Fast-Food Logos Burned Into Pleasure Center of Children's Brains

bbianca127 writes "A study has found that fast-food logos are branded into the minds of children at an early age, perhaps fueling the U.S.'s obesity epidemic. The study showed children 60 logos from popular food brands and 60 logos from popular non-food brands. Researchers found that, when shown images of fast-food brands, the parts of kids' brains linked with pleasure and appetite lit up. This is concerning because marketers tap into those portions of the brain long before children develop self-control, and most foods marketed to kids are high in calories, sugar, sodium, and fat."

Comments

Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always thought that exposure to fast food at an early age (perhaps due to mom and dad being perennially short of time to cook) implants a memory into kids of the taste of greasy fast food that sticks with them forever. Don't feed them this glop.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[Genda]

Its neither. We are evolutionary survival machines, look at the things that our ancestors did to survive. They sought sugars, salts, protein and fat. Any combination of those things is literally guaranteed to addictive to a human being. We are bred literally to respond to that combination. So what do fast food restaurants do, they server us huge helpings of sugar, salt, protein and fat. These things have survival value. Sadly, they are also killing us. The ugly part is that people are getting rich pulling the trigger, knowing full well its a trigger.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[pinkushun]

Yup, those sugary and fatty foods provided sustenance for those periods when food was scarcer, when your body relies on fatty deposits.

Super markets eliminated the need to hunt for food interspersed with periods of shortages, but the latent craving for those sugary, fatty treats still remained.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yeah, it's not fast food. WhatEVER kids eat at an early age, that's why they'll enjoy for the rest of their lives. It's called "human culture". Fast food's got nothing to do with it.

Liking fast food is essentially chemistry. Science (yay, science!) has basically figured out what tastes good on the human taste bud. Fast food supplies this. Sure, you gourmands out there will choke and puke at the thought of fast food, but that is purely social conditioning (the kind that intelligent people insist they're too smart to fall for). Take someone with no preconceptions, say a barbarian from a pre-modern society, and serve them two meals: one of a Big Mac and the other Thai-Burmese-Argentinian fusion or whatever is considered haute cuisine these days, and the barbie will pick the Big Mac every time.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed it should be forbidden to sell that stuff or at least advertise it. Kids are not allowed to drink alcohol so why are they allowed to eat food only based on these triggers. Beside that, they do not learn the wide variety of tastes food can have and they loose one portion of culture. Also they trained that eating is only for resupply of calories and other stuff relevant for the metabolism. However, that is normally called feeding. Humans developed culture and dishes and the art of eating them is part of the culture.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[jandersen]

I agree, but I think it is a wider issue than that. I remember, when growing up, I was always told to "eat up" and not waste food, even when I genuinely felt that I didn't want to eat more. This makes sense, of course, if you can't be sure when the next meal will be around, but it teaches us at an early age to override the signal to stop eating. That, in combination with the way we serve food in the West: a whole meal on a large plate, means that it is very easy to develop a habit of overeating.

Perhaps we should learn from the Chinese: you put all the dishes in the middle of the table and eat out of small bowls; and you only take a little bit at a time, so you don't have to sit there, being full with half a meal on your plate, feeling that you must finish. And of course, the Chinese tend to integrate the leftovers in the next meal, so there is less food wasted overall.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Taste enhancer additives are the culprit. I remember when i was a kid, the one potato chips which was made by virtually a monopoly company in my (communist then) country tasted ... ordinary: salt, oil, crisp potato. Then, much later, a new company came with Western technology and it tasted ... like heaven! I always liked chips, but while 50 grams bag of old chips was more then I could eat alone, I couldn't satiate myself even with 200 grams of this new chips. The difference was, of course, the "secret" (not really ... just in small print) additive ingredient in the latter.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[DNS-and-BIND]

Nope. I once took a 70 year old peasant farmer from China to KFC and he freaking loved it. The man had never been to a restaurant in his life. Seriously, his village was freaking medieval. Where do you get such bizarre ideas?

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[thomasw_lrd]

Or we could just stop letting people blame their problems on others. Yeah, I'm fat. I know why I'm fat, I eat too much food. Do I care, yes. Enough to do anything about it, no. At some point every person has to take responsibility for their own choices.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[jythie]

On the other hand, I think people get really uncomfortable with the idea that advertizing has the impact it does.. the idea makes them feel less in control of their lives so they underestimate how much other forces actually do sway them. We like to think we are above influence, but we are not, and marketers know we are not.

This does not absolve us from personal responsibility, but it does mean we need to be more realistic about what effects us so we can take responsibility by working to limit or remove those influences.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[Dodgy G33za]

Buy some unsalted roasted peanuts, or raw peanuts and roast yourself. Blend very well. The result should be peanut butter with no sugar, salt or oils. It isn't rocket science.

And if you are worried about money, grow some veggies. You can make a small amount of land do a lot if you grow potatoes, carrots, onions etc. Even herbs, chillies, peppers on a window sill or balcony if you are living in a vertically stacked urban environment (names vary by country).

I am far more worried by the difficulty in getting basic ingredients to make foods from, such as bakers flour and unhomogenised milk.

My philosophy. Eat as close to nature as you can. Less opportunity for corporations to a) fuck it up and b) make a profit.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[Dodgy G33za]

The problem is that people "like" it because it has been engineered that way. Imagine the design brief:

1) make the food as addictive as possible
2) make it as cheaply as possible

And you get trans-fats, high fructose corn syrup, parmoline (aka tree lard) and all the other nasty things the food industry has come up with to make their business as profitable as possible.

The problem with the average slashdot denizen is that they give far too much credit to the intelligence of the target audience of this crap. The truth is that half of them are too uneducated to know better (which is a problem with our society), and the other half are too interested in other things (which is a problem with other marketing).

Now I know many on this site love the idea of a free market, but an unfettered market is not allowed in any country, for a very good reason.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[Dodgy G33za]

I went to the US once, and driving out of Omaha all I saw was suburb after suburb of 'chains'. Why anyone would even think of pulling off the highway to go to a donut outlet is beyond me.

Here in Australia, 'normal' restaurants and cafes are the norm, and long may that be the case.

Fight it guys. Fight it with every once of your spirit. I grew up thinking Americans believed in freedom. But what I see from your culture is homogenisation and the rule of the bland. Is that really what you want?

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[Avatar8]

Dislike of fast food is not social conditioning.

I grew up with home-cooked meals, not healthy but typical comfort food. Once I was old enough to cook for myself, most of my meals came out of the freezer and cardboard boxes. When I was old enough to drive, fast food joints were my primary source of food.

I grew obese, developed a few health problems then met and married a woman who not only knows how to cook, but has recently learned to cook healthier food. I'm losing weight, all health issues are gone and I'm eating the best food I've every had in my life.

Your analogy of a barbarian choosing between a burger and ethnic food is far off the target. Compare apples to apples. Given the choice between a McD/BK/W/whatever burger and a burger made with fresh beef, fresh vegetables and fresh baked bread, the barbarian will steer clear of the fast food one after one bite. (Actually, he'd probably eat both.)

Food does not have to be fancy to be good. It should be fresh, healthy AND taste good. Fast food restaurants provide NONE of those factors.

Try eating fresh food for a month, and you'll wretch at the thought of trying to eat a fast food burger, too. Don't try the "fast food is cheaper" argument either. It's been well documented that buying and preparing food is much cheaper than fast food, not only at the cash register but also at the doctor's office.

Re:Logos? Maybe. Tastes? Yes.

[s0nicfreak]

Actually kids are allowed to drink alcohol - they're just not allowed to buy it. In most countries, and in most states in the US (details), kids are allowed to drink alcohol as long as their parents say it's okay.

Children that have not yet developed self-control usually have parents to do the controlling for them. If we want to do away with fast-food advertising due to childrens' lack of self control, by that logic we would have to do away with all advertising... or, a better solution; expect parents to make up for a child's lack of self-control.

no self control

[chentiangemalc]

lets blame advertisers for poor parenting.

Re:no self control

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're "financially strapped" you have no business eating at McDonalds to begin with. You can eat far healthier and far cheaper food. I know because I just spent several years living well below the poverty line, and I couldn't have afforded to eat at McDonalds.

And no amount of advertising can force you to buy something. It can let you know that thing exists, but you still get to make your own choice. Humans are not mindless drones. So yes, it is poor parenting, a failure to act in the best interests of their children. A 5 year old child does not get to McD's on his own nor does that child earn his own money to buy that crap food. This is not really debatable: there was a time when parents acted much more responsibly due to a difference in culture as opposed to today, and even though fast food was wildly available, people were far thinner then. Seeing someone obese was a rarity, not the norm as it is today.

Re:no self control

[Genda]

I swear the public doesn't get it. For 70 years, advertisers have been doing double blind studies on how to control and manipulate you. They go for your conscious mind, they go for your unconscious mind, they assault your pleasure centers, they know what frequencies in what order trigger certain centers in your brain. They are aware of when to target you by common daily habits and schedules. In short advertizing is a science with a cutting edge that make a scalpel look like a blunt instrument. They go after your biology, culture, demographic, political views, religious beliefs, you social opinions. Its one of the reasons we now see sound bite instead of meaningful campaigns. That my friends if the work of Wall street advertising as applied by politics which has degenerated into just one more product being sold to semi comatose mouth breathing pubic.

Re:no self control

[Genda]

Ta da!!! Superb call good sir! My friends, until they have pubic hair, NO TV. I know 5 different families whose kids never watched the tube before they were near the end of puberty. The outcome is striking. The kids are brighter, more well balanced, more socially mature, more responsible, more productive and better disciplined. I mean its shocking. I can't say that they are better because the parenting was better, or that the simple lack of TV made such an incredible difference, but it left me with the experience that TV is profoundly destructive to the developing human brain and should simply be eliminated from the childrens' intellectual diet.

Re:no self control

[Anonymous Coward]

And no amount of advertising can force you to buy something. It can let you know that thing exists, but you still get to make your own choice.

You overestimate the extent of free will. Advertisers don't spend billions a year just to let you know that McDonalds (still) exists. They do it because they absolutely can control your behavior. Maybe not reliably enough to force a specific person to eat there, but on the average, it works.

Re:no self control

[Krneki]

This is nothing short from mind hacking. There is only one way to beat them, don't watch commercials. Not an easy task though. This is why I stopped watch TV at age of 15 and thanks to adblock and similar addons I managed to remove them from my browsing experience.

Re:no self control

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I'd like to rephrase that a bit. No parent likes to be called a "poor parent", and all parents want to believe that they are doing the best for their children. However, the advertisers are a very powerful opponent. Parents need to view this as a challenge for them, that requires even more effort on their part, to achieve what is best for their children.

Fast food advertisers will always find a way to wiggle around any attempt to limit their effectiveness. The challenge for parents will always be there. It's up to the parents to master this opponent.

And, no, it is not simple and easy.

Re:no self control

[jandersen]

lets blame advertisers for poor parenting.

Groan. Need I say more? *Groan*

This sort of response has always been stupid, in my view, but with the amount of knoledge we now have about nutrition, how we become obese, how advertising influences people etc etc etc, it is staggerign that there are still this sort of uninformed opinions about.

First of all, nobody is blaming it all on advertising - not least because there is a lot more going on than idiotic TV adverts. Like the fact that when you go to any shop (even so called health food shops) the ratio between sugary, fatty luxury snacks and appealing, genuinely healthy alternatives is something like one or two orders of magnitude, if I'm not much mistaken.

And secondly, blaming it on poor parenting or "lack of self-control" is just too much like blaming the victim. People make poor choices because they are not really given any real alternatives. It is so easy to blurt things like "just pull yourself together" - but do you even know how to do this? Can you teach this skill to others? Are you able to help people overcome their moments of weakness? If you know and cared, you wouldn't say this kind of shit.

Re:no self control

[slim]

Hmm, on Monday I bought a pack of seasonal vegetables (carrot, swede, onion, parsnip) for £1.50 and a carton of value tomato juice for 65p. The soup will feed me for the rest of the week.

Re:no self control

[DNS-and-BIND]

There are three professions where being untruthful is the key to success: Lawyers, salespeople, and advertising. All three are hired to portray their client in the most favorable light possible, and the very best ones lie through their teeth. The worst of these three are the advertisers because they have legions of psychologists and scientists trying to figure out the best way to lie to people.

Re:no self control

[schroedingers_hat]

So you're saying we should bring the fast food home and use it to destroy all the kids favourite toys then send them to their room with no dinner?

Re:no self control

[silentcoder]

To counter a joke with sad facts.
The truth is that study after study has found that nobody is immune to advertising -even as we all think we are (that's part of WHY we aren't).

Ask people - nearly all of them will tell you they look at products in the store and buy the best value product as determined primarily by the price.

Let them buy and not know you are watching: 85% of them will consistently buy the thing with the most appealing packaging even if it costs significantly more. If asked afterward, they rationalize it as believing it was better quality (without any actual reason for this belief).

The small 15% who really DO manage to consciously and deliberately override advertising (no, they are NOT immune, they just learned to recognize the response and deliberately ignore it - like choosing NOT to wank when you're horny) - are the same kind of people who shop with a calculator in hand and make damn sure they don't go over-budget - and dont' buy anything not on the list unless there were enough specials to put them UNDER budget by more than the extra costs.
Those people DO exist- and they are the reason shops have no-name brands. The same product in plain packaging bought in bulk and sold cheaper.

Those people buy the no-name (I'm one of them, most of the time anyway) stuff because we know it's the better value - but the more expensive pretty packaging stuff is stocked right next to it, and the vast majority of people buy THOSE.

The science simply disproves most of our free will illusions. I won't discount it's existence entirely - but make no mistake, the vast majority of our lives are responding to ancient urges without us ever actually rationally thinking about and questioning those actions - let alone choosing to do otherwise (though we can apparently). People who figured out what those urges are CAN and DO exploit this tendency.

Re:no self control

[geekoid]

And she is going to be screwed when she gets out on her own.
How about you watch commercials and explain how they are trying to manipulate you?

I would rather my children and look at a commercial and take it apart, then be hidden from them until they end up on there own.

And just so you know, my kids have been able to take apart a commercial since they were 10.

Starts with first solid food...

[mspohr]

There is good evidence that food preferences starts with the first solid food. Most infants (at least in the US) are started on white rice cereal and this has been shown to lead to a preference for high glycemic index foods (simple sugars and starches) leading to obesity. They have found that brown rice (low glycemic index) is much better.
Much better to start with low glycemic index foods (and stay with them for life).

Re:Starts with first solid food...

[mspohr]

Don't usually reply to ACs who don't know how to use Google but here's one for a start:

Sun Q, Spiegelman D, van Dam RM, Holmes MD, Malik VS, Willett WC, and Hu FB. “White Rice, Brown Rice, and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in US Men and Women. Archives of Internal Medicine. June 2010; 170(11):961-969.

Re:Starts with first solid food...

[MrAngryForNoReason]

Sun Q, Spiegelman D, van Dam RM, Holmes MD, Malik VS, Willett WC, and Hu FB. “White Rice, Brown Rice, and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in US Men and Women. Archives of Internal Medicine. June 2010; 170(11):961-969.

That is a study of the difference between white and brown rice and how they affect rates of type 2 diabetes in grown men. It doesn't mention anything to do with a connection between foods that infants are fed and their preferences later in life.

When you make a statement like "There is good evidence" then you really need to be able to back that up with compelling evidence from a reliable source.

parental self control

[Anonymous Coward]

long before children develop self-control

This is true, self control is something that develops slowly and isn't present in young children. This is why parents need to provide a substitute for that self control. When I was young my family ate every meal at home, from healthy home cooked food. We NEVER ate at fast food joints, and weren't exposed to fast food advertising. Surprise, now in late middle age (50) I am thinner and in better physical condition than 95% of the country. I've run up flights of steps and seen 20 year olds who can't keep up without wheezing and having to stop for breath.

A whole generation of parents seems to have dropped the ball. I see children who eat every meal at McDonalds, and are obese by age 6. I see children who badly need exercise driven around by their parents for distances easily walkable. The parents are enabling this problem through lack of parental responsibility for their own children. This is not rocket science: if you eat twice as many calories per day as you burn, you're going to get fat. How did we get so stupid as a nation that we no longer understand this? It seems like whacking one's self on the thumb with a hammer, and wondering why it hurts... over and over and over, never learning that it's our own swinging of the hammer that hurts. Not all the advertising in the world can MAKE you go to McDonalds. You have to chose to do so. You are free to choose NOT to do so, and this is the choice I've made all my life.

It's just... bewildering to see people make the opposite choice, eat several big macs per day coupled with massive high calorie sodas and large fries, and then bitch about getting fat. Stop doing that! If you're a parent, instil a sense of basic reality in your children, and don't feed them a diet of fast food when they're young enough to be dependent on you. It makes me sick to see so many parents hauling their 5 kids to fast food joints for every single meal.

Re:parental self control

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I believe that all you say is correct. Unfortunately, that also requires a lot of diligence and discipline from the parents. I have the impression that most folks are simply looking for an easy scapegoat:

• It's the fast food advertising's fault.
• It's the large drink size fault.
• It's the soda can's fault.

Until folks fess up and accept take the responsibility, and realize that they have to take the difficult road, this won't change. Someone or something else will always be the fault for their children's obesity.

poorly controlled study?

[king neckbeard]

From TFA

The study, conducted at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Kansas Medical Center, selected 120 popular food and non-food brands, including McDonald's and Rice Krispies, and BMW and FedEx.

Were there brands that kids would care about shown as well, or just brands that they happen to know? I don't really see FedEx lighting up the pleasure center in a kid's brain, but Toys'R'Us or Mattel might. Other listed logos from the study are the Target bulls-eye and the Energizer Bunny. I might expect the bunny to cause a little bit of pleasure, but the cuteness of bunnies is balanced with the boringness of batteries.

Re:ORLY?

[jrumney]

Compare logos of providers of "non-healthy" food to some healthy food - vegetables, fruits - then you'll have something to talk about, but I bet you'll find no difference.

To find no difference, you'd need to compare them with logos of healthy food that comes with cheap plastic toys and a playground. I find my children quickly stopped asking to go to McDonalds when I started buying them a cheeseburger, chips and orange juice from the a-la-carte menu for taking out, instead of a "Happy Meal" and eating in and letting them use the playground there.

Don't worry...

[Black Parrot]

When they reach puberty the logos will be replaced by other images, which they can easily find on the internet.

What about the parents?

[SciCom Luke]

I always had the faint residual of an idea there is such a thing as 'parents' who come in to the picture when children are about to do something that is not good for them. That these carbon based lifeforms have a function of guiding children through early life, which includes warning them of marketing bastards and teaching them to think for themselves before they believe anything to see and hear and read. But that idea might be caused by social phenomena of the previous century...

Re:ORLY?

[CubicleZombie]

I get annoyed with the "Mod parent up!" posts, but damn, that's insightful. Parent of a 12 week old here. I'll remember that.

As a very young kid, I remember Mom taking me to McDonalds on the way to pick up my older brother from school. It was only for the playground. She never bought me any food there. And I always wanted fruits instead of candy at the grocery store. Guess she was onto something.

Emotional and social - somewhat mindless

[Anonymous Coward]

And no amount of advertising can force you to buy something. It can let you know that thing exists, but you still get to make your own choice. Humans are not mindless drones.

Advertizing influences us. We are social creatures who evolved to fit in with others. I garanty you - without any doubt whatsoever - that there are things you purchased that you would never have purchased without the advertizing. And if I asked you about it, you would have some sort of "reason" why you purchase that item - parroting much of the advertizer's "message".

People make most of their decisions based on emotion. Very rarely do folks sit down and do a cost/benefit analysis, pros and cons, etc ... about a purchase - it takes too long. It's easier and more gratifying for that quick indulgence.

The women who buy very large SUVs "because they have children and they need the space" - they have only 2. My parents got 3 kids around in a Chevy Vega. But these days people need gigantic light trucks for their TWO kids. Gee, I wonder what gave them that idea? Or let's look at the Mini in the States. When it first came out the advertizers had two very masculine men doing crazy shit with them. Why? They were afraid that the Mini would be considered a chick car like the Volkswagen Bug and the Porsche Boxster.

And there's religion - the most manipulative thing ever created by man.

No sir, we may not be mindless, but we sure are easily manipulated.

Yeah... they are so succesful

[SmallFurryCreature]

That I rooted my android devices to install an ad-blocker. Works perfectly, ad-free.

That I don't watch TV, or rather not broadcast TV. I download the TV-series I want, from torrent sites where I block the ads.

I have multiple layers of web ad-blocking, priv-proxy, ad-blocker, ghostery and finally opera's own rather good content blocker.

I use a government friend who has access to digests created from newspapers for polticians, ad free newspapers.

I don't buy DVD's because of their forced ads.

I don't use streaming services that display ads. Youtube is very easily manipulated to show zero ads.

I have my groceries delivered so I don't have to go to the supermarket and deal with the visual bombardment created to get me to buy stuff I don't want.

I do my tech shopping from pricewatch lists and real user reviews, so I don't have to deal with advertising on product sites and "pro" reviews sites whose product is paid for reviews.

THAT is how effective advertisers have become. I didn't used to mind ads but over the last decade they have managed to stimulate my brain into a rabid hatred of even the tiniest exposure to advertising.

And I am not alone. If advertising really worked, they wouldn't have to force it on us. The low point apparently happening in New York were kids were forced to watch commercials in exchange for school. It was a VPRO documentary so it probably was true (they are left-wing but to serious to make stuff up).

Why do you think you can't skip the commercials on DVD's? Because the advertisers are confident you enjoy watching them and want the information? No, because advertisers know all their tricks are useless in persuading people to watch something they don't want to.

Diets and Genes

[andersh]

Yes, it's very interesting, I only have a laymans understanding of the subject(s) involved. My degrees are all in other areas.

What I have understood however is that the genetic component may be far more important than the diet itself for individuals. The Mediterranean diet may only work well for people with [that or] similar genetic makeup and/or environmental conditions (climate, eating patterns, etc). Consuming butter heavy, low carb diets (Ketogenic) has recently become a fad here in Scandinavia. It even lead to a butter "shortage" before Christmas due to our agricultural policy (protectionist/self-sufficiency).

From what I have read and seen a lot of industrial food products in the US may have everything from trans-fats, [traces of] anti-biotics and growth hormones and frequently contains High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). The variation of products with corn derivatives is incredible, from beer to dry-wall! We know long-term consumption of HFCS leads to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats (triglycerides).

That's why I'm thankful that HFCS is not common in food products here in Scandinavia, even our [non-light] sodas use real sugar. It may be part of the obesity problem, in addition to the lack of exercise.

I remember reading one particularly interesting [American] study on the effects of poor nutrition, lack of healthy alternative food sources and polluted natural environments on the urban poor, and how it effectively locked them in poverty, poor health, low education, unemployment and crime. A cycle that is very hard to break. Think of all the money save and problems we could avoid in health care, welfare and crime prevention!

Re:Clearly McDonald's isn't included ...

[YttriumOxide]

While I wouldn't call McDonald's "high quality" food anywhere, I do notice distinct quality difference in different countries.

Their burgers in Australia and New Zealand tend to both be quite high quality, with good meat; fresh lettuce / salad parts; and fries that are recognisably made from potato. Here in Germany, the standard is somewhat lower; but still not so bad. France seems somewhat lower than here in Germany - bordering on "I'm not sure I want to eat that". And the UK is even lower at "I'm quite sure I don't want to eat that".
For the absolute bottom of the scale though, the one time I ate McDonalds in the US, I was absolutely unable to eat more than a couple of bites due to the poor quality. The bun was literally sweet with the amount of sugar used in it; the meat was over-salted and tasted more like a beef/pork mix than pure beef (which is fine when it is really a mix, but when it is supposed to be beef, that's a bit of a concern); and the fries were more fat/oil than potato matter. Even the drink tasted syrupy and weird (I found that in bottled drinks there also though; so I'm assuming it's the difference between the HFCS based versions and the sugar-cane based versions that I'm used to)

It might not always be like that there, and indeed may vary from state to state or store to store even; but that one time (which was at LAX airport for the record) has turned me off the idea of trying it there ever again.