This One Trick Will Help Your Brain Change Your Snack Choices

Nearly every one of us regularly snacks. If you’re like me, an early riser, you reach for a snack in the middle of the morning – my second breakfast, I call it. Some people have a snack in the middle of the afternoon. Some days, I have both.

When you snack often, as I do, it’s critical to change your snack choices away from the typical snack foods. That’s why I always use this one trick when choosing a snack.

I take a few minutes to think about all my delicious options. Usually, I settle on something like rich yogurt with fresh fruit and roasted pecans, or crisp apple slices and tangy cheese.

It turns out that this approach – taking a few moments to plan what I’m going to eat, instead of grabbing the first thing I see, is just what health researchers have found to be best.

A 2021 study showed that participants took twice as long, about 800 milliseconds, to incorporate information about a snack’s healthfulness as they took to incorporate taste information. Taking just a split second longer to make a decision resulted in participants choosing the healthful option.

Taste Wins Over Healthfulness

“Most people fail when they attempt to diet. Taste seems to have an advantage that sets us up for failure.”

Scott Huettel, Duke University professor of psychology and neuroscience

It’s no surprise when I say we like salt and sugar. These ingredients send pleasure signals to our brains. Conversely, bitter tastes warn us about potentially harmful ingredients and our brains associate them with pain and discomfort.

We eat 3,400 mgs of sodium each day, on average. That’s more than twice as much as the 1,500 mgs recommended by the American Heart Association. All that extra salt in foods means too much sodium, and sodium is linked to high blood pressure, stroke, heart failure, and kidney disease.

We’re no better when it comes to watching our sugar intake. On average, we eat 17 teaspoons, or about one-third of a cup, of added sugar. The AHA recommends men eat nine teaspoons, and women eat six teaspoons. Too much sugar can lead to obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.

The exciting news is that we can train our tastebuds to appreciate less salty and less sweet flavors. Dr. Maya Vadiveloo, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Rhode Island. says our bodies adjust to a new taste. “There’s different signaling that happens as your body gets used to a different taste. Over time, your body adapts to accepting lower sugar or lower salt, and you’ll get the same signal that ‘this tastes good’ or ‘this is the right balance of flavors,’ as you did before when it was higher.”

She’s not the only one to report these findings. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia found that our tastebuds might adapt to lower levels of salt and sugar while still delivering the rich and zesty tastes we crave.

Change Your Snack Choices

Several years ago I decided to reduce my salt intake. I discovered over time that foods I knew were less salty than I had eaten before taking this step still tasted salty. (I didn’t have a health issue, I just decided to eat less salt.) And when I ate an ultra-processed salty snack, it tasted so salty to me that I could not eat it.

I also discovered something else: that excess salt and sugar common to most snacks get in the way of tasting the mouth-watering flavors within a food. In fact, most of what is in traditional snacks is there to make you want to keep eating, in search of feeling satisfied.

We all deserve so much better than junk food.

That’s why I decided when we started this company that our pecan snacks would let the rich pecan taste shine through. We want you to experience the full pecan flavor. So, we start with a variety of pecan known for its pure pecan taste and buttery crunch.

It also meant that we, and you, have to take good care of the pecans. It’s not hard. They only need the same care you give produce. They’ll stay fresh longer than produce, of course. But they don’t last like ultra-processed cheap snacks that can maintain their salty-sugary crunchiness for years.

We’re unashamedly committed to producing snacks that taste great. It’s for you that we run this snack company.

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