We don’t necessarily think of the food industry as nefarious and Machiavellian – but that is the queasy picture Dr Chris van Tulleken paints in the sobering yet absorbing Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating (BBC Two, Monday).
The argument that van Tulleken makes in a documentary that is the literal opposite of a binge-watch is that “big food” has invested millions into hacking our brains so we consume more and more “ultra-high processed foods” with devastating consequences for our health. He further contends that this is driving an epidemic of harmful eating (in Ireland, obesity rates doubled among women and tripled among men between 1990 and 2022).
His thesis isn’t original. In 2001, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation warned fast-food chains were driving unhealthy dietary habits and feeding obesity. Van Tulleken claims that these strategies have leapt from the chain restaurant to our kitchens, where many of us find it more practical to ping a ready meal in the microwave than rustle something up from scratch.
He talks to some of the whizzes who helped drive this food “revolution” in the 1970s. Dr Howard Moskowitz recalls how, while working in the 1970s for Campbell’s Soup, he identified the concept of the “bliss point,” which he explains in layperson’s terms as the amount of sugar in your coffee that brings maximum satisfaction. Too little sugar and the coffee is bitter; too much, and it’s too sweet. The right amount, and ping, your senses are ablaze.
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Moskowitz is proud of his breakthrough. He does not appear troubled by the argument that super-engineered foods have contributed to a public health disaster. He disagrees that food companies are engaged in “a sinister plot, like Ming the Magnificent – how shall we make the people of the world fat?”
Whether by design or not, the food industry has cracked the code of how to make people eat more. One scientist explains how he would have volunteers eat ice cream while he measured their brain patterns, allowing him to identify which flavour and consistency produced the maximum pleasure. Another recalls urging the manufacturer of Pringles snacks to keep its tubular packaging narrow because “people like struggling to get their hand in, like they’re foraging bears”.
The obvious antecedent is the tobacco industry, which designed its products to appeal to kids (the Joe Camel mascot) and, as recently as the mid-1990s, was denying the addictive properties of nicotine. It is no coincidence, says van Tulleken, that many tobacco companies got into the snacks business. It was essentially the same game: foisting unhealthy, addictive products on an oblivious public and reaping the rewards.
The narrative around unhealthy eating has focused on personal responsibility – which is to ignore how our habits are encouraged by corporate interests. That’s the big message of Irresistible – that we should not feel guilty over how and what we eat but alarmed and angry that companies have knowingly got inside our heads and encouraged us to consume more than we need. He offers Colombia as a positive example, where high-sugar kids’ cereals carry ominous health warnings about potential dangers.
Ultra-processed foods, says van Tulleken, are “engineered by some of the smartest people on earth to be irresistible”. He adds: “This is not your fault. It is not you. It is the food.”
