Salt Sugar Fat ─ How the Food Giants Hooked Us

An instant #1 New York Times bestseller, Salt Sugar Fat is the troubling story of the rise of the processed food industry-and how it used salt, sugar, and fat to addict us.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes Salt Sugar Fat, a journey into the highly secretive, highly profitably world of the processed food giants, and the story of how they have deployed these three essential ingredients, over the past five decades, to dominate the American diet. This is an eye-opening book that reveals how the makers of these foods have chosen, time and again, to double down on their efforts to increase consumption and profits, gambling that consumers and regulators wouldn't figure them out. With meticulous original reporting, access to confidential files and memos, and numerous sources from deep inside the industry, it shows how these companies have pushed ahead, despite their own misgivings (never aired publicly) and despite the fact that one in three Americans today-and one in five children-are obese. (To say nothing of the 26 million who have diabetes.) Salt Sugar Fat is the story of how we got here, and it will hold the food giants accountable for the social costs that keep climbing even as some of the industry's own say, "Enough already."