Twenty adults worked harder for one chip than the other

Today’s letter

The plain bag, the salt shaker, and an easier evening

A reader named Charlene wrote to me last week about a bag of chips on her kitchen counter. She is 58, she schedules surgeries at a hospital in Toledo, and she gets home a little after seven. The bag is the one thing she buys for herself on the drive back. She told me she opens it standing up, decides she will have a few, and finds it light in her hand twenty minutes later.

What she wanted me to know was not about the chips. It was about the part afterward, when she stands at the counter with the empty bag and runs through everything she should have done instead… the walk, the tea, the leftover soup. She has been running that same list since she was thirty.

“Why can I stop at one of everything else?”

Charlene is not a person who lacks follow through. She has driven the same forty minute commute for nineteen years and never once called in sick. Two kids were raised on shift work and put through school on that paycheck. The bag on the counter is the only thing in her life she cannot seem to close.

For thirty years the advice she got was some version of willpower. Keep them out of the house, eat a handful and put the rest away, find something else to do with your hands. She followed all of it in good faith, and when it kept failing she did what she had been taught to do, which was to decide the problem was her.

Here’s what gets me.

None of it was her fault. The bag was built to be hard to close.

30 Days of Eating This = Permanent Damage?

If you're afraid your memory, focus, or mental sharpness might be slipping…

You think you're eating "brain-healthy" foods... but MIT scientists just exposed 3 so-called "superfoods" that are actually HARMING your neurons…

And here's the scary part.

Every single morning you eat them... the damage gets worse.

These foods contain hidden toxins that create sticky "Dementogens" — choking your brain cells and harming memories.

Every bite floods your brain with memory-harming toxins...

While you think you're being "health-conscious."

The average neurologist won't tell you this (they don't even know)... but these 3 foods are turning your sharp mind into mush.

And if you keep eating them for 30 more days?

The damage could become permanent.

Once you eliminate these brain toxins and add the ONE breakfast food that helps dissolve Dementogens…

Your memory can feel better again.

But you can't afford to wait to make this change…

Discover the 3 "healthy" foods harming your memory (plus the breakfast superfood that targets the damage)

Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study that came out this spring, from a lab that usually tests drugs.

Researchers at the University of Kansas, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, took the standard toolkit regulators use to measure how habit forming a substance is, and pointed it at a bag of potato chips. Twenty adults who eat chips regularly came in for four lab sessions. Nobody knew which chip they were getting.

One session was the ordinary chip off the shelf, with its full load of fat and salt. Another was a baked vegetable chip, low in fat, sodium and carbohydrate, there as the comparison. The rest were that same potato chip with one of the two ingredients dialed back. Then they measured two things: how far a price could climb before a person stopped buying, and how hard a person would work before she stopped earning more.

What they found

University of Kansas, 2026. Fazzino et al., Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology.

The full recipe chip (they kept working)

Liking, wanting and craving all ran higher than for the comparison chip. The price could climb, the effort could climb, and people kept going anyway.

The same chip, one ingredient dialed back (they eased off)

Still liked, still wanted. Every measure came in smaller, and the pull appeared to track the pairing rather than the person eating it.

A 20 person pilot in a lab, so this is a first read and not a final word. It was built to test the food, not the eater.

In other words, the measurements used on habit forming substances were run on a snack, and the snack registered on them. Take out some of the fat or some of the salt and it registered lower.

Her willpower had nothing to do with it. Yours does not either.

So why would two ingredients, in the right ratio, do more than either one of them alone?

Fat and salt almost never arrive together in nature at the levels a chip carries. A potato has starch and close to no fat. Nuts carry fat and close to no sodium. The combination a fryer and a seasoning drum produce sits outside anything the body built a stopping signal for, and the researchers who work on this have a numeric definition for it: more than a quarter of the calories from fat, alongside a set threshold of sodium by weight. Food scientists find those ratios on purpose, because that is what tasting panels reward, and a bag that sells stays on the shelf.

Charlene never stood a chance at that counter. Neither did you, I’d bet.

That’s the part no one says out loud… the bag was tested on people before it ever met you.

Try this today

Pick the one salty snack you reach for most. Next time you buy it, buy the plain version of that same snack: unsalted or lightly salted nuts instead of the seasoned tub, plain popcorn instead of the cheese dusted bag, the plain chip instead of the flavored one. Keep everything else exactly as it is, the same hour, the same bowl, the same amount. Then put the salt shaker on the table and salt it yourself, to taste, right before you eat it.

Nothing is taken away here. The pairing just stops being the factory’s decision.

Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick.

I’m in. I’ll try it today →

This is not magic, and one plain bag will not rewrite your evenings. What it does is take one half of the ratio the lab was measuring out of the product, and the study suggests the pull may come down with it.

Charlene wrote that the part she hated most was the list she ran afterward, not the chips. That list was never evidence of anything except that she had been handed the wrong explanation for thirty years.

The bag was engineered a long time before it reached her counter, and she got to the right question on her own anyway. There’s still time for you.

So the next time the bag feels light in your hand…

It was never your fault.

— Cole

P.S. What’s the snack you buy for yourself on the way home? One word, hit reply. I’ll tell you tomorrow which one came up most.

30 Days of Eating This = Permanent Damage?

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