| Today’s letter |
| What to do in the minute before the box opens |
| In 1992, Nabisco put a fat free cookie on the shelf and called it SnackWell’s. The devil’s food version had no fat in it at all, and it became the best seller almost immediately. By 1995 the brand was doing around 490 million dollars a year. |
| A Nabisco food scientist named Sam Porcello developed it. Taking the fat out meant putting something else in, and what went in was sugar. People bought it by the box and ate it by the box, and researchers later gave that pattern a name: the SnackWell effect, the tendency to eat more of a food because the label says it is the better one. |
| “Why can’t I just stop?” |
| I think about a woman I know, fifty-three, who runs a department and a household and has never once been accused of lacking discipline. She meal preps on Sundays and reads every label in the store. |
| But every night around nine o’clock she opens something and finishes it. Not because she is hungry. Once she starts, something in her brain will not let her stop. She has tried the small packages, tried keeping the thing out of the house, tried telling herself she is stronger than a box of cookies, and every time she ends up in the same place, looking at an empty box and blaming herself. |
| Here’s what gets me. She read something last week that called this an addiction. Not a metaphor, and not a figure of speech. A clinical measure, scored the same way researchers score dependence on alcohol or nicotine… And she laughed, because it sounded like an excuse. |
| It was never her. The formula was built to do this. |
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| Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study. |
| Researchers at the University of Michigan surveyed more than two thousand Americans between the ages of fifty and eighty, through the National Poll on Healthy Aging. They scored the answers with the modified Yale Food Addiction Scale, a research tool built on the criteria used for substance use disorders, and pointed it at ultra-processed food. |
| Then they split the results by age and by sex, and looked at who met the criteria. The gap that came out of it fell along one generation. |
| What they found |
| University of Michigan, 2025. Loch et al., Addiction. |
| Women aged 50 to 64 (21 percent) |
| One in five met the criteria for addiction to ultra-processed food. That is more than double the rate for men of the same age, and it runs well above the rates for problematic alcohol or tobacco use in this age group. |
| Women aged 65 to 80 (12 percent) |
| Twelve percent met the same criteria, a little over half the younger rate. These are the women who were already grown before ultra-processed food filled the store. |
| The authors suggest the difference may be linked to the food supply the younger group grew up inside. What changed first was the food, not the women. |
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| In other words, one in five women in her fifties or early sixties now scores as addicted to ultra-processed food. Not because she is weaker than her mother was. Because the product she was handed at twenty-five was engineered, down to the sugar, to be eaten by the box. |
| Her willpower was never the problem. The formula was. |
| So why does one cookie turn into an empty box? |
| When sugar and fat and salt arrive together in the ratio a product was tuned to, the brain releases dopamine, which is the same signal it uses for nicotine or alcohol. That signal appears to mark the food as worth getting again. Ultra-processed food is built to hit the ratio in every bite, without variation, which is something almost nothing in nature does. An apple carries sugar, but it arrives wrapped in fiber and water that slow it down. Whole food comes with its own brakes. The engineered version skips all of them, so the signal to keep eating keeps firing and nothing in the food says stop. |
| She never stood a chance against the formula. Neither did you, I’d bet. |
| That’s the part no one says out loud. You were not failing a test of character. What you were up against was a product designed, in a lab, to make sure the box emptied… |
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| Try this today |
| Name the hour it usually arrives. Nine at night, or the first hour after work, whichever one you already know. Before you open anything, send one message to one person: two lines of text, a voice note, a photo of the dog. Then eat whatever you were going to eat anyway. Nothing is off the list here. In the same Michigan study, the people who said they felt isolated some of the time or often were more than three times as likely to meet the addiction criteria, so who is around the food may matter as much as what the food is. |
| The formula works best on a woman who is alone with it. |
| Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick. |
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| This is not magic. One text message will not undo thirty years of engineered food. But it puts a small brake between the hour and the box, and it costs nothing to find out. |
| The woman I mentioned, the one who reads every label, calls her sister most nights at nine now. Some nights the cookies still win. Most nights they do not. She told me the strange part is how much smaller the whole thing gets when she is not sitting alone with it. |
| There’s still time for you. |
| And when you are standing in the kitchen tonight, wondering why you can’t just stop… |
| It was never your fault. |
| — Cole |
| P.S. What was the diet food of your twenties? The box you remember. One word, and hit reply. I’ll tell you tomorrow which one came up most. |
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