July 8, 2014 • 43 mins
Why does junk food hold such power over us? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie get to the bottom of modern humanity's favorite supernormal stimuli.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what's your relationship with junk food? Well, you know, as
a hinder teen, I would love to get myself into
(00:25):
some Cheetos and darker pepper. I felt like this was
the taste sensation. I don't know that I had an
addiction to it, but that was my go to poison. Yeah.
I feel like for a lot of us, our childhood
was a waste land of of bad food. And you know,
and I my dad was was a dentist, so you know,
(00:45):
I feel like we we didn't have as much of
the whole, eat everything you want candy bowl kind of
environment that a lot of households had, but that still
I remember drinking a lot of colas. I remember eating
a lot of magic metal, the cubler of cookies that
had a chocolate e center and a short red outside
that they eventually quit making, and it was a very
(01:06):
cheerful event. I remember eating tons of Twizzlers, and even
even to this this day, I have I've been able
to to shut out a lot of junk food from
my life, at least overt junk food. And still if
someone offers me twizzlers, I end up falling into the
trap of accepting them. You know what mine is? What
(01:27):
is it? Chip? Which? Chip? Which? It's the chocolate chip
cookies with the ice cream middle chocolate chip cookie. Oh,
like an ice cream sandwich. Yeah, yeah, Which turns out
is we're going to discuss, has all the elements of
like an addictive food because you have the texture, you have,
(01:48):
you know, the different ingredients contrasting and the creaminess. And
so I'm kind of powerless if if you put a
chip which in front of me, well, luckily it has
that frozen aspect to it. So it's it's not the
kind of thing you would necessarily find on a table
at work, like left there by someone who was just
trying to remove the curse from their own life. Um,
(02:09):
something frozen has to be hidden away in a freezer
or offered directly from a chilling advisum. You're right, I
could if I could just turn away from it for
like twenty minutes, then I could just Yeah, but we
are going to talk about this. These powers, the hold
that junk food has over us, and the fact that
it's not accidental. There's a lot of money in research
(02:32):
and development into making the perfect junk food to trip
the sort of hardwired desires that we have for it. Yeah,
it's kind of chilling because it's it's easy to just think, well,
chocolate chip cookies are delicious, you know, my mom makes
my grandma makes them. Whatever. There's something kind of natural
and wholesome about that. And and even if it is
(02:54):
super normal stimuli and its own right, it's still doesn't
seem that nefarious. But when you start looking at at
the way that these companies create these items and the
way they tweak their game plan and just and and
really gain the food item in their favor economically, then
it kind of gives you the willies. Yeah, because you're like,
(03:14):
all of a sudden, you you realize that that chip
which has been engineered in a lab somewhere with some
really expensive equipment. And we'll get to that, but first
let's talk about this influence of food on our behavior,
because not just like, hey, we we desire this and
therefore we take the actions to secure it and eat it.
It's something a little bit more and a good example
(03:37):
of this is the power of freshly baked bread. Yeah,
this is really really interesting. And and it involves bread,
which is an artificial food. You know, for the most part,
it's uh, it's not something you're going to pick out
of a tree. It's a it's a product of human ingenuity.
And yet it seems wholesome enough, right. I mean I
(03:58):
I even find myself at the store sometimes picking up
bread and forgetting that that it could contain it could
contain high fruit dose corn syrup until I actually bring
the bread home and I'm like, oh crap, it's wheat bread,
but it has high fruit dose corn serpent. But there's something,
there is something safe feeling about the bread and it's
been a part of safe rituals for a long time.
(04:19):
I mean to take of bread and salt in Eastern cultures. Uh,
bread and salt were eaten uh with an oath that
was taken. Um. You know, there's the the just the
idea of the breaking of bread being away to to
to ease grievances. You have the ritual of the Eucharist
in the Catholic tradition and uh and and uh, you know,
and basically throughout Christianity, the idea that you know, you're
(04:42):
gonna eat this bread and it's the the flesh of
Christ and all that. I mean, it's still it's it.
That's that's bread breaking and it's most ritualistic. Yeah, I mean,
that's some deeply ingrained troops right there, ingrained, ingrained, right
there you go. And we even see it show up
in the hardest rebel world of Game of Thrones, that's right, uh,
(05:03):
George R. Martin's universe there, of of wester Ross and beyond.
You see that ritual of breaking bread, of having bread
and salt when say, two warring families meet. In fact
I specifically remember no spoilers, but a specific specifically remember
a scene where two very antagonistic groups are meeting and
(05:23):
one of the characters is very insistent, let's get the
bread out, let's get the salt out. Let's go ahead
and break that bread, because that that alone maybe what
could prevent us all from dying here. So taking that
information and knowing that it might you know, flavor ha
ha um. The way that we behave this study about
(05:44):
altruism and bread is really interesting because it turns out
that the room is so influential that Researchers at the
University of Southern Brittany and France found that its mere
presence amped up altruism and strangers passing by a bread shop.
We're talking about seven seven percent of people who passed
a bakery with a robust smell of bread emanating from it.
(06:06):
Those people stopped to help a person pick up their
glove or handkerchief or tissue. In contrast with people passing
by a closed store, of which only fifty of those
um who stopped to help that confederate that person in
the study retrieve their snotty rag. It's amazing. It's it's
as if it ties into this this primordial food sharing
(06:30):
sort of vibe that we have. You know, something, something
just buried deep in the hind brain where there's a
smell of bread in the air, the smell of food,
a smell of sustenance. Therefore, maybe I should start being
nice to everyone, or at least a little less awful
on the chance that I could have some of that bread,
because ultimately that's part of my my whole genetic programming
(06:50):
is I need to eat, I need to breed, I
need to keep going. Ah, So you're saying that altruism
could be connected to the pleasure circuit, which we'll talk
about in a second. What I is, do you does
that actually affect crime statistics? Like if somebody's looking to
rob a fast food restaurant, do they go into subway
and suddenly feel a little like, I don't know, these
guys look like decent folks. I don't want to, uh,
(07:12):
you know, do a stick up job here. I'm going
to go down the street to the burger place. Yeah,
maybe maybe they grab a sub and they go down
to Burger, Burger King or Burger King. Would I would
be interested in seeing the results of such a study.
All right. Um wanted to point out that neuroscientists David
Lyndon said in an interview with Terry Gross fresh Air
that the average weight of an American between ninets and
(07:35):
sixty and now has gone up by an astonishing twenty
six pounds. And he says that's not because americans genomes
have changed significantly. It's because we have these thirty two
sodas and fast food and food corporations realizing that certain
combinations of flavors and textures produce craving. So again, it's
(07:58):
sort of like take the bread example, um that elicits
this idea that we're going to have this reward, that
there's a certain pleasure in that smell, there's a certain sustenance.
So I also wanted to point out that there is
a twenty thirteen survey by market research firm Technomic. They
looked at twenty two thousand, four d fifty nine adults
(08:20):
and they found of people who eat outside of the
home are prompted by cravings, and seventy who visit restaurants
more than once a week do so for a specific
dish that they crave. And can you guess the restaurants
that people hit up the most. It was interesting to
(08:42):
to look at the findings here because they're not necessarily
the places that I would crave, but the number one
on this list on the chart rather than the highest
ranking one Krispy Cream Donuts. And while I like to
believe I'm immune to the temptation of chris be Cream
Donuts today, I do know that there is a there
(09:03):
is an upscale donut place just down the street from
where I live, and I do feel a little bit
of the temptation to drop by there, uh not in
part because I know that it would be delicious. But
also there's just sort of the uh, you know, the
you're like a hero if you bring donuts somewhere, do
you bring you bring really nice donuts somewhere. I mean,
not not for my son. I wouldn't let him have
(09:24):
one of these things, but you know, just to bring
bring one home to some to the family or to
two friends and say, look, i am the bringer of
doughnuts and therefore I'm an okay guy. I've noticed that
an office culture, right on a Monday morning or Friday morning,
if you bring in a bunch of donuts, it's kind
of like this grand gesture and everybody's like, wow, donuts,
(09:45):
like you know, like like it's the Victorian Agency when
brought in oranges. Um. But yeah, that that there's a
certain kind of power there. So it makes sense that
Krispy Kreme is occupying the top slot because they have everything,
and it's not just Krispy Creme, but donuts in general.
You've got the sweet, you've got the fatty, the bretty, um,
even the even some of the meat flavoring. Now, I
(10:06):
mean you can get the like one of the donuts
is really popular with the place I was talking about has.
It's like a like a a caramel sea salt caramel
topped with with not bacon DIBs per se, but bits
of bacon and uh and so yeah, you're getting the salty,
you're getting the sweet, you're getting the bretty, the fatty,
the meaty, all in one super stimuli lump of food. Yeah.
(10:31):
And you know what, I'm immune to the donuts and
I live around You're lucky, immune to the charms of
the donut, and I live by the way around the
corner from that place that you're talking about. And that's
because as an angsty team. My first job, or one
of my first jobs, was at Duncan Donuts, working the
six am to two pm shift on the weekends with
the conveyor belt. No no in the store. Like, I
(10:54):
didn't make the donuts. Um one of the best jobs
I had, but I smelled donuts and and then it
was disgusting and so getting pulled over all the time. Yeah,
people are just started sniffing me and licking my hair.
Uh So anyway, for me, donuts don't hold that power.
But I did think about something on this list. After
(11:16):
cold Stone Creamery, you have red Lobster as the first
kind of like restaurant restaurant. And I'm not a big
red lobster fan, but I have had those Cheddar Bay biscuits,
and I understand this. This might be my crave item
if I were to go out and seek something from
a restaurant each week. I agree because I'm the same
way you mentioned red lobster to me, and I'm instantly
(11:37):
gonna think seafood drowned in butter. I don't really want any,
but then I'm gonna remember that those those those biscuit things,
those Cheddar biscuits were so good. Now, why is this
gaming us in such a way. Well, it all has
to do with the metal or brain pleasure circuit. And
this is the region of the brain which is dependent
upon the neurotransmitter dopamine. And um, this is really essential
(12:01):
to our evolutionary survival if you look at it this way.
So it's a very ancient region of our brain, and
it exists originally because we want eating food and drinking
water and having sex to be pleasurable in order to
repeat this, to have children, to propagate our genes, survive
and pass on this to the next generation. Um, it
(12:23):
means that our ancestors could quickly identify which foods had
the dense caloric value that their bodies needed to support
what what are really like huge daily energy expenditures. So,
as we saw in our episode about addiction, the problem
about hitting this kind of supernormal stimuli, as you say
(12:46):
over and over again, is that those dopamine receptors, those
D two receptors, they start to decrease and they need
more and more in order to get that same effect
of dopamine in your brain. So it's the same sort
of situation you see with someone who is addicted to
to to various drugs, to various illicit substances. There they
(13:09):
need more to get the fixed because because the circuits
are breaking down kind of under the load of this, uh,
this colossal stimuli. Yeah, when we looked at that World
Science Festival panel on addiction, they showed those three brains
right the um I think it was a meth addict, Um,
it was an obese person and then a heroin addict,
(13:32):
and they all had a lack of D two receptors.
And so the interesting thing about this is that something
like of cases of severe BC are food addiction, with
only ten having to do with a metabolic defect. So
and you can see this power of these foods and
as kind of going to them over and over again
creating those pathways of addiction. So again, what's going to
(13:57):
make the brains sing the most with openmine? That's super
normal stimuli. And that's where I'm like that that's why
something like the Cheesecake Factory exists because I was like,
what is a good example of this cheesecake? Um, what's
an even better example a restaurant that fetishizes it? And
according to their website they have something like thirties seven
(14:19):
different types of cheesecakes available. And just to add I
think a little bit of injury to insult, they offer
something called the Skinny Liscious Menu, which I'm going to
assume is a wave too for people to eat like
maybe dinner with less calories and then rationalize that giant
(14:40):
cheesecake or yeah, I was, I was. I was wondering
is there going to be a smaller piece of cheesecake
or what? And do they have all types of cheesecake?
Did they have like savory cheesecakes? Because I had an
alligator cheesecake once in New Orleans? Who was tell me,
what do you mean? You had an alligator cheesecake, like
a cheesecake with with alligator, and it's it's everything that
is a cheesecake except savory and meaty via the meat
(15:03):
of an alligator. How was it? It was good? It
was really good and exceedingly rich, and it made you
feel like a bad person after you ate it. That
it's such like an Americana thing right there, alligator cheesecake
exactly shrinking bit of American If you're an adventurous eater,
look it up there. There are a few different places
to get it down there, all right. So it would
make sense that we have this this reaction to food.
(15:24):
And it would also make sense that when it comes
to engineering junk food that scientists leave nothing to chance.
And we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back,
we're going to talk about the techniques and the technology.
(15:44):
Hello there, won't you join me on the information elevator
this week? Ben Bullen of Stuff they Don't want you
to know, car stuff and brain stuff, will join me
on the elevator and we'll look at whether or not
he is a lire lire pants or fire. You can
find the Information Elevator on mind Stuff Show on YouTube. Hey,
(16:11):
we're back. Um, you know, I was thinking I mentioned
earlier the whole breaking of the bread. We talked about
how that the scent of the bread, the aroma of
the bread is pleasing and therefore inspires altruism. And we
mentioned Game of Thrones and the idea that you have
to rival houses coming together, and that smell of bread
and the ritual of the bread maybe all that keeps
them from tearing each other apart. It occurred to me
(16:33):
after you mentioned donuts in the office, when another situation
where you see this kind of peace offering made. And
that's when there's bad news in the office, or some
sort of major transition or some major pain in the
butt giant meetings HR stuff, or or in our case,
when our our our company recently changed corporate masters from
(16:54):
one dark overlord to another. And uh, not to imply
that they're they're dark or get your meaning, but you
know they're they're overlords. And and so what happens when
the transition is announced instantly there's some sort of baked
good in the office, right, big good fruit and some
coffee and some orange juice, but especially the smell of bread.
Get that bread smell in there. So that nobody kills
(17:16):
anybody well, and everybody feels like it's okay. Yeah, it's
okay because there's bread. You know. I wonder if law
firms should begin to use this tactic when mediating cases, right,
if they're trying not to go to court with the case,
maybe everybody shows up at the table and they break bread.
Would this actually, in fact, uh dial down the animosity
(17:37):
between the parties. What if when a police officer makes
an arrest, before they duck their head into the patrol car,
they stick a Kaiser roll in their mouth. You know,
I feel like there might be a lawsuit really arising
from that. Well, we would need to be gluten free
and it would need to be vegan, right, but some
sort of bait good. I mean, we are a litigious society.
(17:59):
I mean, I states so or a police baton that's
actually a French French bread. I love that. I love
the image now and now I'm thinking about bobbies in
the UK, you know, yeah, alright, um, alright, So how
do these these food scientists get to that extra itchy
(18:20):
place in our brains? According to New York Times magazine
article The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food Freedom lay had
a formidable research complex near Dallas were nearly five hundred chemists, psychologists,
and technicians conducted research that cost up to thirty million year,
and the Science Core focused intense amount of resources on
(18:43):
questions of crunch, mouth feel, and aroma for each of
these items. And one of the items that they used
is a forty thousand dollar device that stimulates chewing to
test imperfect chips, which we'll talk about later. Chips is
like sort of like the old standard of junk food um,
which gets us to this whole chewing thing. Yeah, the
(19:05):
idea of how much chewing is optimal, right, because because
apparently the whole situation is you want some chewing because
you need to be needed chew your food. Chewing the
food is part of the enjoyment of it when we've
taste it. And this is an interest. If you ever
really stop and think about a food that's pleasing you
and try to dissect why it's pleasing you, it's almost
(19:26):
an unanswerable question. Have you ever done that. There's a
there's some sort of dish you're looking forward to, it's
in your mouth, and then you're trying to break it down.
Why am I enjoying this. Am I enjoying it? Do
I enjoy? Why am I going to swallow it? Like?
Because once I swallowed, I can't taste it. Yeah, And
it's funny because we don't think about it in slow mode.
But if you did, you would realize that that saliva
is actually releasing some of the aromas of the food
(19:49):
and that in and in and of itself, is making
a more pleasurable experience. But most of us kind of
just rushed through it, and um, the problem without is
that the faster you rush through chewing, the less your
stomach has a chance to kind of catch up with
feeling sated and send signals to the brain that says
(20:10):
stop right. But this is one of the key tactics
in food engineering or junk food engineering, is if you
can reduce the amount of chewing, you can stuff more
stuff into your your gaping maw, and you can feed
the addiction more and you can get to the bottom
of that chip bag faster. And companies kind of want
you to do that, right, because then you're just going
(20:31):
to buy more and more of the thing. Yeah, I mean,
they have to put that suggested serving on the side,
but really they don't want you to stop. They want
you to to plow through bag after bag, and if
it takes forever to chew each each kernel, each chip,
each families fun sized piece, then it's gonna take forever.
And that's gonna cut into how much fast food they
can sell you and how much fast food they can
(20:53):
put in that mount. Yeah. Oh. Dr Lennon, who wrote
the I believe it's called the Compass of Pleasure. In
an interview again with Terry Gross is a separate one,
Um said that much of the meat in chain restaurants
has been mechanically tenderized and injected with marinite to dissolve
in your mouth, and it's lubricated for swallowing by high
water content, and so he says, in essence, the factory
(21:16):
has done half of your chewing and swallowing for use
that you can eat more. And he says that's one
of the things that chain restaurants have figured out now.
Gail vance Seville, who's the founder and president of Sensory Spectrum,
this is a consumer research firm, says that in the
forty five years that she's been in the food business,
they used to have foods that they chewed fifteen times
(21:38):
and twenty times and thirty times before they were swallowed.
But now she says, there's rarely a food out there
outside of say, like a sweet chewy candy you have
to chew more than twelve times before it's gone. And
so the idea is that you you're getting these quick
hits and you're onto that next pleasure or seeking that pleasure.
(21:58):
And I thought that was not fascinating because probably a
good example of this chicken McNuggets, which is if you've
ever looked at that processes, you know, the meat is
basically turned into a paste and then it's just molded
and cooked. And that is that it's made like that
because you can consume it faster, Yeah, and you can
(22:20):
make more from the chicken. It's just it's it's like
a lot of our our meat products out there. It's
it's what's left and what can we do with that
that can then be sold as a food product. And
then when it's kind of patted down like that, you
have more surface area to put all of the fatty
bread crumbs on it to even amp up that product
more so that your brain is like, oh, nice, deep fried,
(22:41):
I'll take more. And then some sort of gelatinous sugary
substance that you can dip it into and then and
you go yeah, now, um cola companies are looking at
something called sensory specific satiety, and this is the tendency
for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which makes
the brain kind of say whoa, that's that's enough, and
(23:03):
it depresses the desire to have more. So they have
to keep this in mind when coming up with just
the right blend of sweetness and flavors. And they're trying
to reach something called the bliss point. Like this is
an actual industry term and um that's a term that
came up in research and development for Dr Pepper's Vanilla soda.
(23:24):
It's that that point where the project is firing on
all cylinders on your brain, but it's not overwhelming you,
right yeah. And and similarly in economics that it's seen
is that the point of consumption where any further increase
would make the consumer less satisfied. So in a sense,
whether you're talking about flavor or quantity, it's it's that
(23:45):
point where it's good, but before you hate yourself. Like
if this, if you're ever eating something, this is great.
If it was a little more sweet, I would hate myself.
Then you are at the bliss point. Yes, you're right,
it's like before you go into the shame spiral. It's
just a couple just before that. And the funny thing
is is that the companies can back off just aspect
from that sugar, and just respect from that sugar means
(24:07):
that they can you know, if you're especially if you're
manufacturing billions of ounces of the stuff, you're actually gonna
have cost savings. So they're doing it for both the
satiation point, but also so that they can save a
couple of pennies, you know, parounts. Well, that's interesting, the
one area where a junk food company would want to
(24:29):
cut down on the sugar just for pure cost reasons. Yeah.
And the funny things is that it's so miniscule that
it really doesn't affect like that the actual um health
or nutrition of a drink. Yeah, because ultimately there's so
much sugar and most of these products that even even
backing out up a little bit is really doing nothing
to the overall potency of the thing. Um. I mean,
(24:50):
it's just ridiculous. I was eating a lot of these,
you know, snack bars until recently and even though you know,
you look at it and you start breaking down the
contents of those things, even the ones that are more
greenwashed and healthy sounding are actually like it's like eating
a candy bar. It is. And even something like yo
play yogurt is chock full of sugar, and in fact
(25:14):
they're serving is has more sugar in it than Lucky
Charms cereal. And this used to be just like a
humble yogurt that people would have for breakfast, and they
transformed the whole yogurt industry by adding sugar into it
and making it much more of an addictive go to
thing for people. Yeah, it's the yogurt just becomes a
vehicle for the sugar you're having for for breakfast or
(25:36):
your snack. Yeah. And the yogurt has that creaminess element
too in some cases the fat in it that really
makes it even more desirable. Um, that's because it creates
this kind of mouth feel. I'm sure you've heard that
in foodie terms, for the mouth feel is creamy and
and the funny thing about this is that that creaminess
(25:57):
and that fat contributes to a smooth, an even bullest
of masticated food in your mouth, and that is pleasing
all right, because it's the idea that this, uh, the
food has taken the form that it needs to carry
on through my digestive system and so that I can
absorb its nutrients and therefore it's almost like it's pre
chewed and therefore pleasurable. Yeah, and it's lubricated, it's ready
(26:20):
for action in your digestive The mother company has spit
has spat it directly into my mouth, and now it's
traded to swallow, which, by the way, is something that
people have done through the ages, is to premasticate food
for infants. But anyway, that's neither here nor there, but
maybe it is. Maybe there's there's a sort of hard
wired feeling of that with this um premasticated food. Really now,
(26:42):
there's something called the Malliard reaction that the industry uses,
and this is I did not know about this. This
is cooking carbohydrate rich foods that temperature is high enough
to produce that yellow or brown surface, that kind of
roasted quality, it kind of toastedness basically. And that's what
kind of horrified at me about this. When I first
started reading about it, I was like, oh, great, now
(27:03):
I can't I can't even eat toast the science science
of nutrition and carcent gene has ruined toast for me.
So what is left if I can't even toast some bread?
It's not quite as simple as that. And really, what
we're the real villains in the in the situation are
going to be you're deeply fried foods, not not as
(27:24):
much some lightly brown toast. Yeah, because what it does
is it produces something called a churlamide, and this is
a known cancer causing agent when when it's consumed at
higher levels, and it is potentially a dangerous chemical. And
you could argue that there's probably not enough of it
on say you're cheetos to warrant any danger. But has
(27:45):
anyone ever taken like a tenure survey of people who
eat Cheetos, you know, two packs a day, to see
what that effect might be in their bodies? I don't
think so. Yeah, after I read over, the material I
feel like they take home is not a void toast,
but rather, here's another reason to think twice about going
(28:06):
too often to the fried food trough. You know, it's
one more reason on the list of reasons to maybe
keep French fries or fried onion rings a special treat
as opposed to a daily indulgence. Well, and it's even
baked too, like cheetos um, which this was kind of
horrific to me for some reason. I don't know why
it makes sense to me, you know how they kind
(28:27):
of melt on your tongue. Let's which ones are Cheetos?
Are those the ones that have a lot of air
in them? Are the ones that are look kind of
like there's one that kind of looks like orange um
marsupial kind Yeah, I mean it's like a pool noodle
that's been that's toasty looking. Yeah. Yeah. The Cheetos has
more has more structure. Okay, I'm confusing with the cheese puffs. Yeah,
(28:48):
because cheese puffs are the ones that are mostly air
and then the other ones look like like something. But
you're right, cheese puffs have what is called a higher
vanishing caloric density than cheetos becausecheetas you have to break
down a little bit more, although they still kind of melt.
And this is something that food scientists try to achieve
in a product since the melting quality of the food
(29:09):
fools your brain into thinking that there's no calories in
it and that you can just keep eating it. Forever.
So it's gaming your brain to think like, oh, yeah,
I can eat the whole pack. You're not gonna you know,
fill up from this. So it's just the same appeal
of ice cream. Then in addition to ice cream, sugar
noose and fattiness and and and and mouth feel and
(29:31):
everything else. I think, so, Seth, I would wager about
that the fat is probably detected more by the body
and so you can't eat as much of it. But
if you're looking at something like a cheese puff in particular,
which is full of air and it melts really quickly,
then your brain is going to be like, oh, I
didn't realize that. You know, It's ten minutes later and
I'm at the bottom of this package and I'm looking
(29:51):
for like a little bits and pieces of it. All right,
But now let's we've talked about cheetos, we talked about
cheese but best, but let's return to the granddaddy of
all junk food items, the potato chip, which I can
go weaken the niece for if it's the salt and
vinegar kind. Yeah, that's There are some really nice chips
out there, and some of them are you know, their upscale,
(30:13):
they're a little artsy, they're they're a little greenwashed, and
therefore you look at me like this is all natural?
I can I can get a whole bag of these, Yeah,
And it turns out a lot of people do. There's
a two thousand and eleven study that was published in
the New England Journal of Medicine and it's all about
weight gain. What they did is they looked at a
hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred and seventies of then
(30:35):
men and women who were all professionals in the health field.
So presumably these people would have a sort of a
base knowledge of of of what is good for you
and what's not. And using data back to the researchers
monitored everything that they ate, as well as their physical
activity and smoking. And what they found is that every
four years, the participants exercised less, they watched TV more,
(30:58):
and they gained an average of three point three five
pounds every four years. So the top contributors to weight
gain included red meat, processed meats, sugar sweetened beverages, and
potatoes including mash and fredge fries, but the largest contributor
was potato chips. Like that that right there tells you
(31:19):
how addictive these little crisps are. Yeah, I mean, I
mean it's the cliche, right that they almost enforced the
idea that you just can't stop eating them once you
open that bag. And and and there's a lot going
on here, a lot more than I thought, because you know,
if you'd ask me previously, I would have said, all right,
with the pitch of obviously you're getting salty, obviously you're
(31:41):
gonna get you can get some oil, and then there's
some market either the fat, and then there's some marginal
vegetable content there as well. But but there's there's a
little more, yeah, that you get the sugar that exists
not as an additive but in the actual starch of
the potato potato itself. And so starch in turn causes
(32:01):
the glucose levels in the blood to spike, and that
can cause more of that craving in your brain for it. Um.
So the other thing about this is that there's a
sort of physics to the potato chip that is very appealing.
So you remember that device that we talked about that
choose and premasticates food. That device has also helped the
(32:26):
industry to try to understand that people like a chip
that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch,
and so you could say that there's definitely an arn't
to a kind of physics to it. And Mary Roach
actually talked about this in the New York Times article
called the Marvels of the Mouth. Yeah, I mean the
the idea that you when that when that I think
(32:47):
we've talked about this before a bit, when you crunch
into that chip, when it when it crunches in your mouth, Um,
we're getting a sense. The brain is getting a sense
that we're eating something fresh, so like like yes, like salary.
The brain is saying this is basically celery we're eating here,
and therefore we should eat a lot of it because
it's fresh and it's not going to be fresh forever.
Chow down. Yeah. To get that kind of snap, that fracture,
(33:10):
you need crack speeds of the chip of three hundred
meters per second. That's the speed of sound. And so
Mary Roach describes it as the sonic boom inside of
your mouth. And then uh Dr Tom Vanpolet, who has
been studying the crunching of chips for seven years, had
said that as just as you say that crispiness, that
(33:32):
crunchiness appeals to us because it has that sort of
freshness that our ancestors would have sought out in vegetables
and fruit. So not only is the chip um very
appealing to us because of the sugar content and the
salt and the fat, but because it's mimicking something that
would have been important to us um in our ancestral survival. Yeah.
(33:55):
And and and on top of that, and this was
in some materials that you you sent me earlier. Just
the the crinkliness of the bag piz into that it's
almost like a harbinger of the of the crispiness of
the chip. You hear the bag crinkling, and and and
that makes you start thinking about the crunchiness of the
of the chip. It's almost like you're you're again, you're
(34:16):
reaching in with your caveman hands into some crisp, crunchy
plant to to grab your your lunch. Yeah. And that's
what gets us to this idea of sound symbolism. And
in two thousand and four, Charles Spence and neuroscientists at
Oxford University had subjects bite into all told about one
and eighty potato chips. And what he did is he
(34:38):
manipulated the that bite or crunch sound with directional microphones
and found that when researchers amplified the crunching sounds, that
the subjects rated the chips as crisp ear, but when
he muffled their crunching noises, they scored the chip as
less crisp. So it is really the full experience that
(34:59):
you're bringing to the food. And that's that sound stabolism
of oh this is fresh, it's good. Yeah, the chip
that is so crunchy that you have to turn up
the television set while you're while you're watching it because
the sound is deafening in set your own skull. So
think of all that when you the next time you
open a bag of potato chips, Because this is an
item that has been gamed, that has been manipulated to
(35:21):
get the maximum response out of you the user. Yeah,
free do lay thirty million dollars in that one year
to try to create the perfect chip for you to
return to over and over again. And for the most part,
you think, oh, well, probably this isn't a big deal.
I mean a lot of this is just you know,
(35:41):
little power. But we've talked about this before. We've talked
about how these pathways are created in the brain. It's
very hard to try to get over these types of addictions,
so you know, it takes a little bit more than
just knowing that it's bad for you. And I wanted
to bring up this example of microwave popcorn, especially that
will yield butter flavor. That you see, it uses flavoring
(36:05):
chemicals like diacutle and pentadeon which are dissipated into the
air by the heating process. Not something you want to
breathe in, right. Well, Um, a guy named Wayne Watson
was awarded seven million dollars when he seed the manufacturer
and retailers of microwave buttered popcorn that caused him to
(36:26):
develop something called popcorn lung after he ate two bags
daily for ten years. So you could argue that it's
just it's not it's not even just an obesity issue.
Sometimes it's it's some of the chemicals that are affecting
us in adverse ways. And clearly here it's the artificiality
of our food. You know, I mean, this is not
(36:46):
a matter of saying, oh, all that butter on the
popcorn was bad for you. This is a matter of
the butter flavoring. It was, there's a careful chemical concoction
had this dire effect on him, Which brings us to
this analogy of cigarette which isn't a perfect analogy, but
if you consider that cigarette manufacturers have been known uh,
(37:07):
you know particularly, I think it was in the eighties
that this came to light that for a number of
years they were amping up some of the addictive chemicals
in the cigarettes to further addict their customers. Could you
say this tame of junk food. Yeah, I would think so.
I mean your starting I think basically you're starting point
(37:28):
is uh is a little less evil, but you're still
ramping it up. You're still trying to make it more
addictive and and in opening yourself to the situations where
someone ends up eating your product product exclusively and then
paying the price for it. So, about fifteen years ago,
vice president of Kraft, Michael mud He went to a
(37:50):
industry meeting process food industry meeting meeting, and the meeting
was meant to talk about the rising obesity and the
manufactured foods that they were creating, and he was hoping
that that all the members of these various companies would
be open to this idea of regulating their foods um.
(38:12):
Unfortunately that was not that did not happen at that meeting.
But I thought it was striking because fifteen years ago
he presented, uh, this whole idea of what they were
doing and how it was affecting people. And he included
the following quote in this presentation from Yale University professor
of psychology and public health Kelly Brownel, which is quote,
(38:35):
as a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies
advertising to children, but we sit oddly by while the
food companies do the very same thing. And we could
make claim that the toll taken on the public health
via poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco fifteen years ago,
before we really even saw this huge expansion of obesity
(38:55):
statistics that we have today. It's a little startling, it is.
So tell me this, Yes, this evening, after my son
goes to bed, I am going over to a friend's
house to play board games. And said friend, let's call
him Greg, is going to inevitably have two bags on
the table. One is going to be normal Twizzlers and
(39:17):
one is going to be this other variant of Twizzler
that include no, no, no, it's rainbows and each one
has like a creamy filling. So what what am I
to do? How am I going to resist having that
first twizzler and then the subsequent u you know, thirty twizzlers?
You know, honestly, I think that you you eat pretty healthy, right, Yeah,
(39:39):
it seems to me. I feel like that's not a
huge risk for you. What I see is that the
problem is is that fast food, junk food is so
inexpensive and easy now for manufacturers to produce that a
lot of people are going to this as their mean sustenance.
So if you were like, man, I'm hitting up the
KFC again today, kind I pick you up something, and
this was happening all the time, I might be like Robert, dude,
(40:02):
remember the kraal mind um? But you know, I really
think that's that's the problem, and that is also the
problem for people who are um in lower income brackets
is that it's a lot easier and convenient to go
to these foods instead of fresh foods, which are more expensive.
And of course availability also placed into that the whole
(40:23):
idea of of having food deserts, where whereas an individual
does not have access to those healthier foods, even if
they are a little bit more expensive than the than
the unhealthy options. And you're talking about food desserts in
that there there have been plenty of studies that will
show you that in lower income areas there are not
grocery stores as readily available. Therefore, you know you could
(40:47):
hit up that KFC or that McDonald's a lot easier
than you could to travel the ten to twenty miles
to find a grocery store exactly. All right, So there
you have it, junk food, a little more insight into
why we love that, why we cannot resist it, what
it's doing to us, how it's gaming us, and of
course about the dark masters of dark food that engineer
(41:08):
it to dominate us. I know that everyone has some
comments to make on this, so we'd love to hear
from what what fast food item holds the most influence
over you? What fast food items have you managed to defeat?
Fast food or junk food. I'm kind of using the
two words that interchangeably for some reason, but but let
us know. Share your stories, share your tips, share your alternatives,
(41:31):
and because we would love to hear from you, and
we'd love to share some of your content on the show. Yeah,
I'd also like to know if commercials affect you. I
was thinking about this that I think there's one of
the Kardashians did a Roy Junior Burger ad campaign. I
don't know if I've got that chain right, but I
think I was like, you know, skimpy bathing suit with
the burger, with like the sweaty bacon falling out of
(41:53):
it and like the listening orbs of her breasts, and
I thought, if there's nothing more super normal to me
live than that? Yeah, I mean that actually ties in
directly within with a study I was looking at recently
that I've blogged about, and I have a video coming
out about the the idea of what did they call it.
It's not the bikini effect, um, but it's something that
(42:15):
to to that effect. And the idea is that if
a male UM in this case, say a heterosexual male,
looks at a picture of a model on a bikini,
sees a woman in a bikini, or even just handles
a braw their willpower lessons like there's it makes the
primal male, you know, want to to mate, to to
(42:38):
to give into his impulse, but that impulse will will
then manifest itself in the form of say, um, buying
some some junk food that they know they don't need,
eating some junk food in the office place, or ordering
something off of Amazon that they normally would have the
willpower to resist. Now that's not surprising to me if
I especially think about it in the context of the
bread example and altrsm. You know something that's simple changing
(43:02):
your behavior in tapping into that pleasure circuitry. So very interesting.
Let us know your thoughts on that. We definitely want
to hear it, and uh, you can find us at
the Mothership, Yes, Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
There that's where you'll find all the podcast episodes, all
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(43:24):
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And you can send us an email if you'd like
at Blow the Mind at house to Works dot com
(43:45):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how Stuff Works dot Com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what's your relationship with junk food? Well, you know, as
a hinder teen, I would love to get myself into
(00:25):
some Cheetos and darker pepper. I felt like this was
the taste sensation. I don't know that I had an
addiction to it, but that was my go to poison. Yeah.
I feel like for a lot of us, our childhood
was a waste land of of bad food. And you know,
and I my dad was was a dentist, so you know,
(00:45):
I feel like we we didn't have as much of
the whole, eat everything you want candy bowl kind of
environment that a lot of households had, but that still
I remember drinking a lot of colas. I remember eating
a lot of magic metal, the cubler of cookies that
had a chocolate e center and a short red outside
that they eventually quit making, and it was a very
(01:06):
cheerful event. I remember eating tons of Twizzlers, and even
even to this this day, I have I've been able
to to shut out a lot of junk food from
my life, at least overt junk food. And still if
someone offers me twizzlers, I end up falling into the
trap of accepting them. You know what mine is? What
(01:27):
is it? Chip? Which? Chip? Which? It's the chocolate chip
cookies with the ice cream middle chocolate chip cookie. Oh,
like an ice cream sandwich. Yeah, yeah, Which turns out
is we're going to discuss, has all the elements of
like an addictive food because you have the texture, you have,
(01:48):
you know, the different ingredients contrasting and the creaminess. And
so I'm kind of powerless if if you put a
chip which in front of me, well, luckily it has
that frozen aspect to it. So it's it's not the
kind of thing you would necessarily find on a table
at work, like left there by someone who was just
trying to remove the curse from their own life. Um,
(02:09):
something frozen has to be hidden away in a freezer
or offered directly from a chilling advisum. You're right, I
could if I could just turn away from it for
like twenty minutes, then I could just Yeah, but we
are going to talk about this. These powers, the hold
that junk food has over us, and the fact that
it's not accidental. There's a lot of money in research
(02:32):
and development into making the perfect junk food to trip
the sort of hardwired desires that we have for it. Yeah,
it's kind of chilling because it's it's easy to just think, well,
chocolate chip cookies are delicious, you know, my mom makes
my grandma makes them. Whatever. There's something kind of natural
and wholesome about that. And and even if it is
(02:54):
super normal stimuli and its own right, it's still doesn't
seem that nefarious. But when you start looking at at
the way that these companies create these items and the
way they tweak their game plan and just and and
really gain the food item in their favor economically, then
it kind of gives you the willies. Yeah, because you're like,
(03:14):
all of a sudden, you you realize that that chip
which has been engineered in a lab somewhere with some
really expensive equipment. And we'll get to that, but first
let's talk about this influence of food on our behavior,
because not just like, hey, we we desire this and
therefore we take the actions to secure it and eat it.
It's something a little bit more and a good example
(03:37):
of this is the power of freshly baked bread. Yeah,
this is really really interesting. And and it involves bread,
which is an artificial food. You know, for the most part,
it's uh, it's not something you're going to pick out
of a tree. It's a it's a product of human ingenuity.
And yet it seems wholesome enough, right. I mean I
(03:58):
I even find myself at the store sometimes picking up
bread and forgetting that that it could contain it could
contain high fruit dose corn syrup until I actually bring
the bread home and I'm like, oh crap, it's wheat bread,
but it has high fruit dose corn serpent. But there's something,
there is something safe feeling about the bread and it's
been a part of safe rituals for a long time.
(04:19):
I mean to take of bread and salt in Eastern cultures. Uh,
bread and salt were eaten uh with an oath that
was taken. Um. You know, there's the the just the
idea of the breaking of bread being away to to
to ease grievances. You have the ritual of the Eucharist
in the Catholic tradition and uh and and uh, you know,
and basically throughout Christianity, the idea that you know, you're
(04:42):
gonna eat this bread and it's the the flesh of
Christ and all that. I mean, it's still it's it.
That's that's bread breaking and it's most ritualistic. Yeah, I mean,
that's some deeply ingrained troops right there, ingrained, ingrained, right
there you go. And we even see it show up
in the hardest rebel world of Game of Thrones, that's right, uh,
(05:03):
George R. Martin's universe there, of of wester Ross and beyond.
You see that ritual of breaking bread, of having bread
and salt when say, two warring families meet. In fact
I specifically remember no spoilers, but a specific specifically remember
a scene where two very antagonistic groups are meeting and
(05:23):
one of the characters is very insistent, let's get the
bread out, let's get the salt out. Let's go ahead
and break that bread, because that that alone maybe what
could prevent us all from dying here. So taking that
information and knowing that it might you know, flavor ha
ha um. The way that we behave this study about
(05:44):
altruism and bread is really interesting because it turns out
that the room is so influential that Researchers at the
University of Southern Brittany and France found that its mere
presence amped up altruism and strangers passing by a bread shop.
We're talking about seven seven percent of people who passed
a bakery with a robust smell of bread emanating from it.
(06:06):
Those people stopped to help a person pick up their
glove or handkerchief or tissue. In contrast with people passing
by a closed store, of which only fifty of those
um who stopped to help that confederate that person in
the study retrieve their snotty rag. It's amazing. It's it's
as if it ties into this this primordial food sharing
(06:30):
sort of vibe that we have. You know, something, something
just buried deep in the hind brain where there's a
smell of bread in the air, the smell of food,
a smell of sustenance. Therefore, maybe I should start being
nice to everyone, or at least a little less awful
on the chance that I could have some of that bread,
because ultimately that's part of my my whole genetic programming
(06:50):
is I need to eat, I need to breed, I
need to keep going. Ah, So you're saying that altruism
could be connected to the pleasure circuit, which we'll talk
about in a second. What I is, do you does
that actually affect crime statistics? Like if somebody's looking to
rob a fast food restaurant, do they go into subway
and suddenly feel a little like, I don't know, these
guys look like decent folks. I don't want to, uh,
(07:12):
you know, do a stick up job here. I'm going
to go down the street to the burger place. Yeah,
maybe maybe they grab a sub and they go down
to Burger, Burger King or Burger King. Would I would
be interested in seeing the results of such a study.
All right. Um wanted to point out that neuroscientists David
Lyndon said in an interview with Terry Gross fresh Air
that the average weight of an American between ninets and
(07:35):
sixty and now has gone up by an astonishing twenty
six pounds. And he says that's not because americans genomes
have changed significantly. It's because we have these thirty two
sodas and fast food and food corporations realizing that certain
combinations of flavors and textures produce craving. So again, it's
(07:58):
sort of like take the bread example, um that elicits
this idea that we're going to have this reward, that
there's a certain pleasure in that smell, there's a certain sustenance.
So I also wanted to point out that there is
a twenty thirteen survey by market research firm Technomic. They
looked at twenty two thousand, four d fifty nine adults
(08:20):
and they found of people who eat outside of the
home are prompted by cravings, and seventy who visit restaurants
more than once a week do so for a specific
dish that they crave. And can you guess the restaurants
that people hit up the most. It was interesting to
(08:42):
to look at the findings here because they're not necessarily
the places that I would crave, but the number one
on this list on the chart rather than the highest
ranking one Krispy Cream Donuts. And while I like to
believe I'm immune to the temptation of chris be Cream
Donuts today, I do know that there is a there
(09:03):
is an upscale donut place just down the street from
where I live, and I do feel a little bit
of the temptation to drop by there, uh not in
part because I know that it would be delicious. But
also there's just sort of the uh, you know, the
you're like a hero if you bring donuts somewhere, do
you bring you bring really nice donuts somewhere. I mean,
not not for my son. I wouldn't let him have
(09:24):
one of these things, but you know, just to bring
bring one home to some to the family or to
two friends and say, look, i am the bringer of
doughnuts and therefore I'm an okay guy. I've noticed that
an office culture, right on a Monday morning or Friday morning,
if you bring in a bunch of donuts, it's kind
of like this grand gesture and everybody's like, wow, donuts,
(09:45):
like you know, like like it's the Victorian Agency when
brought in oranges. Um. But yeah, that that there's a
certain kind of power there. So it makes sense that
Krispy Kreme is occupying the top slot because they have everything,
and it's not just Krispy Creme, but donuts in general.
You've got the sweet, you've got the fatty, the bretty, um,
even the even some of the meat flavoring. Now, I
(10:06):
mean you can get the like one of the donuts
is really popular with the place I was talking about has.
It's like a like a a caramel sea salt caramel
topped with with not bacon DIBs per se, but bits
of bacon and uh and so yeah, you're getting the salty,
you're getting the sweet, you're getting the bretty, the fatty,
the meaty, all in one super stimuli lump of food. Yeah.
(10:31):
And you know what, I'm immune to the donuts and
I live around You're lucky, immune to the charms of
the donut, and I live by the way around the
corner from that place that you're talking about. And that's
because as an angsty team. My first job, or one
of my first jobs, was at Duncan Donuts, working the
six am to two pm shift on the weekends with
the conveyor belt. No no in the store. Like, I
(10:54):
didn't make the donuts. Um one of the best jobs
I had, but I smelled donuts and and then it
was disgusting and so getting pulled over all the time. Yeah,
people are just started sniffing me and licking my hair.
Uh So anyway, for me, donuts don't hold that power.
But I did think about something on this list. After
(11:16):
cold Stone Creamery, you have red Lobster as the first
kind of like restaurant restaurant. And I'm not a big
red lobster fan, but I have had those Cheddar Bay biscuits,
and I understand this. This might be my crave item
if I were to go out and seek something from
a restaurant each week. I agree because I'm the same
way you mentioned red lobster to me, and I'm instantly
(11:37):
gonna think seafood drowned in butter. I don't really want any,
but then I'm gonna remember that those those those biscuit things,
those Cheddar biscuits were so good. Now, why is this
gaming us in such a way. Well, it all has
to do with the metal or brain pleasure circuit. And
this is the region of the brain which is dependent
upon the neurotransmitter dopamine. And um, this is really essential
(12:01):
to our evolutionary survival if you look at it this way.
So it's a very ancient region of our brain, and
it exists originally because we want eating food and drinking
water and having sex to be pleasurable in order to
repeat this, to have children, to propagate our genes, survive
and pass on this to the next generation. Um, it
(12:23):
means that our ancestors could quickly identify which foods had
the dense caloric value that their bodies needed to support
what what are really like huge daily energy expenditures. So,
as we saw in our episode about addiction, the problem
about hitting this kind of supernormal stimuli, as you say
(12:46):
over and over again, is that those dopamine receptors, those
D two receptors, they start to decrease and they need
more and more in order to get that same effect
of dopamine in your brain. So it's the same sort
of situation you see with someone who is addicted to
to to various drugs, to various illicit substances. There they
(13:09):
need more to get the fixed because because the circuits
are breaking down kind of under the load of this, uh,
this colossal stimuli. Yeah, when we looked at that World
Science Festival panel on addiction, they showed those three brains
right the um I think it was a meth addict, Um,
it was an obese person and then a heroin addict,
(13:32):
and they all had a lack of D two receptors.
And so the interesting thing about this is that something
like of cases of severe BC are food addiction, with
only ten having to do with a metabolic defect. So
and you can see this power of these foods and
as kind of going to them over and over again
creating those pathways of addiction. So again, what's going to
(13:57):
make the brains sing the most with openmine? That's super
normal stimuli. And that's where I'm like that that's why
something like the Cheesecake Factory exists because I was like,
what is a good example of this cheesecake? Um, what's
an even better example a restaurant that fetishizes it? And
according to their website they have something like thirties seven
(14:19):
different types of cheesecakes available. And just to add I
think a little bit of injury to insult, they offer
something called the Skinny Liscious Menu, which I'm going to
assume is a wave too for people to eat like
maybe dinner with less calories and then rationalize that giant
(14:40):
cheesecake or yeah, I was, I was. I was wondering
is there going to be a smaller piece of cheesecake
or what? And do they have all types of cheesecake?
Did they have like savory cheesecakes? Because I had an
alligator cheesecake once in New Orleans? Who was tell me,
what do you mean? You had an alligator cheesecake, like
a cheesecake with with alligator, and it's it's everything that
is a cheesecake except savory and meaty via the meat
(15:03):
of an alligator. How was it? It was good? It
was really good and exceedingly rich, and it made you
feel like a bad person after you ate it. That
it's such like an Americana thing right there, alligator cheesecake
exactly shrinking bit of American If you're an adventurous eater,
look it up there. There are a few different places
to get it down there, all right. So it would
make sense that we have this this reaction to food.
(15:24):
And it would also make sense that when it comes
to engineering junk food that scientists leave nothing to chance.
And we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back,
we're going to talk about the techniques and the technology.
(15:44):
Hello there, won't you join me on the information elevator
this week? Ben Bullen of Stuff they Don't want you
to know, car stuff and brain stuff, will join me
on the elevator and we'll look at whether or not
he is a lire lire pants or fire. You can
find the Information Elevator on mind Stuff Show on YouTube. Hey,
(16:11):
we're back. Um, you know, I was thinking I mentioned
earlier the whole breaking of the bread. We talked about
how that the scent of the bread, the aroma of
the bread is pleasing and therefore inspires altruism. And we
mentioned Game of Thrones and the idea that you have
to rival houses coming together, and that smell of bread
and the ritual of the bread maybe all that keeps
them from tearing each other apart. It occurred to me
(16:33):
after you mentioned donuts in the office, when another situation
where you see this kind of peace offering made. And
that's when there's bad news in the office, or some
sort of major transition or some major pain in the
butt giant meetings HR stuff, or or in our case,
when our our our company recently changed corporate masters from
(16:54):
one dark overlord to another. And uh, not to imply
that they're they're dark or get your meaning, but you
know they're they're overlords. And and so what happens when
the transition is announced instantly there's some sort of baked
good in the office, right, big good fruit and some
coffee and some orange juice, but especially the smell of bread.
Get that bread smell in there. So that nobody kills
(17:16):
anybody well, and everybody feels like it's okay. Yeah, it's
okay because there's bread. You know. I wonder if law
firms should begin to use this tactic when mediating cases, right,
if they're trying not to go to court with the case,
maybe everybody shows up at the table and they break bread.
Would this actually, in fact, uh dial down the animosity
(17:37):
between the parties. What if when a police officer makes
an arrest, before they duck their head into the patrol car,
they stick a Kaiser roll in their mouth. You know,
I feel like there might be a lawsuit really arising
from that. Well, we would need to be gluten free
and it would need to be vegan, right, but some
sort of bait good. I mean, we are a litigious society.
(17:59):
I mean, I states so or a police baton that's
actually a French French bread. I love that. I love
the image now and now I'm thinking about bobbies in
the UK, you know, yeah, alright, um, alright, So how
do these these food scientists get to that extra itchy
(18:20):
place in our brains? According to New York Times magazine
article The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food Freedom lay had
a formidable research complex near Dallas were nearly five hundred chemists, psychologists,
and technicians conducted research that cost up to thirty million year,
and the Science Core focused intense amount of resources on
(18:43):
questions of crunch, mouth feel, and aroma for each of
these items. And one of the items that they used
is a forty thousand dollar device that stimulates chewing to
test imperfect chips, which we'll talk about later. Chips is
like sort of like the old standard of junk food um,
which gets us to this whole chewing thing. Yeah, the
(19:05):
idea of how much chewing is optimal, right, because because
apparently the whole situation is you want some chewing because
you need to be needed chew your food. Chewing the
food is part of the enjoyment of it when we've
taste it. And this is an interest. If you ever
really stop and think about a food that's pleasing you
and try to dissect why it's pleasing you, it's almost
(19:26):
an unanswerable question. Have you ever done that. There's a
there's some sort of dish you're looking forward to, it's
in your mouth, and then you're trying to break it down.
Why am I enjoying this. Am I enjoying it? Do
I enjoy? Why am I going to swallow it? Like?
Because once I swallowed, I can't taste it. Yeah, And
it's funny because we don't think about it in slow mode.
But if you did, you would realize that that saliva
is actually releasing some of the aromas of the food
(19:49):
and that in and in and of itself, is making
a more pleasurable experience. But most of us kind of
just rushed through it, and um, the problem without is
that the faster you rush through chewing, the less your
stomach has a chance to kind of catch up with
feeling sated and send signals to the brain that says
(20:10):
stop right. But this is one of the key tactics
in food engineering or junk food engineering, is if you
can reduce the amount of chewing, you can stuff more
stuff into your your gaping maw, and you can feed
the addiction more and you can get to the bottom
of that chip bag faster. And companies kind of want
you to do that, right, because then you're just going
(20:31):
to buy more and more of the thing. Yeah, I mean,
they have to put that suggested serving on the side,
but really they don't want you to stop. They want
you to to plow through bag after bag, and if
it takes forever to chew each each kernel, each chip,
each families fun sized piece, then it's gonna take forever.
And that's gonna cut into how much fast food they
can sell you and how much fast food they can
(20:53):
put in that mount. Yeah. Oh. Dr Lennon, who wrote
the I believe it's called the Compass of Pleasure. In
an interview again with Terry Gross is a separate one,
Um said that much of the meat in chain restaurants
has been mechanically tenderized and injected with marinite to dissolve
in your mouth, and it's lubricated for swallowing by high
water content, and so he says, in essence, the factory
(21:16):
has done half of your chewing and swallowing for use
that you can eat more. And he says that's one
of the things that chain restaurants have figured out now.
Gail vance Seville, who's the founder and president of Sensory Spectrum,
this is a consumer research firm, says that in the
forty five years that she's been in the food business,
they used to have foods that they chewed fifteen times
(21:38):
and twenty times and thirty times before they were swallowed.
But now she says, there's rarely a food out there
outside of say, like a sweet chewy candy you have
to chew more than twelve times before it's gone. And
so the idea is that you you're getting these quick
hits and you're onto that next pleasure or seeking that pleasure.
(21:58):
And I thought that was not fascinating because probably a
good example of this chicken McNuggets, which is if you've
ever looked at that processes, you know, the meat is
basically turned into a paste and then it's just molded
and cooked. And that is that it's made like that
because you can consume it faster, Yeah, and you can
(22:20):
make more from the chicken. It's just it's it's like
a lot of our our meat products out there. It's
it's what's left and what can we do with that
that can then be sold as a food product. And
then when it's kind of patted down like that, you
have more surface area to put all of the fatty
bread crumbs on it to even amp up that product
more so that your brain is like, oh, nice, deep fried,
(22:41):
I'll take more. And then some sort of gelatinous sugary
substance that you can dip it into and then and
you go yeah, now, um cola companies are looking at
something called sensory specific satiety, and this is the tendency
for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which makes
the brain kind of say whoa, that's that's enough, and
(23:03):
it depresses the desire to have more. So they have
to keep this in mind when coming up with just
the right blend of sweetness and flavors. And they're trying
to reach something called the bliss point. Like this is
an actual industry term and um that's a term that
came up in research and development for Dr Pepper's Vanilla soda.
(23:24):
It's that that point where the project is firing on
all cylinders on your brain, but it's not overwhelming you,
right yeah. And and similarly in economics that it's seen
is that the point of consumption where any further increase
would make the consumer less satisfied. So in a sense,
whether you're talking about flavor or quantity, it's it's that
(23:45):
point where it's good, but before you hate yourself. Like
if this, if you're ever eating something, this is great.
If it was a little more sweet, I would hate myself.
Then you are at the bliss point. Yes, you're right,
it's like before you go into the shame spiral. It's
just a couple just before that. And the funny thing
is is that the companies can back off just aspect
from that sugar, and just respect from that sugar means
(24:07):
that they can you know, if you're especially if you're
manufacturing billions of ounces of the stuff, you're actually gonna
have cost savings. So they're doing it for both the
satiation point, but also so that they can save a
couple of pennies, you know, parounts. Well, that's interesting, the
one area where a junk food company would want to
(24:29):
cut down on the sugar just for pure cost reasons. Yeah.
And the funny things is that it's so miniscule that
it really doesn't affect like that the actual um health
or nutrition of a drink. Yeah, because ultimately there's so
much sugar and most of these products that even even
backing out up a little bit is really doing nothing
to the overall potency of the thing. Um. I mean,
(24:50):
it's just ridiculous. I was eating a lot of these,
you know, snack bars until recently and even though you know,
you look at it and you start breaking down the
contents of those things, even the ones that are more
greenwashed and healthy sounding are actually like it's like eating
a candy bar. It is. And even something like yo
play yogurt is chock full of sugar, and in fact
(25:14):
they're serving is has more sugar in it than Lucky
Charms cereal. And this used to be just like a
humble yogurt that people would have for breakfast, and they
transformed the whole yogurt industry by adding sugar into it
and making it much more of an addictive go to
thing for people. Yeah, it's the yogurt just becomes a
vehicle for the sugar you're having for for breakfast or
(25:36):
your snack. Yeah. And the yogurt has that creaminess element
too in some cases the fat in it that really
makes it even more desirable. Um, that's because it creates
this kind of mouth feel. I'm sure you've heard that
in foodie terms, for the mouth feel is creamy and
and the funny thing about this is that that creaminess
(25:57):
and that fat contributes to a smooth, an even bullest
of masticated food in your mouth, and that is pleasing
all right, because it's the idea that this, uh, the
food has taken the form that it needs to carry
on through my digestive system and so that I can
absorb its nutrients and therefore it's almost like it's pre
chewed and therefore pleasurable. Yeah, and it's lubricated, it's ready
(26:20):
for action in your digestive The mother company has spit
has spat it directly into my mouth, and now it's
traded to swallow, which, by the way, is something that
people have done through the ages, is to premasticate food
for infants. But anyway, that's neither here nor there, but
maybe it is. Maybe there's there's a sort of hard
wired feeling of that with this um premasticated food. Really now,
(26:42):
there's something called the Malliard reaction that the industry uses,
and this is I did not know about this. This
is cooking carbohydrate rich foods that temperature is high enough
to produce that yellow or brown surface, that kind of
roasted quality, it kind of toastedness basically. And that's what
kind of horrified at me about this. When I first
started reading about it, I was like, oh, great, now
(27:03):
I can't I can't even eat toast the science science
of nutrition and carcent gene has ruined toast for me.
So what is left if I can't even toast some bread?
It's not quite as simple as that. And really, what
we're the real villains in the in the situation are
going to be you're deeply fried foods, not not as
(27:24):
much some lightly brown toast. Yeah, because what it does
is it produces something called a churlamide, and this is
a known cancer causing agent when when it's consumed at
higher levels, and it is potentially a dangerous chemical. And
you could argue that there's probably not enough of it
on say you're cheetos to warrant any danger. But has
(27:45):
anyone ever taken like a tenure survey of people who
eat Cheetos, you know, two packs a day, to see
what that effect might be in their bodies? I don't
think so. Yeah, after I read over, the material I
feel like they take home is not a void toast,
but rather, here's another reason to think twice about going
(28:06):
too often to the fried food trough. You know, it's
one more reason on the list of reasons to maybe
keep French fries or fried onion rings a special treat
as opposed to a daily indulgence. Well, and it's even
baked too, like cheetos um, which this was kind of
horrific to me for some reason. I don't know why
it makes sense to me, you know how they kind
(28:27):
of melt on your tongue. Let's which ones are Cheetos?
Are those the ones that have a lot of air
in them? Are the ones that are look kind of
like there's one that kind of looks like orange um
marsupial kind Yeah, I mean it's like a pool noodle
that's been that's toasty looking. Yeah. Yeah. The Cheetos has
more has more structure. Okay, I'm confusing with the cheese puffs. Yeah,
(28:48):
because cheese puffs are the ones that are mostly air
and then the other ones look like like something. But
you're right, cheese puffs have what is called a higher
vanishing caloric density than cheetos becausecheetas you have to break
down a little bit more, although they still kind of melt.
And this is something that food scientists try to achieve
in a product since the melting quality of the food
(29:09):
fools your brain into thinking that there's no calories in
it and that you can just keep eating it. Forever.
So it's gaming your brain to think like, oh, yeah,
I can eat the whole pack. You're not gonna you know,
fill up from this. So it's just the same appeal
of ice cream. Then in addition to ice cream, sugar
noose and fattiness and and and and mouth feel and
(29:31):
everything else. I think, so, Seth, I would wager about
that the fat is probably detected more by the body
and so you can't eat as much of it. But
if you're looking at something like a cheese puff in particular,
which is full of air and it melts really quickly,
then your brain is going to be like, oh, I
didn't realize that. You know, It's ten minutes later and
I'm at the bottom of this package and I'm looking
(29:51):
for like a little bits and pieces of it. All right,
But now let's we've talked about cheetos, we talked about
cheese but best, but let's return to the granddaddy of
all junk food items, the potato chip, which I can
go weaken the niece for if it's the salt and
vinegar kind. Yeah, that's There are some really nice chips
out there, and some of them are you know, their upscale,
(30:13):
they're a little artsy, they're they're a little greenwashed, and
therefore you look at me like this is all natural?
I can I can get a whole bag of these, Yeah,
And it turns out a lot of people do. There's
a two thousand and eleven study that was published in
the New England Journal of Medicine and it's all about
weight gain. What they did is they looked at a
hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred and seventies of then
(30:35):
men and women who were all professionals in the health field.
So presumably these people would have a sort of a
base knowledge of of of what is good for you
and what's not. And using data back to the researchers
monitored everything that they ate, as well as their physical
activity and smoking. And what they found is that every
four years, the participants exercised less, they watched TV more,
(30:58):
and they gained an average of three point three five
pounds every four years. So the top contributors to weight
gain included red meat, processed meats, sugar sweetened beverages, and
potatoes including mash and fredge fries, but the largest contributor
was potato chips. Like that that right there tells you
(31:19):
how addictive these little crisps are. Yeah, I mean, I
mean it's the cliche, right that they almost enforced the
idea that you just can't stop eating them once you
open that bag. And and and there's a lot going
on here, a lot more than I thought, because you know,
if you'd ask me previously, I would have said, all right,
with the pitch of obviously you're getting salty, obviously you're
(31:41):
gonna get you can get some oil, and then there's
some market either the fat, and then there's some marginal
vegetable content there as well. But but there's there's a
little more, yeah, that you get the sugar that exists
not as an additive but in the actual starch of
the potato potato itself. And so starch in turn causes
(32:01):
the glucose levels in the blood to spike, and that
can cause more of that craving in your brain for it. Um.
So the other thing about this is that there's a
sort of physics to the potato chip that is very appealing.
So you remember that device that we talked about that
choose and premasticates food. That device has also helped the
(32:26):
industry to try to understand that people like a chip
that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch,
and so you could say that there's definitely an arn't
to a kind of physics to it. And Mary Roach
actually talked about this in the New York Times article
called the Marvels of the Mouth. Yeah, I mean the
the idea that you when that when that I think
(32:47):
we've talked about this before a bit, when you crunch
into that chip, when it when it crunches in your mouth, Um,
we're getting a sense. The brain is getting a sense
that we're eating something fresh, so like like yes, like salary.
The brain is saying this is basically celery we're eating here,
and therefore we should eat a lot of it because
it's fresh and it's not going to be fresh forever.
Chow down. Yeah. To get that kind of snap, that fracture,
(33:10):
you need crack speeds of the chip of three hundred
meters per second. That's the speed of sound. And so
Mary Roach describes it as the sonic boom inside of
your mouth. And then uh Dr Tom Vanpolet, who has
been studying the crunching of chips for seven years, had
said that as just as you say that crispiness, that
(33:32):
crunchiness appeals to us because it has that sort of
freshness that our ancestors would have sought out in vegetables
and fruit. So not only is the chip um very
appealing to us because of the sugar content and the
salt and the fat, but because it's mimicking something that
would have been important to us um in our ancestral survival. Yeah.
(33:55):
And and and on top of that, and this was
in some materials that you you sent me earlier. Just
the the crinkliness of the bag piz into that it's
almost like a harbinger of the of the crispiness of
the chip. You hear the bag crinkling, and and and
that makes you start thinking about the crunchiness of the
of the chip. It's almost like you're you're again, you're
(34:16):
reaching in with your caveman hands into some crisp, crunchy
plant to to grab your your lunch. Yeah. And that's
what gets us to this idea of sound symbolism. And
in two thousand and four, Charles Spence and neuroscientists at
Oxford University had subjects bite into all told about one
and eighty potato chips. And what he did is he
(34:38):
manipulated the that bite or crunch sound with directional microphones
and found that when researchers amplified the crunching sounds, that
the subjects rated the chips as crisp ear, but when
he muffled their crunching noises, they scored the chip as
less crisp. So it is really the full experience that
(34:59):
you're bringing to the food. And that's that sound stabolism
of oh this is fresh, it's good. Yeah, the chip
that is so crunchy that you have to turn up
the television set while you're while you're watching it because
the sound is deafening in set your own skull. So
think of all that when you the next time you
open a bag of potato chips, Because this is an
item that has been gamed, that has been manipulated to
(35:21):
get the maximum response out of you the user. Yeah,
free do lay thirty million dollars in that one year
to try to create the perfect chip for you to
return to over and over again. And for the most part,
you think, oh, well, probably this isn't a big deal.
I mean a lot of this is just you know,
(35:41):
little power. But we've talked about this before. We've talked
about how these pathways are created in the brain. It's
very hard to try to get over these types of addictions,
so you know, it takes a little bit more than
just knowing that it's bad for you. And I wanted
to bring up this example of microwave popcorn, especially that
will yield butter flavor. That you see, it uses flavoring
(36:05):
chemicals like diacutle and pentadeon which are dissipated into the
air by the heating process. Not something you want to
breathe in, right. Well, Um, a guy named Wayne Watson
was awarded seven million dollars when he seed the manufacturer
and retailers of microwave buttered popcorn that caused him to
(36:26):
develop something called popcorn lung after he ate two bags
daily for ten years. So you could argue that it's
just it's not it's not even just an obesity issue.
Sometimes it's it's some of the chemicals that are affecting
us in adverse ways. And clearly here it's the artificiality
of our food. You know, I mean, this is not
(36:46):
a matter of saying, oh, all that butter on the
popcorn was bad for you. This is a matter of
the butter flavoring. It was, there's a careful chemical concoction
had this dire effect on him, Which brings us to
this analogy of cigarette which isn't a perfect analogy, but
if you consider that cigarette manufacturers have been known uh,
(37:07):
you know particularly, I think it was in the eighties
that this came to light that for a number of
years they were amping up some of the addictive chemicals
in the cigarettes to further addict their customers. Could you
say this tame of junk food. Yeah, I would think so.
I mean your starting I think basically you're starting point
(37:28):
is uh is a little less evil, but you're still
ramping it up. You're still trying to make it more
addictive and and in opening yourself to the situations where
someone ends up eating your product product exclusively and then
paying the price for it. So, about fifteen years ago,
vice president of Kraft, Michael mud He went to a
(37:50):
industry meeting process food industry meeting meeting, and the meeting
was meant to talk about the rising obesity and the
manufactured foods that they were creating, and he was hoping
that that all the members of these various companies would
be open to this idea of regulating their foods um.
(38:12):
Unfortunately that was not that did not happen at that meeting.
But I thought it was striking because fifteen years ago
he presented, uh, this whole idea of what they were
doing and how it was affecting people. And he included
the following quote in this presentation from Yale University professor
of psychology and public health Kelly Brownel, which is quote,
(38:35):
as a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies
advertising to children, but we sit oddly by while the
food companies do the very same thing. And we could
make claim that the toll taken on the public health
via poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco fifteen years ago,
before we really even saw this huge expansion of obesity
(38:55):
statistics that we have today. It's a little startling, it is.
So tell me this, Yes, this evening, after my son
goes to bed, I am going over to a friend's
house to play board games. And said friend, let's call
him Greg, is going to inevitably have two bags on
the table. One is going to be normal Twizzlers and
(39:17):
one is going to be this other variant of Twizzler
that include no, no, no, it's rainbows and each one
has like a creamy filling. So what what am I
to do? How am I going to resist having that
first twizzler and then the subsequent u you know, thirty twizzlers?
You know, honestly, I think that you you eat pretty healthy, right, Yeah,
(39:39):
it seems to me. I feel like that's not a
huge risk for you. What I see is that the
problem is is that fast food, junk food is so
inexpensive and easy now for manufacturers to produce that a
lot of people are going to this as their mean sustenance.
So if you were like, man, I'm hitting up the
KFC again today, kind I pick you up something, and
this was happening all the time, I might be like Robert, dude,
(40:02):
remember the kraal mind um? But you know, I really
think that's that's the problem, and that is also the
problem for people who are um in lower income brackets
is that it's a lot easier and convenient to go
to these foods instead of fresh foods, which are more expensive.
And of course availability also placed into that the whole
(40:23):
idea of of having food deserts, where whereas an individual
does not have access to those healthier foods, even if
they are a little bit more expensive than the than
the unhealthy options. And you're talking about food desserts in
that there there have been plenty of studies that will
show you that in lower income areas there are not
grocery stores as readily available. Therefore, you know you could
(40:47):
hit up that KFC or that McDonald's a lot easier
than you could to travel the ten to twenty miles
to find a grocery store exactly. All right, So there
you have it, junk food, a little more insight into
why we love that, why we cannot resist it, what
it's doing to us, how it's gaming us, and of
course about the dark masters of dark food that engineer
(41:08):
it to dominate us. I know that everyone has some
comments to make on this, so we'd love to hear
from what what fast food item holds the most influence
over you? What fast food items have you managed to defeat?
Fast food or junk food. I'm kind of using the
two words that interchangeably for some reason, but but let
us know. Share your stories, share your tips, share your alternatives,
(41:31):
and because we would love to hear from you, and
we'd love to share some of your content on the show. Yeah,
I'd also like to know if commercials affect you. I
was thinking about this that I think there's one of
the Kardashians did a Roy Junior Burger ad campaign. I
don't know if I've got that chain right, but I
think I was like, you know, skimpy bathing suit with
the burger, with like the sweaty bacon falling out of
(41:53):
it and like the listening orbs of her breasts, and
I thought, if there's nothing more super normal to me
live than that? Yeah, I mean that actually ties in
directly within with a study I was looking at recently
that I've blogged about, and I have a video coming
out about the the idea of what did they call it.
It's not the bikini effect, um, but it's something that
(42:15):
to to that effect. And the idea is that if
a male UM in this case, say a heterosexual male,
looks at a picture of a model on a bikini,
sees a woman in a bikini, or even just handles
a braw their willpower lessons like there's it makes the
primal male, you know, want to to mate, to to
(42:38):
to give into his impulse, but that impulse will will
then manifest itself in the form of say, um, buying
some some junk food that they know they don't need,
eating some junk food in the office place, or ordering
something off of Amazon that they normally would have the
willpower to resist. Now that's not surprising to me if
I especially think about it in the context of the
bread example and altrsm. You know something that's simple changing
(43:02):
your behavior in tapping into that pleasure circuitry. So very interesting.
Let us know your thoughts on that. We definitely want
to hear it, and uh, you can find us at
the Mothership, Yes, Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
There that's where you'll find all the podcast episodes, all
the videos, all the blog post links out to our
social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, Google Plus,
(43:24):
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subscribe to us, follow us, and you'll stay up to
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coming out now and they are pumping out in the future.
And you can send us an email if you'd like
at Blow the Mind at house to Works dot com
(43:45):
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