I’m writing this a couple days before Halloween and on my desk I have a cup of tea, a glass of water, and a wad of empty Fruit-tella wrappers that I’ve pilfered from the stash set aside for the kids this weekend. Reading this – on the other side of Halloween – I’m wondering if you have a stack of empty Fun Size wrappers or Haribo skeletons that you plundered from your unsuspecting children? Or maybe they were acquired legitimately, with the help of the Switch Witch? Regardless of how these sweets came into your possession, I wonder what stories you’re telling yourself about them now? I wonder if you’re trying to get them out of the house as quickly as possible because you don't trust yourself or your kid? I wonder if you feel like you might be ‘addicted’ to sugar? Or maybe you’re afraid to have any of your kids sweets because you’ve told yourself that if you have even just one then it will be game over; the floodgates will open and you won’t be able to stop yourself.
These are the kinds of stories that diet culture wants us to believe. Stories that undermine our trust in our bodies. Stories that disconnect us from foods we loved as kids (and that our kids love now). Stories like: you’re not hungry, you’re just thirsty. Or, if you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not really hungry (as if an apple could satisfy all our hungers). And the story that if you give in to your cravings for something sweet, you’ll keep on wanting more and more and more.
The idea that sweets are somehow irresistible and in need of close micromanaging has always existed, but lately they’ve been mashed together with ideas about UPFs. Especially when it comes to kids. This is why Jennifer Anderson, of Kids Eat In Color fame, recommends we introduce babies to ‘plain’ foods in her new book Feed Them Well. Speaking to a much deeper anxiety about engineering kids to have the ‘right’ kinds of appetites, she writes, ‘the overarching goal is to get babies the most exposure possible to plain, non-hyperpalatable foods so that their palates are trained on these’. ‘Hyperpalatable’ as I discussed on Burnt Toast is as good as meaningless, but she appears to be using interchangeably with foods high in salt, fat, and sugar and/or UPFs. To wit: ‘food companies run thousands of tests to find the exact amount of sugar, salt, fat, and sensory properties that a product must contain to encourage people to eat more of it. Companies then use this data to create bright, fun “hyperpalatable foods,” defined as highly processed foods that are designed to be difficult to stop eating’. It’s funny that when Samin Nosrat does it, she gets a James Beard, but when food companies do it, it’s a conspiracy.
Regardless, I’m sitting here with my bright, fun, ‘hyperpalatable’ Fruit-tella, wishing I had bought Starburst instead.
And to be fair to KEIC lady, this logic is sort of received wisdom in nutrition spaces, with the WHO, Health Canada, and the NHS all warning that eating sweet things makes you want to eat more sweet things. And eating sweet things will make you fat and fat is bad etc… etc… You know the story inside out by now. This is sometimes referred to by scientists as ‘the sweet tooth hypothesis of ob*sity’. Basically, humans are hardwired to have a preference for sweet foods, so in a modern food environment where sweet foods are abundant and have been specifically engineered so we can't stop eating them, we can’t control ourselves.
But hold up...
What evidence is this claim based on? Given that it’s baked into official dietary guidelines around the world, you’d think it was probably pretty robust, right?
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