Featuring Michael Norton and Stephen Terrell PDF  | Print |
America's Best Selling Authors
The Law Business Insider Logo

America's #1 TalkRadio Show Presents

"America's Best Selling Authors Series"

Image of Michael Norton Happy Money Book Cover Image of Michael Shelden Stephen Terrell Book Cover Image of Jack Girardi
Michael   Michael   Jack
Moss   Shelden   Girardi

Guest: Michael Moss
Author of “Salt, Sugar, Fat”
Website: http://michaelmossbooks.com/

Michael Moss has been a reporter with the investigations group since joining The New York Times in 2000.

Before coming to The Times, Mr. Moss was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, New York Newsday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colo., and the High Country News in Lander, Wyo.

He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his reporting on the lack of protective armor for soldiers in Iraq, and in 1999 for a team effort on Wall Street’s emerging influence in the nursing home industry, and received an Overseas Press Club citation in 2007 for stories on the faulty justice system for American-held detainees in Iraq.

Mr. Moss is the author of “Palace Coup: The Inside Story of Harry and Leona Helmsley,” a Doubleday bestseller, He has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has had fellowships with the German Marshall Fund and the Gannett Center for Media Studies. In 1983 he covered an expedition up the West Ridge of Mount Everest in Nepal.

Born in Eureka, Calif., on Dec. 16, 1955, Mr. Moss attended San Francisco State University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Eve Heyn, a writer, and their two boys.

THE BOOK: “Salt, Sugar, Fat”

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. Michael Moss reveals how companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more important, how we can fight back.

In the spring of 1999 the heads of the world’s largest processed food companies—from Coca-Cola to Nabisco—gathered at Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis for a secret meeting. On the agenda: the emerging epidemic of obesity, and what to do about it.

Increasingly, the salt-, sugar-, and fat-laden foods these companies produced were being linked to obesity, and a concerned Kraft executive took the stage to issue a warning: There would be a day of reckoning unless changes were made. This executive then launched into a damning PowerPoint presentation—114 slides in all—making the case that processed food companies could not afford to sit by, idle, as children grew sick and class-action lawyers lurked. To deny the problem, he said, is to court disaster.

When he was done, the most powerful person in the room—the CEO of General Mills—stood up to speak, clearly annoyed. And by the time he sat down, the meeting was over.

Since that day, with the industry in pursuit of its win-at-all-costs strategy, the situation has only grown more dire. Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year.

In Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how we got here. Featuring examples from some of the most recognizable (and profitable) companies and brands of the last half century—including Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestlé, Oreos, Cargill, Capri Sun, and many more—Moss’s explosive, empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, often eye-opening research.

Moss takes us inside the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology to calculate the “bliss point” of sugary beverages or enhance the “mouthfeel” of fat by manipulating its chemical structure. He unearths marketing campaigns designed—in a technique adapted from tobacco companies—to redirect concerns about the health risks of their products: Dial back on one ingredient, pump up the other two, and tout the new line as “fat-free” or “low-salt.” 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. Simply put: The industry itself would cease to exist without salt, sugar, and fat. Just as millions of “heavy users”—as the companies refer to their most ardent customers—are addicted to this seductive trio, so too are the companies that peddle them. You will never look at a nutrition label the same way again.

“As a feat of reporting and a public service, Salt Sugar Fat is a remarkable accomplishment.”—The New York Times Book Review

Guest: Michael Shelden
Author of “Young Titan-The Making of Winston Churchill
Website: http://www.michaelshelden.com/

Michael Shelden is the author of five biographies, among them the best-selling Mark Twain: Man In White, which was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by the Library Journal and the Christian Science Monitor. His Orwell: the Authorized Biography was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Shelden was a features writer for the Daily Telegraph (London) and a book critic for the Baltimore Sun.

THE BOOK: “Young Titan-The Making of Winston Churchill”

In modern memory, Winston Churchill remains the man with the cigar and the equanimity among the ruins. Few can remember that at the age of 40, he was considered washed up, his best days behind him. In Young Titan, historian Michael Shelden has produced the first biography focused on Churchill’s early career, the years between 1901 and 1915 that both nearly undid him but also forged the character that would later triumph in the Second World War.

Between his rise and his fall, Churchill built a modern navy, experimented with radical social reforms, survived various threats on his life, made powerful enemies and a few good friends, annoyed and delighted two British monarchs, became a husband and father, took the measure of the German military machine, authorized executions of notorious murderers, and faced deadly artillery barrages on the Western front. Along the way, he learned how to outwit more experienced rivals, how to overcome bureaucratic obstacles, how to question the assumptions of his upbringing, how to be patient and avoid overconfidence, and how to value loyalty.

He also learned how to fall in love. Shelden gives us a portrait of Churchill as the dashing young suitor who pursued three great beauties of British society with his witty repartee, political f lair, and poetic letters. In one of many never-before-told episodes, Churchill is seen racing to a Scottish castle to prepare the heartbroken daughter of the prime minister for his impending marriage.

This was a time of high drama, intrigue, personal courage, and grave miscalculations. But as Shelden shows in this fresh and revealing biography, Churchill’s later success was predicated on his struggles to redeem the promise of his youth.

Jack Girardi, Partner at Girardi Keese, is one of America's Finest Trial Lawyers and our Co-Host, as always, brings out the most important key elements to the success of today's guests. He and his firm have been dedicated to working hard and getting the best possible recovery for its clients.

Girardi Keese's mission is to provide aggressive representation of individuals and businesses who have been injured in sous way, whether by physical harm, property damage, damage to business, or damage to economic interests. Girardi & Keese has two offices in California: Downtown Los Angeles and San Bernardino. www.girardikeese.com

Hosted by Steve Murphy
Steve Murphy
Brought to you by "The Law Business Insider"
Contact:

Guest: Michael Moss
Author of “Salt, Sugar, Fat”
Website: http://michaelmossbooks.com/

Guest: Michael Shelden
Author of “Young Titan-The Making of Winston Churchill
Website: http://www.michaelshelden.com/

Jack Girardi
Co-Host
Website: www.girardikeese.com

Steve Murphy
Executive Producer and Host
Website: www.lbishow.com

Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 November 2015 23:29