What do you crave?

I don’t know about you but for so long I have heard all about how salt, sugar and fat were bad for me. I have definitely cut down over the years on how much salt, sugar and fat I consume, but I never really stopped to think about why I craved those foods.

For my next adventure in prep for my Culinary Nutrition course I decided to delve into the book Salt Sugar Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss.

By the time I finished the book there were some startling questions that came into my mind.

The first block buster was how in the world did the cigarette company Phillip Morris make the decision to buy up a number of processed food producing companies and become the largest processed food producer in the world?

I will let you think on that yourselves, but it was a bit mind blowing to me. Wise business move for sure, but……..

Did you know that sugar is more addictive than cocaine?

Let me say that one more time!

​Did you know that sugar is more addictive than cocaine?

That was a stunning idea for me. We can’t be addicted to those ingredients, can we?

Salt, sugar and fat have long been used to improve the taste of the processed food that people eat today and to make us crave it and go back for more.

Behind the clever marketing were labs where food was engineered to have you going back for the taste, the mouth feel, the bliss-point and more of just whatever, as long as you came back to their product and not someone else’s seemed to be the goal.

When you are looking at the product labels do you look at the number of ingredients listed, and the order they are listed in?

Most of us today know that the order the ingredients are listed in is based on the % that ingredient is of the total product.

Did you know that there are over 56 different ingredients names that are really sugar, and over 40 ingredients that are actually salt? AMAZING!

When you look at nutritional labels have you ever wondered, if you added up all the processed foods you eat in a day by the % of recommended daily amounts listed on the nutritional label, would you be over 100% for the recommended daily amount for fat or salt or sugar?

It is a little bit of a challenge to figure that out for sugar. If you go to your cupboard and look at some of the nutrition labels there, you will see that there are relatively few that actually give you the sugar % of RDA. Why is that? Hmmm……..

I consume far less processed foods than I used to, so imagine my surprise when I ran to the cupboard/refrigerator to examine ingredient lists and nutrition labels of some of the foods I have purchased.

I was not surprised to see products there that boasted low fat, where the salt and sugar were now significantly more than I imagined and how often sugar was brought into the first 5 ingredients. Condiments like salad dressing, ketchup, BBQ sauce, etc, sugar was the first or second ingredient! Products that you would never expect sugar and salt to be.

Recently, I have started to really try to only purchase products that:

• I cannot make at home
• Have less than 5 ingredients
• Sugars is not in the first 5 ingredients
• Do not have a long list of ingredients I do not know
• Or do not have a list of ingredients that I cannot pronounce the name of

It was really amazing to me now in hind sight, the number of products that have now been eliminated from my house.

This is such an interesting journey to be on, and such an interesting time. Now that I have had more time to explore what I purchase and why. Some of the questions I now ask myself in addition to the 5 listed above while I am in the grocery store are:

• Do I really want to consume this product knowing what is in it?
• Do I really need this convenience?
• Is there real food value from this product?
• Is this a food product that I know calls me from the cupboard, and I just can’t stop eating it. I now know there is a reason why that happening.
• Are there other foods I could consider?

One thing for certain, I am taking more control over the foods that I consume, and the foods that come into my house. There are so few things that you can control today, but what goes into your body is definitely one of them.

Thanks for coming on the journey and exploring the world of food with me.

There is more to come, a little bit at a time, and I promise fun stuff too!

Food Sensitivity Coach and Food Lover exploring the world of food.