Posts Tagged ‘Doritos’
“A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It asks only that you are not there.”*…
As a young lawyer in Australia, Andrew Taylor couldn’t help but hurry through lunch, quickly and distractedly eating between meetings. Until that is, he bit down on the wrong tortilla chip, one that “severely scratched” his esophagus. “I was in quite a lot of pain for some time, but was told by my doctor and dentist there was little they could do,” he explains, adding that they basically informed him that he would have to wait until his throat healed on its own.
They did make sure, though, that he knew how lucky he was. “I was told of a situation where someone actually tore their throat,” Taylor explains, “and it was quite touch-and-go there for a while.”
The case Taylor is referring to is widely known in dental circles. The gist of it: On May 10, 1990, a gastroenterologist in San Diego named George Longstreth wrote into the New England Journal of Medicine, describing how a “poorly chewed tortilla chip can produce serious injury.” His patient, 63-year-old Irene Harnisch, had swallowed a tortilla chip that ripped a five-inch gash in her esophagus. After throwing up blood and experiencing severe chest pains, she was rushed to the hospital, where she was kept for six days (she was unable to eat solid food for another two weeks).
“It was a very serious incident,” Longstreth told United Press International at the time. “She lost four pints of blood. It’s possible she could have died.”…
What happens when your chips bite back? From broken teeth to a ripped esophagus, history suggests that a sharp Dorito is an oral accident waiting to happen: “The Sick Hellscape of Tortilla Chip Injuries.”
* Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
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As we chew our food, we might spare a thought for Lucy Hobbs Taylor; she died on this date in 1910. She was the first female dentist in the U.S.– the first woman in the world to graduate from a dental college, and to receive a doctorate in dentistry.
“The man who invented doritos has passed away at the age of 97. He asked to be buried with the creators of Fritos and Cheetos in a variety pack”*…
All told, there are 26 separate ingredients in Doritos Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips…
While most of these individual ingredients aren’t all that bad for us, they’re a cheese-dust-covered grenade when consumed together. “The more you mess with food, the more you’re demanding your immune system to figure out what the heck all these new things are — and it can make mistakes,” Shanahan says. For instance, studies show that over-processed foods have contributed to the rise in food allergies in Western countries.
Weirdly, while the ingredients that sound like they’d be unhealthy (i.e., disodium inosinate) aren’t really all that bad, the ingredients we think we recognize (i.e., vegetable oils) are slowly waging the real war on our insides. “The main thing people need to pay attention to are the first few ingredients in these foods, like vegetable oil,” Shanahan urges. “Vegetable oils alone can cause diabetes, and they don’t even contain any sugar.”
All 26 ingredients in America’s favorite cheese-flavored chip, singly and as a whole, explained: “What’s in This?: Doritos Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips.”
* Jimmy Fallon
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As we wipe our fingers, we might send apocalyptic birthday greetings to The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus; he was born on this date in 1766. An English cleric and scholar, he was influential both in political economy and demography. He is best remembered for his 1798 essay on population growth, in which he argued that population multiplies geometrically and food arithmetically; thus, whenever the food supply increases, population will rapidly grow to eliminate the abundance, leading inevitably to disastrous results – famine, disease and/or war… a conclusion that remains controversial to this day.
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