Salt Sugar Fat (50 page)

T
his phrase, “feel good about eating it,” sounded familiar to me, so I went and started digging through the file cabinets in which I stored the research materials I had gathered for this book. I finally found it in a confidential memo, from 1957, that I had obtained.

The author was a psychologist named Ernest Dichter, who counted Sigmund Freud among his friends before emigrating from Austria to the United States in 1938. Dichter started a consulting business in the village of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, through which he coached American companies on the art of motivational research. Dichter became
famous in industry circles for encouraging food companies to market their products based on the “sex of food”—as in, Rice Krispies for women and Wheaties for men. For Frito-Lay, however, he had something else in mind, aimed at making its salty snacks more acceptable to Americans. He gave his white paper the title “Creative Memo on Lay’s Products.”

The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. There is so much fear about the consequences of eating them. Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” He then quoted a consumer who explained, “I love them but I don’t like to have them around, as they’re so fattening. You can’t stop eating them once you start.”

In talking to consumers, Dichter counted up seven “fears and resistances” to the company’s chips, which he ticked off in list fashion: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.”

On the last point, he quoted a consumer from Schenectady, New York, who sounded a lot like mothers today when she told his researchers, “Children eat too much of that stuff. They shouldn’t be eating it at all. I’d like to see them eat carrot sticks, peaches and apples.”

This was a problem, Dichter wrote, and he spent the rest of his 24-page memo laying out the solution. There were numerous tactics Frito-Lay could deploy to counteract all this fear and resistance, he wrote. In time,
his prescriptions would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay, but the entire industry.

Starting with the bad-for-you issue, Dichter suggested that Frito-Lay avoid using the word
fried
in referring to its chips and adopt instead the term
toasted
. In the most recent incarnation of this strategy, Frito-Lay in 2010 won a coveted award from the advertising industry for a campaign called “Happiness is Simple,” which, according to the company’s description of the ads, sought to dispel “perceptions it was the poster child for junk food.” The ads didn’t show potato chips soaking in oil; they depicted a sky full of flying potatoes magically popping into chips, midair.

To counteract the “fear of letting oneself go,” Dichter suggested repacking the chips into smaller bags. “The more anxious consumers, the ones who have the deepest fears about their capacity to control their appetite, will tend to sense the function of the new pack and select it,” he said. The latest incarnation of this strategy became part of a Frito-Lay campaign called “Only in a Woman’s World,” for which it won another advertising award in 2010. Frito-Lay divulged its strategy to the awards panel.

“When we found that women were increasingly avoiding the chip aisle—which our company dominates—we faced a serious challenge,” the company said. “While women snack more than men, they weren’t snacking as much anymore with Frito-Lay.” So the company refocused its advertising to promote healthier-sounding versions of its chips, including Baked Lay’s and the smaller packs of the chips that contained only 100 calories each. For dieters, these 100-calorie packs—widely used by food manufacturers—have a major drawback. Recent research has shown they do not work; people who tend to eat compulsively simply go from one little bag to the next.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking altogether and turn them instead into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a
concentrated way,” Dichter said, citing a string of examples: “potato chips with soup, with fruit or vegetable juice appetizers; potato chips served as a vegetable on the main dish; potato chips with salad; potato chips with egg dishes for breakfast; potato chips with sandwich orders.”

When Dichter wrote his memo in 1957, remember, deli sandwiches were served with a pickle, not potato chips. Chips were eaten alone, as a snack and, as Dichter pointed out, with a growing sense of guilt. Today, Frito-Lay is not only marketing the chips to restaurants. Taking a cue from the dairy and beef industry, Frito-Lay is promoting its snacks for creative uses at home,
as ingredients
in other foods. Its website has a battery of recipes, neatly divided by the snack—Cheetos, Lay’s, Stacy’s, Doritos; by the time of day—breakfast, dinner, dessert; and by the dish—casserole, poultry dishes, salads. It also has an online cookbook entitled “Tastes from Home with Frito-Lay.”

The recipes range from Corn Chowder made with potato chips to Frito Chili Pie to Frito’s Ranch Chicken Delight with four cups of corn chips and half a pound of cheese, and, for dessert, Peanut Butter Parfait with Stacy’s Cinnamon Sugar Pita Chips for dipping.

Ernest Dichter died in 1991, so I couldn’t ask him if he had known back in 1957 just how prescient he was, having convinced the snack industry to weave chips into the fabric of American cuisine. One person, however, working thirty-five miles south in Manhattan, would rival Dichter’s genius. His name was Len Holton, and he coined one of the most famous advertising slogans of all time.

Holton had passed away as well, but one of his colleagues, Alvin Hampel, told me the story. It was 1963, and the crew at the ad agency Young & Rubicam were racking their brains to come up with a new slogan for Frito-Lay. Holton was the senior copywriter, already elderly at the time, a stoop-shouldered gentleman who shuffled quietly around the office. While his young colleagues went through their antics, Holton simply took a seat and jotted down a phrase. When he passed it around, his colleagues were dumbstruck by its obviousness.
“It was just waiting there to be plucked,” Hampel said.

The slogan that Holton came up with, of course, was, “Betcha Can’t Eat Just One.”

Those five words captured the essence of the potato chip far better than anyone at Frito-Lay could have imagined. In 1986, as obesity rates in America started their climb, a massive multiyear study began that tracked the eating habits of Americans. The study was hardly representative of all Americans. The subjects all worked in the health field, with a professionalism that lent itself to accurate self-reporting. But if anything, these men and women were also likely to be more conscious about the nutritional aspect of the foods they ate, so the findings might well understate the overall American trend. The study followed 120,877 women and men. The researchers excluded people who were already overweight and monitored everything that they ate as well as their physical activity and smoking. In the ongoing study, the participants have been surveyed every four years.

In 2011, the
New England Journal of Medicine
published
the latest results. Every four years since 1986, the participants had exercised less, watched TV more, and gained an average of 3.35 pounds. The researchers wanted to know what foods were causing the largest share of the weight gain, so they parsed the data by the caloric content of the foods being eaten. The top contributors to the weight gain included red meat and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and potatoes, including mashed and French fries. But far and away, the largest weight-inducing food, outstripping all others, was the potato chip.

The chip, at about 160 calories an ounce, led to a 1.69-pound gain in weight in each of the four-year study periods. By comparison, sweets and desserts accounted for less than half a pound.

When the data was published, observers pointed out just how irresistible the chip was, including the way they were packaged. The portion size stated on the chip bag—usually one ounce, or 28 grams—was completely irrelevant to how many chips a person might eat. “People generally don’t take one or two chips,” said obesity expert Dr. F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer of the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. “They have a whole bag.”

But that was only half the story. The chip’s ingredients were likely just
as effective, if not more so, in leading people to overeat. This starts with the coating of salt, which the tongue hits first, but there is much more inside the chip. They are loaded with fat, which gives them most of their calories. It also delivers the sensation called mouthfeel the moment they are chewed. As food scientists know, fat in the mouth is not like oil on the hand; it is a marvelous sensation, which the brain rewards with instant feelings of pleasure.

There is still more: Potato chips are also loaded with sugar. Not the kind of sugar you will find on the label, though some chip makers do add sugar to their potato chips to meet the cravings of kids. No. The sugar in regular chips is the kind of sugar that the body gets from the starch in the potatoes. Starch is considered a carbohydrate, but more precisely, it is made of glucose, the same kind of glucose you have in your blood. Potatoes don’t taste sweet, but the glucose starts working on you like sugar the moment you bite into it, said Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors.
“The starch is readily absorbed,” he told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike, and this is a concern, in relation to obesity.”

These surges in blood glucose are highly problematic for anyone watching their weight. Recent research suggests glucose spikes will cause people to crave more food, as long as four hours after they’ve eaten whatever caused the blood glucose to spike. Eat chips one hour, crave more the next.

In this regard, potato chips are not the poster child for junk food, as Frito-Lay executives once warned. They are the epitome of processed foods generally, which use salt, sugar, and fat, sometimes interchangeably, to maximize their appeal to consumers. Frito-Lay could take all the salt out of its chips it wanted to create whatever aura of health it wanted. As long as the chips remain alluring—through their fat, their crunch, their salty flavor from salt substitutes—and the marketing campaigns give you psychological permission to eat as many as you like, they will continue to deliver calories. And that, after all, is the ultimate cause of obesity.

T
he sun was just starting to peek through the clouds when I landed in Switzerland on a Monday morning in May 2011. I was bound for the northern edge of Lake Geneva, where the food giant Nestlé had its research labs and headquarters. The hour was early, the week promising. For months, I had been hearing about the extraordinary and innovative work Nestlé was doing in nutritional science, so I came here to see what the future might hold for salt, sugar, and fat.

Nestlé was certainly in the best position to lead the industry toward making some changes. In the past couple of years, it had eclipsed Kraft to become the
largest food manufacturer in the United States—indeed, in the world. Founded in 1866 as an infant-formula maker, Nestlé now competed in almost every part of the grocery store, from drinks (Juicy Juice and Nesquik) to frozen (DiGiorno and Stouffer’s) to the checkout lanes (Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, the iconic Crunch). Twenty-nine of its product lines accounted for more than $1 billion in revenue a year each—the “Billionaire
Brands Treasury,” as Nestlé called them. Its annual sales had pushed past $100 billion each year, with profits in excess of $10 billion, giving Nestlé an accumulation of wealth so profound that one of its former scientists, Steven Witherly, cautioned me against thinking of it as a food manufacturer. “Nestlé,” he said,
“is a Swiss bank that prints food.”

More important, Nestlé was also running the industry’s most ambitious and opulent research operation, making it perhaps the company most capable of leading the way on change. Tucked into the hills above the town of Lausanne—with satellite centers in Beijing, Tokyo, Santiago, and St. Louis—the Nestlé research arm had a staff of 700, including 350 scientists. Each year, they conducted more than 70 clinical trials, published 200 peer-reviewed papers, filed for 80 patents, and undertook 300 collaborations with universities, suppliers, and private research institutions. Nestlé was attracting top talent from every corner of science, including the field of brain imaging, which allowed the company to perform nifty experiments like wiring the scalps of its human test subjects to EEG machines in order to see how, say, Dreyer’s ice cream (another Billionaire Brand) excites the brain’s neurology.

Touring the sprawling, shiny complex at Lausanne was a bit like stepping into the fictional Willy Wonka chocolate factory. (Nestlé, naturally, bought the real-life Wonka factory and brand in 1988, Gobstoppers and all.) Technological wonders abounded, but one of the highlights of the visit was room GR26, known as the “emulsions lab.” There, with an electron microscope towering over them, Emmanuel Heinrich and Laurent Sagalowicz showed me how they were tracking fat as it made its way from the mouth to the small intestines. Nestlé, I learned, has developed the means to improve the distribution of fat droplets in ice cream in order to fool people into thinking it is fattier than it really is. Through another sensory trick, it is also trying to keep people from noticing when saturated fat is replaced with healthier oils. To this end, Heinrich was putting the finishing touches on
a remarkable invention called “encapsulated oil.” In this sleight of hand, a healthier oil—like sunflower or canola—is encased by sugar or protein molecules and then dried into a powder; when used in
cookies, crackers, and cakes, this encapsulated oil can mimic saturated fat’s ability to generate the alluring sensation known as mouthfeel, but with less risk of heart disease. The upshot: same pleasure for the brain, less saturated fat for the body.