PART ONE
THE DORITO EFFECT
ONE
âThingsâ and âFlavorsâ
IN THE early autumn of 1961, a thirty-seven-year-old housewife and mother named Jean Nidetch was pushing a shopping cart through a Long Island supermarket when she bumped into a woman she knew. âYou look so marvelous,â her friend said, and for a sweet moment Nidetch basked in the compliment. Unfortunately, her friend kept talking. âWhen are you due?â
Nidetch was not pregnant. At the time, she stood five seven and weighed 214 pounds, which marked her, in todayâs parlance, as obese, although Nidetch didnât know what that word meant, or that the obese were, at that very moment, coalescing into a demographic ripple that was on its way to becoming a wave.
Nidetch had been to see diet doctors in New York. When their advice didnât work, she headed across the Hudson River to New Jersey, where the diet doctors proved to be just as useless. She had tried every diet there was, and every one of them worked: She always lost weight. But then she would gain it all backâand more. Jean Nidetch could stop eating, just not for very long. She loved food too much. She loved savory things like pizza and meat, and sweet things, too, like cupcakes and soft drinks. Nidetch wasnât one for big breakfasts, but that was because she would get up at three in the morning to gorge on cold pork chops or baked beans right out of the fridge. In summer, if an ice cream, pizza, or sandwich truck zoomed by without stopping, she would take off after it. And when visions of jelly beans began dancing in her head, she would rifle through her sonâs pockets looking for some. But what Nidetch especially loved were cookies. When she started eating them, she couldnât stop. She was addicted to them.
The day Nidetch was mistaken for pregnant, she phoned the New York City Department of Healthâs obesity clinic to make an appointment. Not long after, she found herself in a room full of similarly overweight women. An instructor walked in who was so âslenderâ that Nidetch decided right there on the spot that after the class she was going to have an ice cream soda. The instructor handed out a sheet of paper with a list of foods the women were allowed to eat. Nidetch saw nothing new. She had whole albums filled with similar diets at home, none of which sheâd ever been able to follow for very long. But once again, Nidetch tried. She gave up pizza, cake, and ice cream and started eating vegetables and fish. Every week, she went back to the obesity clinic, and every week she lost weightâtwo pounds.
It was progress, to Nidetch at least. The slender, ice-cream-soda-inducing instructor thought differently. She looked at Nidetch and said, âWhat are you doing wrong?â And as gallingly insensitive, perhaps even abusive, as that might sound, the instructor was right. The truth is Nidetch wasnât following orders, at least not completely. It was the cookies. She was feeding on them in secret. On the way to the clinic, she would sit there on the subway, constructing lies to explain her lack of weight loss, lies that got more and more elaborate with each passing weekâIâm constipated, Iâm retaining water, Iâm premenstrual. By the tenth week, the shame had gotten so bad that she couldnât even look at the instructor.
Nidetch couldnât bear it any longer. She had to get her cookie secret off her chest, so she phoned six fat friends and invited them to her home and confessed. Her friends were supportive. She had a ârightâ to eat those cookies, they said. They did stuff like that all the time. One friend hid chocolate chip cookies in the cupboard behind dishes. Another hid snacks behind cans of asparagus where no one would see them. All of them confessed that they, too, got up in the middle of the night to eat. Toward the end of the meeting, something seemingly insignificant happened that would change the course of Nidetchâs life. One of her guests said, âJean, can we come back next week?â The next week, they brought three more fat friends. The week after that, four additional fat friends joined them.
If this sounds to you like the beginnings of a true-life fairy tale of one woman fighting the odds to attain personal beauty, celebrity, and vast wealth, youâre right. Within two months, the weekly meeting had swelled to forty women. A year after the âWhen are you due?â question, Nidetch was down to 142 pounds. One night, after one of her increasingly popular meetings, a businessman whoâd lost 40 pounds thanks to Nidetch suggested she turn her âlittle projectâ into what it so clearly deserved to beâa business. She did. Within five years, 297 classes were being held in New York City alone, and there were 25 franchises in 16 states. In 1978, H. J. Heinz, the company that makes the famous ketchup, bought her business for $72 million, making Jean Nidetch the Horatio Alger of weight loss. Youâve probably heard of it. You may have even heard this near-mythical story before. Jean Nidetch named her company Weight Watchers.
NIDETCHâS SOLUTION to weight loss lay in collective willpower. Weight Watchers wasnât the first diet to push this method. Overeaters Anonymous, which is also based on group support, was founded three years earlier, in 1960.
Group support was just one way people could lose weight. The year after Weight Watchers launched, a high-living photographer put the opposite spin on dieting with The Drinking Manâs Diet: How to Lose Weight with a Minimum of Willpower, which sold more than two million copies. It was joined that same year by another liquid solution to trimming down: Diet Pepsi. A few years later, a British biochemist introduced the Cambridge Diet, a tough-love, low-calorie regimen designed to promote fat burning and shed pounds fast.
The pace of diets and dieting was starting to pick up in the 1960s. People were getting fatter. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in the early 1960s, just 13.4 percent of adult Americans qualified as obese. A decade later, the percentage had ticked up more than a full point to 14.5 percent. (The increase during this period is even greater when obesity is measured by skin fold rather than the more simple body mass index calculation.) Obesity really got rolling, however, in the â80s, and by the late â90s, more than 30 percent of American adults were obese, more than double the early â60s tally.
All that dieting, in other words, didnât work. Despite Jean Nidetchâs life-changing insight, and the true-life miracles behind every weight-loss regime since, we continue, year after year, to gain weight. In Jean Nidetchâs day, obesity was a relatively rare condition. Now itâs common. Today, obesity is holding at 35 percent, nearly triple what it used to be. By the mid-2000s, the 1961 Jean Nidetch, with a BMI of 33.5âsquarely in the midrange of âobeseââwould have looked almost normal. Today there is extreme obesity, which hardly existed in the early â60s. Back then, just a tiny slice of Americans met this qualificationâ0.9 percent. The âpregnantâ Nidetch was herself forty-one pounds shy of that mark. Today itâs at 6.4 percent.
To put this in perspective, at a sold-out Pirates-Yankees World Series game in 1960, there would have been around six hundred fans in Yankee Stadium of a girth that verged on shocking. Today, there would be close to forty-five hundred, and no one is shocked by it. In the early â60s, well over half of Americans were âslenderâ and of the nonslender, the vast majority was classified as âoverweightââthey needed to lose a few pounds. It is now abnormal to be slender. Today, less than a third of Americans are slender, which is another way of saying more than two-thirds are either overweight or obese. Ninety million Americansâthe populations of greater LA, New York, and Chicago multiplied by 2ânow eat so much they are at increased risk of asthma, cancer, heart attack or stroke, reduced fertility, giving birth prematurely, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, liver disease, gallbladder disease, diabetes, and arthritis. The obese make less money (particularly obese women), have higher medical expenses and lower self-esteem, and are more likely to suffer from depression. After smoking, obesity is the leading cause of preventable death. And when it comes to morbidityââa diseased state or symptomââobesity is surging past smoking, drinking, and poverty.
Obesity is so rampant that it seems contagious. Itâs an epidemic now, and itâs spreading to other countriesâthe British are gaining, the Chinese are gaining, even the French are gainingâwhich makes it a pandemic. There are frantic efforts to make it stop. Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous were just early tactics in a long war that would go on to include the Pritikin Principle, the Scarsdale Medical Diet, Slimfast, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, The Zone, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, the Blood Type Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, the Master Cleanse, the DASH diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Paleo Diet, and the Raw Diet. Americans have eaten fat-burning grapefruits, consumed cabbage soup for seven straight days, calculated their daily points target, followed the easy and customizable menu plan, dialed the 1-800 number to speak to a live weight-loss counselor, taken cider vinegar pills, snacked strategically, eliminated high-glycemic vegetables during the fourteen-day induction phase, achieved a 40:30:30 calorie ratio, brought insulin and glucagon into balance, sought scientific guidance from celebrities, abstained from the deadly cultural practice known as cooking, tanned and then bled themselves to more fully mimic the caveman state, asked that the chef please prepare the omelet with no yolks, and attained the fat-burning metabolic nirvana known as ketosis.
It has all been a terrible, amazing failure. The average American man has gained twenty-nine pounds and the average woman twenty-six. Between 1989 and 2012, according to the market report âThe U.S. Weight Loss & Diet Control Market,â Americans collectively spent more than $1 trillion on weight loss. In that same period of time, obesity grew by more than 50 percent and extreme obesity doubled. The long battle against weight gain hasnât been much of a battleâmore like trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose.
What a strange problem. Despite living in a culture that prizes thinness above even wealth, we keep on eating. Itâs as though weâve created a new âdiet-resistantâ form of obesity that, like some kind of cancer, perpetuates itself at the expense of our own vitality. Kindergarten children now struggle with their weight. Fully one-third of boys and girls from six to nineteen years of age are overweight or obese.
And obesity is just the most visible manifestation of a deeper malaise. Food has become a life-threatening indulgence. It seems to be disrupting the very way our bodies runâstraining our organs, distressing our bowels, and crashing our mood. Adult-onset diabetes had to change its name to type 2 diabetes because so many children are now being diagnosed with what was formerly considered a metabolic disease of grown-ups. Once upon a time, we ate to sustain ourselves. Now food itself is toxic.
What happened?
SUGAR. Thatâs the latest answer, anyway. As I write these words, sugarâor âwhite death,â as some have taken to calling itâis igniting flares of panic and condemnation. A year or two ago, a panic over high-fructose corn syrup came through like a flash flood and then died down to a trickle. Saturated fat, which used to be deadly, is enjoying a renaissance while polyunsaturated fat, which at one time was seen as the antidote to saturated fat, is now under attack. Before fat it was carbs and before carbs it was fat, and if you go back far enough sugar pops up again. For the better part of a century, millions of people, almost all of them with a rudimentary or nonexistent understanding of biochemistry, have been taking part in a richly technical conversation about such phenomena as glycemic load, protein ratios, and serum triglycerides.
Part of the problem is human nature. We are all natural reductionists. We always want to find the single cause of this or that problem, because then itâs easy to come up with a silver-bullet solution. That sort of thinking works very well when it comes to car troubleâyour alternator is fried, your air filter is clogged, your timing belt is worn out. (If itâs all three, itâs time for the scrap heap.) But it doesnât work very well with nutrition, which is about a lot of things. The list of essential vitamins, fats, and amino acids includes twenty-four different substances. And that doesnât include minerals, trace minerals, fiber, choline, or the very fuel of life: energy. But even when you add those to the list, along with starch in all its amazing forms and the micro-universe of fats, you still havenât come anywhere close to describing the radiant complexity of the plant and animal matter that goes into our mouths, our stomachs and intestines, and eventually becomes part of our bodies.
Thatâs the other problem. Food is complicated. And when a species that delights in one-word answers faces a problem as complex but crucial as food, the result is not surprising: a decades-long kangaroo court in which we keep putting the latest evil nutrient on trial. The truth is, it would all be so much simpler if it really were just sugarâs fault.
But clearly, somethingâor thingsâdid change.
Hereâs one thing that definitely did not change: our genes. This is not evolution. There was no cataclysmic eventâno meteor, no supervirus that wafted out of some secret government labâthat conferred a reproductive advantage to those inclined to obesity. Similarly, there has been no demographic influx of genetically obese immigrants who fundamentally changed the population. Make no mistake, there are genetic aspects that determine each individualâs propensity to obesityâI might be more susceptible to putting on weight than you because of traits I inherited from my parents. But as a group, we all have pretty much the same genes as we had in the 1960s. And that can mean only one thing: Something in the world around us has changed.
When you stop to think about it, the human body faces the same doozy of a problem as the nutritionists. It has complex needs. And it fulfills those needs with a very complex substance: food. How does it do that? How does a body know what it wants?
That, it turns out, is the part weâve been messing withâthe want part. Sugar has something to do with want, and so do high-fructose corn syrup, fat, carbs, and all those other nutrients weâve been obsessing over. But the cause of the food problem will not be found in individual nutrients. We keep mistaking the mechanism of obesity for the cause. If we regarded smoking the same flawed way we understand food, we would say cigarettes are deadly because they cause cancer. Cancer is the how of tobacco-related mortality. The reason people smoke in the first placeâthe whyâis that tobacco is addictive. People smoke because they experience a powerful desire to smoke. Jean Nidetchâs problem, similarly, was behavioral. It wasnât that her body turned all the food she ate into fat, or that perhaps it was exquisitely efficient in turning refined carbs into fat. Thatâs what bodies do. Her problem was that she ate too much food. She wanted to eat. She could not resist the desire. And when it comes to wanting, food speaks its own special language: flavor.
Flavor, as we will see, is the aspect of the human environment that has changed. The food we eat today still seems like food, but it tastes very different than it used to. For the better part of a century, two complimentary trends have conspired to transform the flavor of what we eat. These two trends were already ascendant when Jean Nidetch was mistaken for pregnant in that Long Island supermarket. And within a year, they would unite in a Dallas suburb with the momentous utterance of a single word: âtaco.â
This is where our story begins.
IN THE SUMMER of 1962, the vice president of marketing at Frito-Lay took his wife and three kids on a trip to Southern California. It was, on the surface, a family vacation. The five of them piled into Dadâs gold Lincoln Continental for the long trip from Dallas to Orange County, stopping along the way at Carlsbad Caverns and the rim of the Grand Canyon.
From the very beginning, however, the trip portended big things about flavor. Before getting hired by Frito-Lay, Arch West had been a Madison Avenue ad man, where heâd headed up the Kraft account and worked on Jell-O puddings. In Corona del Mar, the West family stayed at a house belonging to Lawrence Frank, the inventor of Lawryâs seasoned salt. And one afternoon, after the family had just dined at a restaurant called the Five CrownsâWest liked the prime rib and fancy creamed spinachâa stranger walked up and complimented his daughterâs golden blond hair. The man asked the Wests if theyâd ever eaten at his restaurant, but theyâd never heard of it, even though in just two years the 500th location would open in Toledo, Ohio. The man was Ray Kroc and his restaurant was McDonaldâs.
The most important meal of that trip, however, didnât take place at the Five Crowns, or at the restaurant that would go on to become the worldâs largest chain of hamburger fast-food restaurants. It was served at a little Mexican âshackâ West spotted by the side of the highway somewhere between L.A. and San Diego, where he pulled over and ordered a small container of tortilla chips.
It was likely the crunch that got him. Besides shape, crunch is the only aspect in which tortilla chips are meaningfully different from a snack West was already in charge of marketing, Fritos. Both are fried pieces of cornmeal. Tortilla chips, however, are baked first, which makes them crunchier. Arch West was struck by an idea: Tortilla chips just might be Frito-Layâs next big thing.
Back at company headquarters in Dallas, West presented his great new idea to his fellow executives. The response was something like the sound a vacuum cleaner makes when itâs unplugged. Why would Americans want Mexican âtortillaâ chips, his colleagues wondered, when they already had perfectly good corn chips? They werenât even interested in trying one. Their instructions were clear: Do not pursue tortilla chips.
West knew better. He was so confident about the future of tortilla chips that he secretly funneled discretionary funds to an off-site facility to develop the tortilla chip concept. He pitched his idea again. This time, though, he handed out samples. He had a...