Michael Moss

Some of the most profitable food companies of the last half century are knowingly manipulating salt, sugar, and fat to addict us to their products. And it’s working. The industry rakes in a trillion dollars a year. Meanwhile, one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year. How did we get here, and what can we do? In this talk, Michael Moss offers an empowering narrative, grounded in meticulous, often eye-opening research. He takes us inside the labs where food scientists are enhancing the “mouthfeel” of fat by manipulating its chemical structure. He shows how food companies are adapting marketing techniques from tobacco companies. And he talks to concerned executives who confess that they could never produce truly healthy alternatives to their products even if serious regulation became a reality. Based on the book that has started a necessary national conversation, Moss’s keynote offers an objective and sweeping take of the problems, and the many solutions. You will never look at a nutrition label, or the food on your plate, the same way again.