Dr. Moskowitz’s "bliss point"—salt, sugar, and fat ratios perfected in the late 1970s—turned processed snacks like Lay’s chips into engineered cravings, with R.J. Reynolds’ Nabisco division capitalizing on tobacco industry tactics after cigarette crackdowns. A 1967 ad featuring the Cowardly Lion as a devilish pitchman proved the point: irresistible hyperpalatability designed to bypass satiety, reshaping diets and health for decades. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Food's Bliss Point Addiction00:01:41
And there's something you mentioned about food being like a recreational drug.
And do you mean by that that food has been intentionally made addictive?
And what do you know about that?
I actually've heard about this, but I've never really talked about it with anyone.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people know that, for instance, when the tobacco companies were broken up back, you know, R.J. Reynolds and some of the other big companies, you know, when we started to push back on the cigarettes, a lot of those companies ended up buying some of these food companies.
Nabisco and some of the other ones were bought by these big tobacco companies.
And I actually had a woman who worked for one of those companies as a food scientist.
She was a chemist.
And she said her job was literally to design the food to be as addictive as possible.
And she had a tremendous amount of guilt about that.
She wanted to come work for our company because she just felt so guilty about the fact that she was, you know, in part responsible for addicting millions of us to this hyperpalatable, damaging food, which is what it's done.
It just sounds so unbelievable.
But the bottom line is, it has to be processed for you to be able to create that scenario, right, to make it addictive.
You can't just take a steak and make it addictive.
Yeah, there's a fellow by the name of Moskowitz back in the late 70s, early 80s, described something called the bliss point of food.
And so it was a special combination of salt, sugar, and fat that, you know, if you mix it together in a certain degree, it was irresistible for people.
I find that if I eat certain foods, you know, if you get, you know, like 1967, Cowardly Lion, I'm from Remember the actor that played that from The Wizard of Oz from the 1930s.
Anyway, there's a commercial with him saying, you know, lays potato chips, but you can't eat just one.
You know, he's dressed up as a devil, right?
But you can't eat just one.
And he's right.
You can't.
So I know that anytime I start eating certain foods, I just can't stop.