Weight Loss Tips: Why We CRAVE

Hey everyone it’s Dr. Angela here today with an important question to think about: Are you a pawn of the food industry?

So… here’s the deal. If you’re eating the Standard American Diet, aka the Global Industrialized Diet, the answer is yes. Today I want to show you some of their tricks. 

The food industry has a lot of tricks up their sleeve to get you to spend your hard-earned money on their products, and they fall into 3 general categories: Craving, Convenience, Children’s products. I’m going to talk about Craving today, and then in future videos I’ll talk about Convenience and Children’s products. 

So let’s talk about Craving first. 

How do they get you to crave certain foods?

My Medical Assistant Marchelle… wanted to get off sugar. She has been posting in Sugar and Flour Buster Society on FaceBook. If you're not in Sugar and Flour Buster Society, just go to Facebook and join, and you can watch the videos that she's done. What she discovered when she first started working for me a couple of years ago, after she had lost a lot of weight, she had plateaued and she recently got some blood work back that indicated that she was pre-diabetic and that really started to worry her and she's around me all the time. She said, you know what Angela, I need to get off sugar. She had a hard time imagining not being able to have her coffee creamer every morning. Nestle French Vanilla creamer. 

The first ingredient is water, the second ingredient is sugar, and the third ingredient is vegetable oil. There are a whole bunch of other ingredients that you can’t pronounce… but there’s actually no real cream in it. For years, Marchelle felt helpless when she thought about having to do without her creamer. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit she told me she asked her husband to stock up on bottles of this stuff at Costco, in case there was a run in on coffee creamer like there had been on toilet paper! So each tablespoon of this has 5 grams of sugar. Add ¼ cup of this creamer to your coffee, and that’s 20 grams of sugar. She would drink that all morning long. She would skip breakfast, skip lunch, and then she'd start snacking in the afternoon after work. And she said, I've got to stop this coffee habit. I've got to stop the creamer habit. She realized she was going to have to stop coffee too because she couldn't imagine coffee without creamer. So she went through both sugar and caffeine withdrawal at the same time. Kudos to you Marchelle!

This is just one example, but as Marchelle has been talking about this addiction she used to have, many others of our patients have admitted that they too, really struggle with these coffee creamers!  

So the food industry has done a brilliant job here of manufacturing something that is highly addictive. They had to get the sweetness just right, and they had to get the flavoring just right. How do you think they do this?

Well, they hire food scientists. This is well documented in the book “Salt Sugar Fat” by Michael Moss. The job of these food scientists is to experiment with people and optimize the sugar content, the flavorings and the mouth feel of the products to create the optimal experience for the consumer… which they call the “Bliss Point.” Michael Moss interviewed a food scientist named Howard Moskowitz, who has been responsible for engineering foods for Campbell’s Soup, General Foods, Kraft and PepsiCo, among others. 

Here is an excerpt from the book: 

“In the lingo of product developers, Moskowitz’s stock in trade is known as “optimization,” and he is not bashful in chronicling his deeds: “I’ve optimized soups “I’ve optimized pizzas. I’ve optimized salad dressings and pickles. In this field, I’m a game changer.”

Moskowitz used this technique to determine the winning formula for Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, which has been hugely popular and has made its parent company Cadbury billions of dollars since 2004 when the product was introduced.  

Here’s how he did it: 

He varied the different ingredients and then tested them on thousands of consumers. To optimize Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, he tested sixty-two distinct formulas—thirty-one for the regular version and thirty for diet.

The formulas were then presented to the tasters and Moskowitz’s system is specifically designed to engage the tasters and convince them of the seriousness of the test. “We don’t let them talk,” Reisner said. “The rooms look professional, with nice computers. These are not junky places we have. The people are paid well, and the moderator will tell them there is no talking or discussing the products. They have to turn off their cell phones. They start to feel like their opinions count.”

Starting on July 12, 2004, in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Dr Pepper tasters began working through their samples, resting five minutes between each sip to restore their taste buds. After each sample, they answered a set of questions: How much did they like it overall? (0=hate; 100=love.) How strong is the taste? How do they feel about the taste? How would they describe the quality of this product? And perhaps most important of all: How likely would they be to purchase this product? (From “definitely would buy” to “definitely would not buy.”)

The scores were then added up. A score of 60 suggests the product will sell well. Fourteen of Moskowitz’s variations scored 61 or better, with two at 67 and two at a spectacular 70. 

Moreover, more than half of the panelists said that they would definitely buy the product, which in food marketing surveys is considered a terrific result.

So all of these opinions are logged and then the data is spilled into a computer program that spits out the winner.”

The biggest hits—be they Coca-Cola or Doritos or Kraft’s Velveeta Cheesy Skillet dinner kits—owe their success to formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!

So do you get this? Essentially Howard Moskowitz and other food scientists ENGINEER food products… and they know exactly how do to it so that you can’t stop eating – or drinking – their perfectly highly addictive products.  

This is WHY Marchelle couldn’t imagine her life without Nestle French Vanilla Coffee Creamer, and was concerned about shortages when the Covid-19 crisis hit.

Here is another example of an engineered food product: my daughter’s friends brought these over one night and couldn’t stop raving about them. It’s Cheeto’s Popcorn, Flaming Hot flavored. Chalk one up for the Frito Lay food industry scientists I said…. They found a winner! It says it doesn’t have more than 1% sugar in it, and yet the 3rd ingredient is maltodextrin, which is sugar, a form of sugar that actually gets digested and lands in your bloodstream faster than table sugar. In my experience, anything with maltodextrin in it makes me crazy with cravings.  You might check your favorite foods – the ones you crave – and see if there is any maltodextrin in them.  

Moscowitz is a food engineer, a food optimizer! The food industry gets to make billions of dollars on these products. We Americans, who are their pawns, ended up gaining billions of pounds, and spending billions of dollars in healthcare costs trying to clean up the damage that these products are doing. Remember, Marchelle was pre-diabetic. So this is what this stuff does to us. I can go on and on. I have a hard time sometimes when I see the blood work that comes back on my patients and it's like I have a hard time to keep myself from throwing charts across the room at how bad it is! I mean really sick people! 

So … do not be a part of the food industry! If you want more information, I have a handy guide for you called Five Dirty Little Secrets of the Food Industry and I would encourage you to download that guide. Download that guide and get knowledgeable about what the food industry is up to so that you can protect yourself.

So that’s the first C - Craving. Find the bliss point. The bliss point creates billions of dollars for the food industry… and billions of pounds for their consumers. 

Again, If you want more information about what the food industry is up to, I’ve written a handy guide called “5 Dirty Secrets the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know”, click the link to get your copy for free!

I’ll see you next time and we’ll talk about the second C - “Convenience”

To your health, 

Dr Angela

(In the video I mention that Dr Pepper is owned by Cadbury. Cadbury sold Dr Pepper to the conglomerate that owns Keurig and various other food and beverage brands, including Krispy Kreme and Cinnabon!)