Book Review & Takeaways: The Dorito Effect
In The Dorito Effect, Mark Schatzker makes the case that nutrition is flavor and flavor is nutrition. That if you take a bite of an apple and it tastes like nothing, that’s because it’s devoid of nutrition (the result of years of engineering crops for yield, not flavor or nutrition, and the degradation of the soil, where plants get their nutrients from, through monoculture agriculture, pesticide use, and a host of other reasons). But if you take a bite of an apple and all of your pleasure zones get triggered, then it’s likely chock full of nutrients.
He also makes the case that when we experience a craving for a certain food, it’s because we are deficient in a vitamin, mineral, or other nutrient, that the food we crave is abundant in, and we intuitively know we need it and seek it out. Intuitive eating, as it turns out, is real. This intuitive pathway only applies to real food of course. And it’s this intuitive pathway that fake foods that are ultra-processed and loaded with artifical flavoring (there is no such thing as natural flavoring), and a disproportionate amount of sugar, fat, sodium, and simple carbs, disrupts. Low quality fake food throws our body into a tailspin and makes it hard to know what we need to be eating.
Even vitamins, he explains, disrupt this intuitive pathway. By supplementing with vitamins we’re bypassing that pathway by ‘artificially’ (my word) addressing potential deficiencies in our bodies, which turns off the need to seek out a specific food.
But the bigger point of the book is what big food has been able to pull off through their use of chemically engineered flavoring. Through the use of fake flavors, big food has been able to trick our brains into thinking that we’re getting nutrients that we aren’t actually getting, creating a dependency on food that lacks nutrition. When we eat a strawberry flavored yogurt, we think that we’re getting all the nutrients of a strawberry. So the next time our body is deficient in vitamin C (strawberries are very high in vitamin C) we might seek out a strawberry flavored yogurt, strawberry drink, or strawberry pancakes. But instead of getting the vitamin C we need, we’re just getting sugar, flavoring, and a host of other filler ingredients. And since our deficiency hasn’t been addressed, we’ll keep going back for more thinking eventually we’ll fix it.
This book has changed my relationship with food and my perspective of the food system in the same way that The Omnivores Dilemma, Food Fix, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, and others like those have. I think it’s a book that everyone should read and will find useful as they try to navigate the confusing and complex world of food we find ourselves in. Reading this book I expected to walk away with a new found hate for big food, which I did, but I also came away with a totally new perspective and understanding of food and how our bodies interact with it. Flavor = Nutrition.
TL;DR - Eat for flavor.