You know that crisps are hardly part of a nutritious diet; they fuel weight gain and even obesity-related diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. However, these golden salt circles have also been linked to other detrimental wellness problems, such as developmental problems in unborn babies, hyperactivity in children and potentially cancer in adults.
Even if you just snack on one packet of crisps a day, that’s the equivalent of drinking more than a gallon of cooking oil per year – not forgetting all the wellbeing-damaging sugar, fat and salt on top of that. But knowing this doesn’t stop us from grabbing a bag. Think about it; you can never just have one. In fact, crisps have been industrially perfected to the point of addiction for your taste buds. According to Michael Moss, the author of a newly published book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us, thanks to decades of research, food-making giants have managed to transform a seemingly harmless snack into an addiction.
Moss explains that the taste of salt hits you almost immediately, which is an effect that the salt industry calls ‘the flavour burst’. Plus, the high fat content provides you with what the industry calls ‘mouthfeel’, making you experience something similar to the pleasure sensation you get when you bite into gooey cheese, which triggers a desire for more through a nerve called the trigeminal. But, let’s not disregard the power of scientifically honed crispiness. Moss notes, ‘Research has found that the more noise [a crisp] makes when you bite into it, the more you will like it.’
However, that crispiness comes at a price; your wellbeing. When consumed in excess, crisps increase your risk of obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and coronary disease. The threat is especially large to children-over-consumption can put them on the path to a lifetime of poor health. In fact, research conducted by the Bradford Institute for Health Research has found that women who consume large amounts of crisps may harm their babies just as much as if they were smoking cigarettes, due to the presence of a invisible toxic chemical called acrylamide, which has been linked to DNA
Bradford researcher John Wright, an epidemiologist and consultant in public health medicine, commented, ‘When you add the acrylamide contamination to the amount of fat, sugar and salt that crisps contain, then crisps have similar levels of toxicity in pregnant women to smoking. Because of this damage to newborns, potentially it may make sense for [crisp] packets to have to carry health warnings.’
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