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Business Daily: Why Junk Food Is So Tasty

Burger, fries and fizzy drink

30/04/2013

Why Junk Food Is So Tasty

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Why Junk Food Is So Tasty

The strategies food companies use to make convenience foods hard to resist

The strategies food companies use to make convenience foods hard to resist. Are food companies responsible when we get fat?

Making food taste good has always been an art - but during the last century it became a science too.  And the results are there on the shelves of virtually every shop in the world - the salty, fatty, sugary products sometimes called junk food. We know eating too much of them is bad for us - the soaring world obesity figures show that - so what makes them so tasty?  

That's the question Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Michael Moss asks in his latest book, Salt, Sugar, Fat.  It reveals the incredible effort and investment food companies put into making their products appealing. 

Justin Rowlatt puts the products to the test, eating an array of the world's top convenience foods as he talks to Michael Moss.

But if the products are hard to resist does that mean the food companies that make them are responsible when we get fat?  John Banzhaf is a US lawyer who has brought high profile cases against the tobacco industry.

Plus: convenience food goes global. We discover how frozen chapatis are changing Indian eating habits.

(Image: Burger, fries, and fizzy drink. Credit: 
BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images)

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