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