Book of the week: Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss

(Random House, $28)

“I’ve always believed that governments have no business telling us what to eat and not eat,” said Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Now I’m thinking I might have been wrong.” This new book from a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist should inspire “even the most ardent libertarian” to rethink whether the alarming spread of obesity can be reversed without nanny-state intervention. Processed foods, which now provide 70 percent of the calories Americans consume, have been engineered by the giants of the food industry to hook the public on useless calories. Salt, fat, and sugar are the principal weapons in their assault on healthy eating: Scientists employed by the major producers manipulate the chemical structure of all three ingredients in a calculated attempt to hit the “bliss point” that triggers virtual junk-food addiction.

Michael Moss’s revelations “will make you want to double-check every grocery store purchase you make,” said Nina Strochlic in TheDailyBeast.com. The phrase “contains real fruit juice,” for instance, can refer to pure sugar molecules—as long as the sugar is fruit-derived. And a TV dinner can contain two times our recommended daily salt intake. The sum effect ensures that the average American consumes double the recommended amount of sodium each day, plus 22 teaspoons of sugar a day. Millions of people, including those whom Coca-Cola refers to as “heavy users,” display neural signs of addiction. Moss doesn’t lay all of the blame on business: Washington has saddled the U.S. Department of Agriculture with an “almost comically blatant” conflict of interest by asking it to both set nutrition guidelines and promote the dairy and cattle industries.

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Moss can be guilty at times of “unnecessary hyperbole,” said Michael Shermer in The Wall Street Journal. Taste is a perfectly appropriate concern of food chemists, yet he often describes their craft “in language that makes them sound cabalistic.” He also ignores the nuances of current research on nutrition, said Joanna Blythman in The Observer (U.K.). Though he’s right to tell readers they should cut as much sugar from their diets as they can, his “all-out attack on fat” makes no sense in light of recent research that finds no link between saturated fat and heart disease. “Ultimately, the reader is left wondering whether Moss actually enjoys eating or whether, after years of listening to food industry personnel, he has simply come to view it as a minefield of threatening substances.”