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Excerpt from Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss

Salt Sugar Fat

How the Food Giants Hooked Us

by Michael Moss
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • First Published:
  • Feb 26, 2013, 480 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2014, 480 pages
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About this Book

Print Excerpt


"One of the most fundamental mysteries is why we like the foods that we do," Mennella said. "The liking of sweet is part of the basic biology of a child. When you think of the taste system, it makes one of the most important decisions of all: whether to accept a food. And, once we do, to warn the digestive system of impending nutrients. The taste system is our gatekeeper and one of the research approaches has been to take a developmental route, to look from the beginning—and what you see is that children are living in different sensory worlds than you and I. As a group, they prefer much higher levels of sweet and salt, rejecting bitter more than we do. I would argue that part of the reason children like high levels of sweet and salt is a reflection of their basic biology."

Excerpted from Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss. Copyright © 2013 by Michael Moss. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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