Snack Foods: The New Big Tobacco

I have a weakness for Doritos. I pretty much love all the classic flavors, although Cool Ranch is my real Achilles heel. There has been more than one occasion when the boyfriend has come home to find me sheepish, ashamed, nauseous and nearly comatose on the sofa beside an empty Doritos bag (and not the small one). I swear on a stack of vegetables that I’ll never do it again, but let’s be honest. Doritos are drugs in crunchy, cheesy, salty-food format and I am helpless to resist them.

Of course Frito-Lay is well aware of the effect their product has on me. They’ve spent years adding salts and sugars in their most potent and evil forms (MSG and corn syrup) to ensure that I keep coming back for more. And more and more. I bet they have a whole bank of fMRI machines to test for maximal activity in brain pleasure zones when ingesting their products.

Indeed this contrived intensity of and variety of flavors found in many processed foods likely makes people eat more and feel less full - or at least that’s the contention of one David Katz at Yale University. He has a book called The Flavor Point Diet, which is all about keeping meals within a limited number of flavors thereby allowing our brains to feel full on less food...because there is always room for more of another taste. Such as desert. Or Doritos.

Likewise, a recent report from the journal Hypertension found that kids who ate less salty snack foods also drank less sugary sweet drinks. The authors contend that the kids drank less fluids cause salty foods make you thirsty, which is of course true, and yet methinks that kids who eat crap snacks also drink crap drinks, so there’s no medical mystery there. And again, the delightfully addictive intensity of saltiness and sweetness feed into one another to ramp up calorie consumption. I mean is it a mistake that Frito-Lay is owned by Pepsi-Co? It’s kind of like they hooked us on purpose...like they knew that their product was addictive and dangerous.....and...and…