Salt Sugar Fat (47 page)

Back in his hotel that night, Karppanen got out his personal diary and found that he couldn’t stop writing, jotting down many of the salient points
of their conversation.
“He was very much disturbed by the experience of what money can buy in the U.S.,” Karppanen wrote. “He said everything is for sale if you have enough money.”

The diary entries he made that night remained tucked away—until the spring of 2010, when Karppanen retrieved them for me. By chance, I had run across a letter that Lin had sent to Karppanen three weeks after their dinner, buried in some files to which I had gained access. I was particularly intrigued by a memo that was attached to the letter, written when Lin was at Frito-Lay, that detailed some of the company’s concerted efforts in defending salt. I found Lin in southern California, in the university town of Irvine. There, in his lovely home off of a winding drive, Lin and I spent several days talking about salt and his years at Frito-Lay and going through the internal company memos, strategy papers, and handwritten notes he had kept.

The details that emerged from this record underscored the concern that Lin had for consumers. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion,
“people get addicted to salt.”

But the documents, along with others I would obtain, also pried open the door to another narrative, one that reflects the food industry’s uncanny—and highly consequential—ability to turn adversity into advantage. Cornered on salt, Frito-Lay would find other ways to boost the sales of its snacks. And it would wield these tricks, through the 1990s and beyond, at the precise moment when America’s dependence on processed food was peaking. High blood pressure was certainly one cause for concern, but more and more, as obesity overtook hypertension as a national health crisis, the danger in overeating the snacks that Frito-Lay so aggressively marketed lay not in their salt content but in their calories.

Thirty-two years had passed since Robert Lin first tangled with Frito-Lay on the health aspect of its chips, but as we sat at his dining room table, sifting through his records, the feelings of regret still played on his face. In his view, three decades had been lost, time that he and a lot of
other smart scientists could have spent searching for ways to ease the industry’s addiction to salt, sugar, and fat. “I was employed at a time I couldn’t do much about it,” he told me. “I feel so sorry for the public.”

L
ike many of the people on the research and development side of the processed food industry, the Robert Lin who went to work for Frito-Lay began his career with a pure heart, as a scientist, intent on discovery and bettering mankind. He came to the United States in the late 1960s from Taiwan after winning a prestigious award to study abroad. His clan was a brainy, demanding one. His brother went to work as a nuclear physicist for the federal laboratories at Los Alamos. All four of his own children would obtain PhDs.

Lin was not only bracingly intelligent as a young man; he was driven and self-confident. He defied his mentors in Taiwan, who had expected him to attend Oxford, or, at the least, an Ivy League school. Instead, Lin chose the University of California at Los Angeles for its medical school. There, and later at the California Institute of Technology, Lin dabbled in the latest brain research and worked on recombinant DNA. Eventually, he decided the field where he could make the most lasting contributions was not nuclear medicine or biophysics but nutrition. As he saw it, the food people ate was nothing less than a matter of (long) life or (early) death.
“My thinking was that the human body is supported by its nutritional intake,” Lin told me. “If I could understand that better, I could make the body last longer.”

But in short order, his passion for science gave way to the realities of the industry. He moved East to work for the life sciences unit of the GTE corporation and then joined a gold rush that was under way on the sweet side of processed foods. Washington had just banned the artificial sweetener called sodium cyclamate for having a toxicity risk, creating a void in the burgeoning market of products for diabetics. Lin joined a startup that was racing to turn an African berry into a sugar substitute. “When you
chewed it, not much flavor came out,” he told me. “But the molecule we
extracted
from the berry, you could put that on your tongue and it would make even vinegar taste sweet.” A disagreement among the principals caused the berry venture to collapse, and Lin was forced to look for more stable employment. He flew to Dallas and interviewed with some executives who were enjoying a gold rush of their own, this one on the salty side of processed foods.

The corporate culture at Frito-Lay was a shock to Lin. As chief scientist, he oversaw a division of 150 researchers and developers, each of whom was expected to dress and act like a senior executive. “Navy blue and charcoal gray,” Lin said. “Any man who dressed colorfully was not going to get promoted.” Lin, at times, was even told to make desk checks at five minutes past eight in the morning to enforce punctuality. The lab work, however, was wildly fun, a series of puzzles to solve. Lin got dragged out of bed one night when thousands of bottles of Pepsi loaded onto a ship and headed to Japan suddenly started popping their tops like champagne corks. A few weeks later, Lin and his team finally nailed the culprit: The trouble had been caused by the new grape pigment Pepsi was using to replace a synthetic dye called No. 6, which, like cyclamates, had been banned. The grape pigment was natural but had quirks of chemistry that obviously needed more careful managing in the factory. Another time, Lin was called upon to rescue the company’s potato chips. Frito-Lay had always been vigilant in keeping its chips incredibly fresh; the policy was, if they were not sold in a matter of days, they would be pulled from the shelves. This strict adherence to freshness was a company hallmark that set it apart from its rivals. But in cases where the chips stayed too long on the shelf, they didn’t just go stale; the people eating them would feel nauseous. The problem, Lin found, was light. The chips in those days were packed in see-through plastic bags, and the light they let in caused a chemical change in the chips. Lin solved this by switching to an opaque bag that now, of course, has been widely adopted by the industry.

Lin’s influence ranged widely across PepsiCo and the Frito-Lay division and even spilled into the marketing side, where officials labored to
learn all the reasons why people would, or would not, buy the company’s products. Health concerns were an obvious issue with salty or sugary snacks, but Lin put this matter in proper perspective. When a colleague developed a calculation for measuring the pros and cons of snacks, Lin honed it with all the proper mathematical framing. The reputation that snacks had for being bad for one’s health (H) was an issue that worked against the company, along with their cost ($), and failures in quality (Q), like breakage. But other factors worked in the company’s favor, making it more likely consumers would decide to purchase (P). Its chips and other snacks tasted great (T). They were convenient (C) and utilitarian (U), ready to eat out of the hand or with meals. Lin added some mathematical weighting (A, B), and threw it all into an equation he called the “Model for Ideal Snack,” which explained—from a mathematical perspective—why Frito-Lay was making a killing in fatty and salty snacks.
“Every time a consumer is making a decision to buy the snack, if Resistance is greater than Reward, there would simply be no Purchase,” Lin wrote in a memo to other Frito-Lay officials. “It would be better to express in the following way: P = A
₁
T + A
₂
C + A
₃
U – B
₁
$ – B
₂
H – B
₃
Q.”

One of his more expensive investigations at Frito-Lay was the Monkey Project, aimed at refuting the critics who, in the late 1970s, were making a fuss about saturated fat. Frito-Lay maintained that shoppers could do worse than pick up a bag of its chips; bread and butter, for one example, might sound innocuous but in truth was loaded with salt and fat. So the company spent $1.5 million on an experiment that would prove Lay’s chips weren’t really that bad after all. Monkeys—130 of them—served as the guinea pigs. An animal research center was hired to run the experiment, with Lin overseeing the science.
“We fed them a potato chip chow, three times as much as we felt people would eat in a day, and we did this for five years,” Lin said. Monkeys breed fast, so there were actually two generations involved in this trial. The findings, although never disclosed publicly, were comforting to Frito-Lay: The chips maybe weren’t great for one’s health, but they wouldn’t
kill
anyone, either.
“We wanted to confirm whether saturated fat was really that bad,” Lin said. “We were asking, ‘How
bad is the chip?’ We raised the monkeys for two generations and fed them this controlled diet of potato chip chow mixed with a supplement of vitamins and minerals, and one group had increasing amounts of saturated fat. After five years, the only conclusion was that the group with higher saturated fat had higher cholesterol. But birth defects? There were none. Some might have thought we were wasting time, but I thought it was responsible science. It gave everyone peace of mind.”

Defending its chips on cholesterol was one thing. Sodium was quite another. Starting in 1978, the salt that Frito-Lay was loading onto its chips would cause it—along with the entire industry—to undertake some deft maneuvering in Washington.

I
f there was one consumer group the food industry came to fear the most, it was the organization called the Center for Science in the Public Interest, simply because it was so ruthlessly effective. Founded in 1971, this group of activists would grow to have nine hundred thousand subscribers to its nutrition newsletter, giving it serious clout—and not only in Washington. Its formidable legal team, wielding laws aimed at curbing false advertising, could generate such angst in the food industry that companies would often race to cough up reforms even before a lawsuit was filed. Since 2005,
the organization has forced Kellogg to limit its advertising to young kids, Sara Lee to make it clear that its “whole-grain bread” is only 30 percent whole grain, and PepsiCo to change the labeling of its Tropicana Peach Papaya Juice to reflect the facts that it has neither peaches nor papaya and is not a juice.
“We’re open to listening to legitimate concerns, and this seemed like a reasonable concern,” a PepsiCo official said in settling the Tropicana case.

The group’s executive director, Michael Jacobson, was trained as a microbiologist at MIT, and a few years after the group started up, Jacobson’s interest in salt was ignited. He had just finished a project examining the preservatives, colorings, and chemical processing aids being used by
food companies in making their products. As scary as some of these might have seemed, he spotted the far more tangible and pressing target of salt. He saw how the country’s rates of high blood pressure were spiking, and how research was linking this scourge to sodium. Jacobson came to view salt—along with fat and sugar—as the biggest issues in processed foods.
“I realized that conventional ingredients like salt were probably far more harmful” than the additives he had been studying, he told me. In 1978, he petitioned the FDA to reclassify salt from an ingredient, like pepper or vinegar, that posed no health concerns to a food additive that the agency could regulate by mandating limits or warning labels.

At Frito-Lay, Lin viewed the issues Jacobson raised as perfectly reasonable from a scientific perspective. He could quibble with the quality of the research, but he saw the basic premise as logical and agreed that excessive consumption of salt was a public health problem. Moreover, when federal regulators took Jacobson’s petition seriously and opened discussions on the possibility of regulating salt, Lin viewed this as anything but a threat to Frito-Lay. He saw this as an opportunity for his company. Frito-Lay’s most iconic product, the potato chip, had less salt than many other snack foods, especially pretzels, which clocked in with triple the sodium loads as potato chips. Lin thought the move in Washington to regulate salt could, in fact, give an edge to Frito-Lay. By moving swiftly to reduce its salt loads, he believed that they could capture a bigger share of the market.
“Our products are already low in salt,” Lin wrote in a 1978 memo to other company officials. “However, since the public is consuming too much sodium from other foods, it would be wise to lower the salt content to enhance sales.”

Lin had only to look to Finland as an example of how the federal government could be a friend, not a foe. There, authorities were requiring manufacturers to label their saltiest foods with the “High Salt Content” warning, but they were also, importantly, incentivizing these same companies to produce lower-salt versions of their products. It did this by letting those companies with these healthier items promote them in a powerful way: They could label their boxes and bags with the comforting phrase “Low Salt.” This is where Lin wanted Frito-Lay to go.

So Robert Lin hurled his staff at the problem of finding a way to reduce the company’s dependence on salt.
A handwritten document by his team entitled “Salt Strategy” shows how they pursued this goal from numerous angles, some involving considerable research and study. The initiatives they examined ranged from adjusting the fat content in potato chips in a way that could lower the need for salt to fiddling with the form of the salt crystals themselves in order to heighten their impact.

In this matter of altering the physical shape of salt, there were two competing schools of thought. One argued that larger crystals were the more efficient way to go, since they seemed to hit the tongue with greater force. The other argued for smaller crystals, which meant grinding the salt into a fine powder that created more surface area for the tongue’s saliva to interact with the salt and speed the pleasure-inducing signals to the brain. Lin reached out to salt manufacturers, prodding them for details on their varying grinds of salt. Large crystals or small, however, there was one matter, he knew, that Frito-Lay would hold inviolable: People would have to crave Frito-Lay chips for their salty and fatty taste. If this could happen with less salt, fine. But if there was even the slightest drop in allure, any talk about reducing salt loads would be dead on arrival. Lin understood this. “Generally speaking,” he told me, “the food that makes you feel good is the food you want to buy more. There is advertising, but the difference it makes is minor. Ninety percent of it is about making you
feel
good, and feeling good means tasting good.”