Suddenly Every Food Company Is Selling Health. So What Have We Been Eating All Along?

People are growing warier of what they put in their mouths. Small companies saw it first; now the slow-moving giants are finally catching up. How did we get here with food?

On November 12, Hershey announced a line of healthier chocolate for the US market, free of all artificial additives. Four months earlier, PepsiCo said it would stop putting aspartame, which carries a cancer risk, in Diet Pepsi sold in the US. You may already have tried Coca-Cola's green can, sweetened with stevia. And in March this year McDonald's announced it would stop serving chicken raised on antibiotics in the US...

Food giants rarely launch "healthier" products in such quick succession, or time them in such apparent concert. Before looking at why, let's look at how these companies have been doing lately.

Hershey's just-released third-quarter results show revenue down 31%. McDonald's has been closing large numbers of US stores to stem its losses. PepsiCo has largely relied on snacks to offset falling cola sales: in 2014 snacks brought in 53% of its total revenue, and over the past three years the snack business has grown 3.5% a year while beverages have shrunk 3.2% a year.

Here is a chart for Coca-Cola. Look: it sold about as much as before, yet its profit took a dive in 2014. Costs did not rise that much, so Coca-Cola must have been either investing or spending on R&D. Where did the money go?

Coca-Cola's revenue, 2011-2014

That brings us back to where we started: "healthier food." Clearly, no one needs to explain the idea to consumers. Most already have some notion of "health"; they differ only in what they take it to mean.

In 2014 Nielsen surveyed people of all ages in 60 countries about health. It found that people under 20 and those aged 21-34 care a great deal about health, and, more strikingly, are more willing than other groups to pay a premium for healthy products.

A May report from the market research firm Mintel, based on a survey of 3,000 Chinese internet users aged 20-49, found much the same: 57% of respondents said that using "natural ingredients" rather than additives matters for healthy food, and 51% wanted manufacturers to adopt "healthier production methods."

This is one of the main reasons big companies are all suddenly talking about health. More and more consumers read ingredient labels, the media report on ingredient scares every day, and people are growing warier of what they put in their mouths.

But have you ever wondered why none of this bothered us before?

"We never used to think about healthy eating, because we thought everything we ate was healthy."

So says one interviewee in the 2009 documentary Food, Inc.. Isn't that true? Because we lacked information, for a long time we saw nothing wrong with what we ate. That changed only as more scientific findings were confirmed and food-safety scares of ever wider reach made the headlines more and more often.

Food, Inc. caused a stir precisely because it exposed what goes on behind America's food-processing industry. Between 1998 and 2009, the number of times The New York Times used the word "obese" tripled. "Diabetes" first appeared in 1970 and now appears ten times as often. "Obesity epidemic" first appeared in the Times in 2002 and has turned up again and again ever since.

It is hard to pin down the moment people's attitudes to health changed. In fact, in how we think about consumption, eating and health have always pulled against each other: "most of what tastes good is junk food," for instance. People have agonized over this for a long time, and the food companies' own messaging has a lot to do with it.

From packaged food on supermarket shelves to fast food, you will find that a few food giants decide it all, especially since food went global. The entire food supply chain is controlled by a handful of multinationals: Unilever, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Mars, Kraft...

When the big companies woke up and decided to offer "healthier" food, it was because they had no choice

What big companies care about most is how to control ingredient costs, how to produce more efficiently, and how to sell food to more people. Humans have sought energy from food since ancient times; big companies teamed up with chemists to find substitutes for natural ingredients simply because substitutes suit industrial mass production better.

Take sugar. Humans learned to make sucrose from pressed sugarcane juice around the year 1000. From the 1960s, chemists began synthesizing artificial sweeteners. From saccharin and cyclamate to acesulfame, aspartame and sucralose, the sweetener industry has gone through roughly five generations, each tasting more like sucrose.

Aspartame is the best example. It is 150-200 times sweeter than sucrose and a favorite of soda makers such as PepsiCo and Coca-Cola. But as more and more studies pointed to potential risks, including cancer and premature birth, worries about aspartame ended up hurting soda sales directly.

Stevia is now the new favorite. It is 200 to 300 times sweeter than sucrose, and, more important, it does not make blood sugar spike, which lowers the health risk. Nearly 50% of the sweetness in Coca-Cola Life comes from stevia, and one survey found that 70% of consumers who had bought it gave it 4 or 5 stars. "Stevia is now the most popular sweetener among food ingredients. We saw that the public wanted stevia, so we made a change," The Coca-Cola Company said.

A roadmap for making food healthier

A new member of the Coca-Cola family

Kraft's macaroni and cheese went through something similar. "The color of Kraft macaroni and cheese is the color of an American childhood. It is a staple quick meal on Western family tables, and nothing is more nostalgic than that steaming orange pasta."

But in 2013 two American mothers launched a campaign against the artificial food coloring in Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. The "yellow" dye contains o-toluidine, a petroleum extract whose only purpose is to "look good." The dye has been linked to hyperactivity in children, asthma, migraines and even cancer.

Kraft says it had been thinking about cutting artificial additives for some time: "We know parents care about the safety of the food their families eat, but we were waiting until we had developed a new macaroni that tastes about the same as before, and only then would we pull the old product entirely."

One reason big companies are slow: they are cautious about substitutes

Behind them stands an enormous customer base. They must be sure a reformulated product will not cost them large numbers of customers overnight.

In 2002 McDonald's announced it would cut the trans fat in its frying oil. According to foreign media reports, before the new oil had even arrived, so many customers called to complain that the fries tasted worse that McDonald's customer-service lines were jammed.

Growing concern about health is forcing food companies to hurry up and find substitutes that neither spoil the taste nor fail commercially.

"We know exactly who this green drink will appeal to: people in their 20s and 30s who realize they only live once and want the kick of a cola, but who also feel some responsibility for what they eat," said Bobby Brittain, head of marketing at Coca-Cola UK. In the US, the biggest buyers of Coca-Cola Life are health-conscious consumers born in the 1980s and 1990s.

McDonald's has also launched a healthy menu on which every item has fewer than 400 calories, including green salads, low-calorie fries and wraps. Even kale, regarded as the greenest of vegetables, has been pressed into service.

Some companies have simply switched their packaging to a healthier-looking green. A Mintel survey on packaging design found that brown combined with green suggests naturalness, because the pairing reminds consumers of soil and plants. Some manufacturers have already started using it to sell their products.

Brown and green together suggest naturalness

Pepsi True, which has also gone green

Nimbler niche brands are rising and creating new demand

People seem to trust small brands' health claims more by instinct. You may have noticed that detox juices have spread from New York to Beijing and Shanghai over the past year or two; Wagas and Element Fresh have become the choice of more and more office workers; and more and more foods and drinks are sold as green and organic, trying to change the way we live.

Lechun yogurt, founded last September, is one of them. Its founder, Liu Danni, lived in the US for many years and worked as an independent consultant for Pepsi China before starting Lechun. "The flagship products of a company like Pepsi have actually lost touch with the market, and it isn't easy for them to change," Liu told QDaily. He wanted to build a food brand with a fan base. Lechun's selling points are zero additives and zero or low fat. Its core process is straining off the whey, that is, filtering the watery part out of ordinary yogurt so it becomes thicker. That makes it cost about 5 times as much as ordinary yogurt.

Lechun shows customers how its yogurt is made

"We didn't invent this technique. In dairy markets abroad, strained yogurt is already mainstream. In the US, too, dairy products started out full of additives, which gradually decreased, and now 60% of the market is strained products like this," Liu said. All of Lechun's marketing centers on the food itself: 3 bottles of yogurt go into 1 bottle of Lechun, with no food additives. "What we most want to see is small companies rising and influencing the big ones."

These niche brands are drawing customers away from the big companies, and opening up new markets at the same time. Facing steadily falling results, the big companies have had to change, and they are also buying their way toward a healthier image: Kellogg bought the organic brands Bear Naked and Kashi, PepsiCo bought Naked Juice, and Starbucks, not much associated with junk food, bought Evolution Fresh juice. They learn production and marketing from the small companies while improving their own product lines.

In fact, eating has never been that simple

What people want from food has gone far beyond filling their stomachs, but in evolutionary terms their bodies have not changed.

Put simply, you eat more often than before and eat a wider variety of things, but your metabolism is no faster than it was. Worse, you move less than a primitive human did: office work cuts your chances to exercise, which slows your metabolism further.

The Atlantic has reported on a depressing study: even if we eat the same calories and do the same exercise, we still put on weight more easily than our parents' generation did.

One of the biggest reasons is that modern food contains too many chemicals that may cause weight gain. Additives in packaged food, pesticides, flame retardants and the like change how our hormones normally work and disrupt the body's mechanisms for gaining and maintaining weight.

"Many people's weight problems today are affected by factors they cannot control," said Kuk, a professor of kinesiology and health science at York University in Toronto. Yet many people think dieting and exercise are enough to reach an ideal weight.

You may ask, then what are we supposed to do? We can't eat well, and exercise doesn't work. Our answer: eating better and moving more both work, but today you have to pay a much higher price to actually do them. Food that claims to be healthier usually costs more, because it is not entirely an assembly-line product and is more expensive to make (though to a large extent you are paying for the brand). Then there are gyms and personal trainers. We hate to conclude that the poor are out of luck, but in this narrow-minded society, that seems to be how things are.

Graphics: Xu Bingqing