Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss is an eye-opening and important book.    It is an entertaining, yet horribly frightening look at the food industry’s practice of manipulating the amounts of salt, sugar and fat in processed foods to entice us to eat (and purchase) more and more of these addictive foods.

It is not just the foods you suspect like candy and chips… it is everything.  The levels food manufacturers go to manipulate what we buy are scary but not surprising.  They are in business – the business of selling their “foods.”  I use the term loosely because while this bit of reporting doesn’t touch on the whole Frankenfood genetically modified stuff in the grocery store, it does chronicle the billions spent researching things like “mouth feel” and “bliss point.”  That, combined with the move from processing food to creating food in the laboratory, is told in this three-part tale.

While the book does repeat itself in some areas, it does so that Moss can focus on the triumvirate by itself.

Read this book.

by Chris Doelle