So there I was snacking on Kettle Brand chips, the jalapeño flavor. Certainly, not everyone’s favorite, but, if you know you know. Once you open up the bag, it’s tough not to crush the entire thing.
Yes, it is my job to help people live a healthy lifestyle. But it’s also my job to show people how I live my life with balance. And as you’ll see in a second, my curiosity for why things are happening and specifically what’s happening in my brain to make me act the way I do, can change things for the better.
I had to know what was in these chips that was lighting up my brain like a drug. Why do I have absolutely no willpower with certain snacks like this? Even when I try to play the “portion control” game by making myself a small serving, I just go back for another.
With a bowl of chips and my laptop open, I dug into the research to figure out what makes snacks like these so irresistible. I mean, the guys who make this food surely know what they’re doing, right? The Pringles tagline literally says the quiet part out loud: “Once you pop you can’t stop.”
Looking back to my time working for Big Food
Some background: Back in the day, when I worked for a consulting company. For a few months, I was on a project for a big food company that, let’s just say, is not exactly known for their healthy offerings.
And while I was on the corporate campus, you could see the impact of the food that they sold on people’s bodies. Hate to say it, but everyone walked around with a can of Pringles around their waist.
The secrets behind some of their biggest sellers, some of their most addicting junk food were just that. They were secrets. No one ever talked about it while we were there. But, do a teeny bit of research, and there are many well-sourced articles on how this all works. Here we go.
Discovering the science behind junk food addiction
Food scientists, the ones behind the biggest junk food brands, have a very specific goal: Create a curious balance. According to “The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food“, the goal is to find a food product’s “bliss point.” It’s when the food is just so good you can’t stop eating it.
Food scientist Steven Witherly explains the bliss point in his book “Why Humans Like Junk Food.” He says it’s “that sensory profile where you like food the most.”
We’re talking about all the senses that happen in your mouth. So that balance of flavors, textures, and other factors makes food products super enjoyable and super crave-able. The more there is going on, the less likely we’ll grow tired of it.
Great examples of complex snacks are Dr. Pepper, Snickers, and Heinz 57 ketchup. I mean, just think about how these products are advertised: they tout all the flavors and textures and complexities. That’s why they’re so good.
Our desire for complex flavors goes the other way too. If you were given one ingredient from one of the snacks we just talked about, you’d move on pretty quickly. Cinnamon? Okay. Peanuts? Great. Tomato? I’m good.
This simple vs complex thing makes me think about the trumpet album my father gave me by Wynton Marsalis. Incredible musician, but how long can you really listen to one guy play one trumpet? But, put him in a 10-piece band and you could listen for hours.
This idea, also known as the symphonic taste experience, is what top chefs use. Put together a variety of flavors, textures, and temperatures to achieve a delicate balance that people go nuts about. You go back for more out of sheer curiosity. That curious balance.
And the evolutionary science behind this is fascinating. As hunters and gatherers, we had to be careful not to eat too much of any particular food to make sure we didn’t perish. For example, you could probably withstand a few poisonous berries. But if you ate the entire bush, you can be done for. This, as an aside, is a comforting notion as a parent when we tell our kids, “You can’t eat too many blueberries otherwise you could get a tummy ache.”
This evolutionary adaptation of how our brains respond to food with a variety of flavors and textures is fun to think about. Imagine searching for food in the forest and discovering a guacamole tree. A guacamole tree? You’d relocate your entire family to live under it!
Armed with the knowledge, I set out to make some snacks that actually fuel my body, but are no less irresistible.
Making homemade snacks irresistible
So we make smoothies for a living. And, I wanted to see what we could do with a standard berry smoothie. As it is, the flavors are pretty much berries and cold. But what if we added peanut butter? That would give it that salt and fat and contrast with the berries. Oh my goodness, I think this is a Peanut Butter and Jelly Smoothie and I can’t stop.
Our Cashew Queso. By itself, it’s complexity works. It’s got the salt. It’s got the fat from the nuts maybe a little sweet from the red pepper. But it’s still just like one flavor, our queso, that had a certain point you’re like I’ve had enough queso.
So we decided to experiment with it by putting it on sweet potatoes black beans, corn, and green onions. We also did Jackfruit Sliders that had our queso, obviously, but also a cabbage slaw to give it a sweet and tangy crunch. Drool.
One of our most popular recipes, our Detox Salad works without modification because it’s so colorful and has so many textures and flavors. This recipe is like the embodiment of the bliss point. And the beauty is it’s one of those where it fills you up, but doesn’t make you feel full. It’s the best.
The change we made to our Detox Salad is that we started making enough for the entire week and storing it in a glass container in our fridge at eye level. So now instead of grabbing chips when I have five minutes in between meetings, I grab a fork and a giant bowl of detox salad and I go to town.
You can watch us make Detox Salad in our Vitamix by watching this video below:
Living with “the bliss point”
Now I know the tricks that food scientists and top chefs use to make food that literally makes you drool. The problem is I can’t stop thinking about it. Anytime food is put in front of me, I’m like, how can we make this more nuanced?
For example, smoothies are great, but I’d much rather have a smoothie bowl. You know, a smoothie dumped into a bowl with all sorts of toppings like granola, nut butter, fresh fruit, coconuts, seeds, all that.
I love peanut butter and I eat a ton of it. But now I’m that guy who likes crunchy peanut butter for the texture variety. And I really enjoy our Monkey Butter recipe or our Panang Peanut Butter recipe, which is completely ridiculous but once you try it, you get it.
And my soups need a crunch and zest of lime. Anything I eat I think “What instrument is this band missing?”
Look, we’re always gonna be a family that has chips in the pantry. That’s just one of the ways that we find balance.
But we also have equally irresistible snacks ready at eye level all the time. With a little bit of Sunday night batching it’s actually pretty easy. And with a little shift in mindset, keeping in mind how good I feel, how much energy I have, how better my digestion is, and just overall better well-being, I’ll go with a giant bowl of detox salad over jalapeño flavored kettle chips a lot of the time.