Salt Sugar Fat

Michael Moss spent years inside the corporate offices, testing laboratories, and legal archives of the largest processed food companies to document how salt, sugar, and fat became the three primary tools for making food difficult to stop eating. He introduces the food-science concept of the "bliss point" — the precise level of sweetness, saltiness, or fattiness that maximizes pleasure without tipping into off-putting excess — and shows how companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, General Mills, and Nestlé invested heavily in research to find and exploit that point across their product lines, often while internal scientists privately raised concerns about the health consequences that were then overruled by marketing and sales priorities.

The book matters because it reframes a public health crisis usually discussed in terms of personal responsibility as, in significant part, a story about corporate incentives and applied science. Moss draws on internal company documents obtained through litigation, along with candid interviews with former executives, to show a pattern repeated across companies and decades: knowledge of health risks existing alongside continued, aggressive marketing, including to children, with reformulation toward healthier products consistently sacrificed to competitive and shareholder pressure.

Who should read it

Anyone who has struggled to moderate certain processed foods and wondered whether the problem is really personal willpower will find this clarifying, as will readers interested in food policy, marketing, or corporate accountability. It is investigative journalism rather than a diet or nutrition guide.

About the author

Michael Moss is an American investigative journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for reporting on contaminated meat, and spent many years as a staff writer at The New York Times covering the food industry.