Frito-Lay Continues to Target the Health-Conscious With New Snack Line

On Thursday, Frito-Lay, the snack-foods division of PepsiCo, unveiled a line of its top-selling chips called "A Pinch of Salt." They have 30 to 50 percent less sodium than regular chips. Well, fine. Less salt is better. But however much Frito-Lay's marketing department would like its customers to believe otherwise, the new products aren't going to lower America's blood pressure by very much.

In a statement heralding the new line, the company notes that a serving of the Pinch of Salt version of its Lay's potato chips has 75 milligrams of salt, compared to 180 milligrams in the regular version.

Neither of those amounts is particularly huge â€" even the original chips had just a pinch of salt in them, relatively speaking. But what's in a pinch? The American Heart Association's guidelines limit daily salt intake to 480 milligrams. In its statement, the company notes, correctly, that chip snacks get a bad rap for their salt content â€" they don't have nearly as much as many other products, particularly processed foods, many of which don't taste salty at all, but are nonetheless filled with the stuff.

Still, 75 milligrams, the amount of salt in a single, vending-machine-sized bag of the new chips, is 16 percent of what the AHA recommends for a whole day. And presumably, the new chips contain the same three grams of saturated fat and 150 calories that the original chips do.

Improbably, Frito-Lay has made "health" a cornerstone of its marketing efforts. It pushes the "baked" versions of its chips as if they were rice cakes, and it has long boasted of its line of reduced-fat snacks (but mentions the calorie counts only on its nutrition labels, as required by law). To some degree, this works. Many people see "lower in salt" or "reduced fat" on a label and feel this gives them license to pig out.

But consumers are becoming smarter all the time, and are increasingly making choices based on real, as opposed to perceived, health considerations. Fast-food chains have learned this, so they market their healthier fare to people who are interested in it, and, without pretense, they market their calorie-laden, artery-choking meals to people who couldn't care less, such as young men. Witness Burger King and Taco Bell, whose advertisements sometimes come close to outright boasting about how unhealthy some of their foods are.

There may come a time when makers of snack-foods will become similarly comfortable with what they're selling, and will stop pretending they are in the health-food business. Until then, it's best to take their claims with a grain of salt.