Sugar, Fat, Salt
Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by in Dr. Joel Fuhrman
The foods that taste the best are highly addictive because they’re generally a combination of sugar, fat and salt. These foods make us anticipate the act of eating them. We can’t wait to get our hands on them. It’s what produces that craving for a McDonalds Happy Meal at midnight…or for pizza and hot wings during Monday night football.
Sugar alone doesn’t excite us too terribly much (if it did we’d be downing packets of raw sugar all the time). Instead, we like sugar in combination with fat and salt. If you put the same amount of sugar into a high-fat and a low-fat product, people will inevitably prefer the high-fat product. This is why restaurants coat foods in butter before cooking them–adding on more fat. This is why McDonalds adds sugar to it’s fat-loaded fries. When the mix of sugar, salt and fat is just right, the food becomes almost impossible to resist. That’s why eating these types of foods makes us eat more than we normally would. This has been proven in both animal and human research.
A study done at the University of Chicago followed a group of rats that were fed foods found in the typical American diet, such as cookies, cheese, chocolate, milk, peanut butter, etc. Another group of rats was fed bland rat chow. After 10 days on the diet, the rats that were fed the typical American foods weighed a lot more than the other rats. They eventually became twice as heavy as the other rats. They couldn’t seem to stop eating. When they had access to foods high in sugar, salt and fat they didn’t know when to stop.
Food created to be served in restaurants is designed with this “sugar, fat, salt” principle in mind. All three are loaded into every dish, no matter if it’s a vegetable, bread or dessert. When you read a restaurant menu the healthful items are meant to catch your eye. You read that the salad you’re about to order is a “bed of fresh greens.” This makes you forget about the fatty cheese, even fattier bacon bits and the mostly oil and cheese dressing. You read that the chicken wings are served with a side of nutritious “crisp celery.” This makes you forget about the fact that the wings were partially fried at the plant where they were made and then fried again at the restaurant and served with the fattiest dipping sauce possible. You read about the taco loaded with “lettuce and tomato.” Again you forget the fact that it’s also loaded with fatty sour cream and cheese with a shell and meat loaded with salt and deep fried in oil.
So if you ever wonder why you can’t stop eating the bread at your favorite Italian restaurant, now you know. It’s been sweetened with sugar, sprinkled with salt and when you take that final step by dipping into a plate of fatty oil, game over.
