Sugar and salt really *are* addictive!

From Ak:

I’ve always suspected that salt and sugar are addictive—and that processed food manufacturers flip and bounce those ingredients in bizarre ways to make us freebase increasing amounts of their frankenproduct.

Now I have something besides my predilliction for nacho cheese Doritos and Hairbo gummy cola bottles to validate my suspicion: The research of David A. Kessler, a former FDA commissioner who is best known for taking on Big Tobacco.

According to this Washington Post article, Kessler, a lifelong dieter, went on a quest to get the nutritional content of some his favorite restaurant foods. For instance, to find out what makes Chili’s Southwestern Eggrolls so seductive, he dumpster dived for the boxes with the original labels affixed. Here’s what he found:

The ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different times; sugars showed up five times. The “egg rolls,” which are deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like meatloaf to give it a “melt in the mouth” quality that also makes it faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.

Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will stimulate that diner’s brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the come-on offered by Lay’s Potato Chips — “Betcha can’t eat just one” — is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than they should or even want, Kessler found.

Ultimately, Kessler wrote a book about these practices titled The End of Overating. I’m buying that book today so I can find out exactly who the guilty parties are.

Today, I’m also gleefully reframing how I think about my periodic snack resistance. Now, when I say no to the Andy Cap Hot Fries, the Herrs cheese popcorn, the gummy bears, the Whatchamacalits and the…

Sorry. Got distracted.

Anyway, abstaining from sugary, salty junk won’t be about maintaining my waistline so I can fit into The Man’s young-ass kkklothes. It won’t even be about staying healthy. I’m saying no as a fuck-you to the capitalist sociopaths who deign to keep us strung out on their edible crack rock. I love a good self-serving protest.

Ugawa motherfuckers. Ugawa.

What do you do when you feel like crap?

Yesterday Yani was with one of her favorite people and she spent the whole time thinking the woman looked amazing. Beautiful. Glorious. And, yes, quite sexy. Then standing in adjoining dressing rooms at a suburban Ann Taylor she couldn’t believe when the woman told her she was having “a bad body image day” and wasn’t going to buy a top that was hugging her in all the right ways because it made her feel anxious.

Today Yani’s having one of those very same days, except she’s just sitting in her house in a big sweatshirt from high school and sweats that are roomy enough to fit everyone in her apartment building inside. If she had to leave the house today…well, that’s just too awful to consider.

She’s thinking she could do one of two things. Crack open a tub of Soy Delicious ice cream and go to town or maybe try to actually get outside of her own head. She keeps remembering her new favorite quote, from Ophira Edut, a writer/body activist whose work she’s always loved. Ophira wrote that body image, hers or anyone else’s, has “very little to do with one’s body. It’s our perception of our bodies, not the bodies themselves. After all, it’s the brain that forms our images, that interprets messages from glossy magazines and TV shows and high school hierarchies.”

So, Yani’s throwing it out there to you: What triggers your bad body image days? And what do you do to get back to feeling good?

My niece has never ever not once felt anything less than gorgeous.