Vani Hari has 2.3 million followers on Instagram, and about as many ideas for healthy food swaps. An entrepreneur and influential food activist in the Make America Healthy Again movement, Hari gives regular shoutouts to substitutes for snacks that contain corn syrup, seed oils, and other ingredients on health-conscious Americans’ blacklist.
For Valentine’s Day, YumEarth choco yums instead of artificially dyed M&Ms. (“Let me say these treats are BETTER, but they are still candy,” Hari writes.) For Super Bowl parties, Jackson’s avocado oil potato chips rather than Lay’s. Looking for a less processed alternative to Chick-fil-A’s frosted lemonade? Why not make your own with lemon-flavored protein powder from Hari’s own brand, Truvani. At least one attempt at a healthy food swap struck out with Hari: PepsiCo’s recently debuted dye-free line of Cheetos and Doritos. “This is dumb,” she wrote on Instagram. “Creating a whole NEW product, instead of FIXING their old product.”
Though the vast majority — 84% — of Americans said eating healthfully was at least moderately important to them in a recent Deloitte survey, most admit their own habits fall short of their aspirations. The $156 billion packaged snack industry has spotted a business opportunity in catering to people seeking a more enlightened way of noshing.
But whether these purportedly better-for-you snacks could actually make an impact on Americans’ health is a complicated question — one that involves parsing research on ultra-processed foods, the trade-offs people are willing to make when deciding what to eat, and the cultural, political, and medical trends that incentivize food companies to change. The danger, nutrition experts say, is that a deluge of prebiotic fiber-infused soda and organic, reduced-sugar sour gummies will delude us all into thinking we’re eating better while doing little to combat heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
Why food companies are betting big on better-for-you
The demand for healthier products has many causes, including the widespread adoption of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, policy pushes from the MAHA movement and progressive states like California, and increased publicity around the potential harms of ultra-processed foods. “People are looking for better-for-you, but they don’t want to compromise on taste,” Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane said this spring while unveiling new offerings like a low-sugar, hydrating Capri Sun and high-protein mac and cheese.
The food industry has experimented with other new-and-improved snacks before, making changes that did nothing to improve Americans’ health, and arguably hurt it. Companies leaned on sugar to compensate for lack of fat during the low-fat craze of the 1990s. The surge in gluten-free products without strict manufacturing and labeling standards in the 2010s was bad for people with celiac disease.
These days, sometimes better-for-you means adding ingredients. Kellanova is putting protein into Pop-Tarts while PepsiCo is fibermaxxing SunChips. Sometimes it means taking artificial dyes and other additives away, as with MAHA-friendly brands like Lesser Evil, which touts the “clean ingredients” in its onion rings and cheese balls. Online organic grocer Thrive Market even has a healthy swaps feature in its app that lets users scan the barcodes of mainstays to find more purportedly virtuous brands.
None of this is ideal, nutrition experts and MAHA leaders generally agree. It’s better to follow the new dietary guidelines’ maxim to “Eat Real Food”: apples instead of Oreos, cashews over Takis.
“At the end of the day, it’s still very different if you have a dietary pattern based on fresh food compared to ultra-processed food,” said Leandro Rezende, a researcher at the Federal University of São Paulo who co-authored a recent BMJ article accusing the food industry of health-washing the products it markets as “functional” or “better-for-you.”
But in a country where more than half of adults’ calories come from ultra-processed foods, giving up packaged snacks entirely is dreaming big. Some experts see hope in the idea that the food industry might be pushed by initiatives like California’s recent labeling bill to make packaged snacks with fewer additives and less industrial processing. But registered dietician Kevin Klatt warns that the benefits of reformulation depend on the food and ingredients in question.
Reducing the amount of sugar in otherwise nutritious foods like flavored yogurt or chocolate milk can be a positive change, said Klatt, who’s also an assistant professor of nutrition science at the University of Toronto. And he’s a fan of how the food industry is expanding snack options to include fiber-packed legumes like roasted chickpeas or dried edamame.
The problem, he said, lies with makeover efforts on products like cookies and chips. A lot of what we call ultra-processed foods are the same things evidence told us to avoid, such as processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and refined grains. In that case, preservative-free beef sticks and candy without artificial dyes will make little difference.
“I think the industry has to sell product, and they’re going to do protein-boosted, fiber-boosted, more natural, organic, yada yada yada,” said Klatt. “And all the actual meaningful nutritional attributes” — things like sodium, sugar, and saturated fat levels — “take a step off to the side.”
How healthy snack swaps stack up
“I’m getting a bad association,” my colleague said one recent afternoon at STAT’s Brooklyn, N.Y., office.
Laid out on the table before us was a better-for-you snack smackdown. Bowls of sunny M&Ms faced off with natural-dyed competitors in the cool tones of a Monet. Frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts eyed their whole-wheat counterparts with suspicion. And, straight from Hari’s swap tips, were two dips: Tostitos queso salsa versus Primal Kitchen’s vegan version.
That last dip, chunky and golden, was what was giving my colleague bad vibes. Vomit, she mouthed, not wanting to bias the other participants.
As Kraft Heinz’s Cahillane noted, better-for-you options will only get traction among consumers if they’re also tasty. The purpose of our taste test was to compare both nutritional compositions and appeal.
Overall, the better-for-you contenders were more expensive by a dollar or two. They had fewer ingredients, as promised, and none of the common MAHA villains like corn syrup, soybean oil, and artificial food dyes. And they generally had lower levels of sodium, added sugar, and saturated fat than their most directly comparable snack.
But the results on taste were varied. Most of us disliked the whole-wheat, chia-seed-studded Smash Foods Toasties, which had a meager ratio of date filling to crust, making for a dry trek toward an eventual swallow. (They did have one defender: “I’ve been ruined by living in Brooklyn,” my co-worker said.)
The avocado-oil potato chips with just three ingredients tasted like they’d been made from real potatoes, unlike their ruffled rivals. But they tasted under-seasoned — perhaps due to their lower sodium levels. Everybody liked the Tostitos dip better than Primal Kitchen’s version with half the sodium. And Unreal’s chocolate candies seemed to have higher-quality chocolate but thinner candy shells than M&Ms, traits that divided our testers.
Those mixed results help answer Hari’s question about why PepsiCo wasn’t just getting rid of the artificial dyes and MSG in its regular Doritos and Cheetos. A lot of people are attached to their snacks looking and tasting like they did in our childhoods — when our palates get set. It’s a safer bet financially for big brands to hang onto their corn syrup-y sodas while rolling out alternatives for the wellness-inclined. (Primal Kitchen, it’s worth noting, is owned by Kraft Heinz.)
When it comes to Americans’ health, opting for lower-sodium chips is probably “very marginally better,” said Klatt. But he added: “I think most of these tweaks are kind of dumb or unlikely to be helpful at a population level.”
Another concern is that snacks advertising their lack of seed oils or added protein might mislead Americans into thinking the products are healthier than they actually are. (New labels are getting introduced all the time: The Non-GMO Project, which offers third-party certification of foods that are not genetically modified, recently introduced a new certificate that will do the same for foods that do not meet its definition of ultra-processed.)
“We know that when you put a single claim on a product, people will overgeneralize to think the whole thing is healthier,” said Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health. Research suggests, for example, that people may eat more of foods like granola that are labeled as low-fat because the claims give the snacks a “health halo.” Foods like General Mills’ protein-boosted cinnamon Cheerios tout their 8 grams of protein on the front of the package, but shoppers have to scour nutritional labels on the back to discover the 12 grams of added sugar they also contain. (Original Cheerios have 5 grams of protein and just 1 gram of added sugar.)
Taillie added: “There’s no reason why Americans should be getting their protein from Pop-Tarts.”
Beyond the better-for-you chip
Food brand consultant Maha Tahiri said there’s a bigger opportunity for food companies than making altered versions of familiar snacks — perhaps taking a cue from the pharmaceutical industry’s approach to exploring a variety of uses for GLP-1 drugs not just for weight loss, but for conditions like addiction or Alzheimer’s.
“The food industry should be really on the lookout for what problems they need to solve” when it comes to Americans’ health, said Tahiri, who holds a Ph.D. in nutrition and previously served as head of health and wellness at General Mills and head of global innovation for Danone. “And there is one that the pharma industry cannot solve, which is providing adequate nutrients.”
As one example of a brand with a smart strategy, Tahiri points to a new line of protein-powered Chobani yogurt drinks. “It’s a cleaner product and it has a good taste. It has lactase [an enzyme that makes the drinks lactose-free], which actually helps with digestion,” she said. She’s also intrigued by Nestlé’s new longevity beverage line, Vital, which she says has crossover appeal to people on GLP-1s.
The best way for packaged snack companies to respond to health concerns, according to Taillie of UNC, is to make simpler products with fewer ingredients.
That was the strategy on display in March this year at Expo West, the annual gathering of natural and organic brands in Los Angeles. Eggs — at the nexus of the protein and whole-foods trends — were everywhere, pre-poached, vacuum-sealed, and soft-boiled. Dates, too, were abundant as a natural sweetener.
Some snacks also aligned with MAHA priorities, with beef tallow popping up in unexpected places like protein bars. “It’s really up to consumers to do their own research and take their health back into their own hands,” said Caitlin Bricker, managing editor at the industry group Startup CPG. “There’s a lot of marketing out there.”
Bricker said the new wave of packaged snack brands want to separate themselves from Big Food. They “don’t want to be another Dorito, and they don’t want to capture that consumer,” she said.
The upscale focus of these kinds of snacks, from both big and small brands, is partly what worries Klatt. If PepsiCo stopped selling regular Doritos tomorrow and switched entirely to a whole-grain, protein-enriched version, he said, that could help reduce low-quality starches in American diets. They’d also probably taste worse, which would make people less likely to overeat. But that’s not what’s happening.
“There are still going to be the old-school Doritos, and you’re going to have this boutique sector of the market that captures a few extra dollars,” he said, by marketing to the “worried well.” The new, better-for-you snacks won’t make much of a dent in the offerings at a typical rural grocery store or gas station, Klatt said. “And the people who are consuming it probably aren’t the ones who had a huge need for it to begin with.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated which company owns Primal Kitchen.
STAT’s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
