How Pringles hack your brain

Leptin resistance, the bliss point, and potato chips

Mar 30, 2025

“Once you pop, you can’t stop!” Back in the 90s, that was the highly successful marketing slogan for Pringles. And, as you’ve probably found, it’s not an exaggeration. You open a tube of glorious potato-based goodness,1 you start munching, and you just keep going. Half-way through, you start to feel a little nauseous. Your mouth feels dry, and you’re not really enjoying the taste any more, but you’re just loving that crunchy feeling, and they’re making you feel good, so you just have one more. Or six. Or twelve. Or the rest of the tube.

And it’s not just Pringles - it’s all sorts of snacks. Pretzels. Cookies. Chex Mix. Potato chips. Those salty, fatty, crunchy carbohydrates are literally engineered to keep you eating long after you’ve had enough - and way past the point where it’s even remotely healthy.

As so often, it’s all down to the chemicals in your brain. Cholecystokinin (CCK) neurons, located in the brainstem, play a key role in regulating hunger by processing various signals as we eat.2 These neurons help signal feelings of fullness, preventing us from overeating. They respond to information such as how much food is detected in the mouth, how full the stomach is, and the levels of hunger-related hormones in the blood, which fluctuate based on food consumption and metabolism. Additionally, neurons in the hypothalamus monitor metabolism levels and trigger hunger when they are low, while other neurons control jaw movements during eating.3

It’s these hunger-related hormones that are critical to when you start and finish eating. To some extent, eating is a voluntary decision, but those hormones are pretty damn powerful and hard to resist. Yes, we can choose to eat or stop eating, but we have to override what our brain and body is telling us it needs to survive. Drugs that target the CCK neurons directly can help - that’s basically how Ozempic and Wegovy work.

Leptin, ghrelin and insulin

Leptin is a hormone that tells you when you’re full. As you eat, leptin levels rise, your appetite lessens, and you eventually lose the desire to eat.4 Alongside that, a second hormone, ghrelin, tells you that you should eat - that’s the one that creates hunger pangs. It’s highest right before mealtimes, and drops as you eat.5 It’s a simple system that relies on the two hormones acting in sync: ghrelin rises, you feel hungry, you eat, ghrelin drops and leptin rises, you stop feeling hungry and feel full, and you stop eating.6

However, foods high in salts, fats, and carbs disrupt that system. In high doses, they inhibit the production of leptin. Not only that, but carbohydrates and saturated fats can raise triglyceride levels, which can make it harder for leptin to reach the brain, so your body never gets the signal to stop eating.7 However, your ghrelin levels have dropped, which accounts for that unpleasant sensation when you’re not hungry and you don’t actually want to eat, but you can’t stop: your leptin and ghrelin systems are out of balance.

But it gets worse. Fat stimulates ghrelin production, so if you eat a diet high in fats, your body keeps telling you that you’re hungry, no matter how much you eat. High ghrelin production doesn’t necessarily increase the amount you eat, but it does affect the frequency at which you eat. So you get hungry more often, which tends to lead to snacking between meals, and, you guessed it, more of those oh-so-tempting salty, fatty carbs.8

The final nail in the coffin is insulin. Insulin is one of the main mechanisms that your body uses to reduce ghrelin levels when you eat - and it’s actually stimulated by ghrelin.9 If you’re eating an unhealthy diet, you’re probably messing up your insulin levels, so not only are you producing more ghrelin than you need, you’re not getting rid of it fast enough, so you’re perpetually hungry, even when you’re full.10

It’s pretty much a perfect storm. The more you eat, the more you want to eat, even if you know you’ve had enough.

But that’s not all. Long-term high-fat diets reduce neurotensin, a peptide that boosts the dopamine response, so paradoxically, the more you eat, the less you enjoy it, which means that you have to eat more to get the same amount of pleasure from your food. You just can’t help stuffing yourself, desperately chasing those feelings of fullness and satisfaction.11

Eventually, you can develop leptin resistance, where even if your body is producing enough leptin, its effect is massively reduced, so your body never feels full. And, wouldn’t you know it, one of the main causes of leptin resistance is… foods high in salts, fats and carbs.12

The bliss point

Manufacturers know exactly what they’re doing. These foods are engineered to hit what American market researcher and psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz called the bliss point - the perfect combination of salt, sweet, fat and texture that stimulates dopamine when we eat it and makes us feel good.13

And, of course, dopamine is highly addictive. Not only do we keep eating to maximize that dopamine rush, we keep coming back and doing it again and again. It’s no different to nicotine, cocaine or heroin - except that you can buy salty snacks anywhere and market them to kids.14

Manufacturers invest literally millions of dollars in hitting that sweet spot. Like cigarette manufacturers, they constantly refine their products to be more and more addictive, based on extensive consumer research. The combination of ingredients and flavors is designed not only to taste good, but to actively suppress leptin.15

In other words, they’ve intentionally hacked your brain. They’re making it as hard as possible for you to stop eating, even when you know you’ve had enough, by preventing your brain from telling you it’s time to stop. In the business, these products are known as hyper-palatable foods, and research shows that the more hyper-palatable foods you eat, the more calories you consume overall, and the worse your health is.16

So, no more Pringles?

As always, moderation is the key. A few snacks now and again probably aren’t going to hurt you. On the other hand, eating a lot of high-salt fat-laden snacks will almost certainly have all sorts of adverse effects on your blood pressure, cholesterol, heart health, digestive system, immune system, sleep and mood.

As with any addiction, there are three ways to deal with this.

Mindfulness: try to become aware of the way you’re reacting to these foods and the decisions you’re making. What makes you crave them? How much can you eat before you stop enjoying them? What could you eat instead? If possible, develop a strategy that puts you in control, so that you’re not just idly munching.
Setting limits: I like to think of myself as strong-willed, but in practice, when it comes to potato chips, I have about as much self-control as an alcoholic. If they’re there, I’ll eat them. (It’s not just me. Oprah said that developing the willpower to resist potato chips was the hardest part of losing weight.17)
My solution is to allow myself a small portion: typically I’ll put a few chips in a small bowl, and then put the bag back in the pantry. When they’re gone, they’re gone, and that’s it. Obviously I could go and get more, but if they’re not in arm’s reach, it becomes an active decision to keep eating them. That gives me a chance to intercept myself and choose to eat something else. It works… most of the time.
Abstinence: if you really can’t control yourself, then maybe you do need to come up with a diet that doesn’t include these kinds of foods. And, to be honest, that’s probably the healthiest option.

Whatever works for you, go for it. But take comfort in the fact that if you find yourself reaching for another mouthful when you really don’t want it, it’s not your fault. It’s because some food manufacturer has messed up your brain.

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