Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss, Random House, 2013. Available through Amazon in several formats. See the author’s website for more information.
One of the ways we can live a happier life is to live a healthier one. Bad health can be a constant drain, a chronic darkener of mood. Good health doesn’t necessarily make us happier, but it removes the drain. Does that make sense? Having good health is like having enough money: You’re freed to think about something else.
Readers of this blog will be seeing regular posts from now on about healthy eating. (It really should be “healthful eating,” but I just can’t bring myself to use that term. It sounds so pretentious.) I have cut out sweets from my diet pretty much completely, as I talked about in this post about personality types.
Anyway, if you’d like to know a little more about how all that “food” in those brightly-colored wrappers and boxes makes it way onto the grocery store shelves, this book will be a real eye-opener. I was particularly struck by the story of Jeffrey Dunn, who was a high-level executive at Coca-Cola for over a decade. He was known for his aggressive marketing strategies, but in 2000-2001 he was hit by three big revelations: someone sent him the book Sugar Busters!, he got engaged to a woman who refused to eat or drink junk food and who kept telling him that he should apply his prodigious talents to something other than selling flavored, fizzy sugar water (my wording), and he visited Brazil, the country that Coke saw as its next huge market. As he walked through an impoverished barrio in Rio de Janeiro, “he had an epiphany. ‘A voice in my head says, “These people need a lot of things, but they don’t need a Coke.” I almost threw up. From that moment forward, the fun came out of it for me.'” He ended up getting fired. Read about his new career in the New York Times article, “From Cola to Carrots.”
So, as I say so often, much more to come on this fascinating topic. I’ll be writing about my own diabetes situation and how my “no-sweets” rule is going, what I see as fad dieting masquerading as science (including the idea that we all should cut out gluten–sigh, smack forehead, roll eyes, repeat), and so on. I’ve even come up with what I think will work as a delicious but sugar-free punch to use at receptions. (And no, I’m not using artificial sweeteners. I’m going to make the iced-tea version of Good Earth herbal tea, which has cinnamon as the flavor that adds sweetness, and use club soda or seltzer water for part of the water, so it will be fizzy. I’m going to make up a sample batch over the holidays, so watch for that over on the hospitality blog.) Forward towards a happy, healthy 2016!