Healthy eating has become an obsession. Soft-drink sales are slumping, salt is getting tossed from food, and kale is on the menu at McDonald’s.

And yet the Twinkie, that icon of indulgence, is on a tear.

For many otherwise healthy-eating American millennials, Twinkies have become food nostalgia. Nine months of forced disappearance from store shelves sharpened appetites for the golden sponge cake filled with fluffy cream, and after two bankruptcies, the 2013 acquisition of the Hostess Brands Inc. snack-cake business by a pair of private equity firms put the company back on the road to solvency.

“For as much as millennials bring us challenges, they also have a belief that you only live once and you should enjoy yourself,” Bill Toler, chief executive of the Kansas City, Mo.-based Hostess, said in an interview. “They believe in a license to indulge.”

In opinion surveys, Americans rank stealthy eating right up there with healthy. While 75 percent told NPR last year they were eating wholesome food, another report, from the Boston Consulting Group and IRI, found that indulgence was a top food trend, alongside nutrition. Hostess was ranked second among growth leaders for midsize companies, behind Greek yogurt company Chobani.

“Unhealthy products remain popular,” said Krishnakumar Davey, president of strategic analytics at IRI. “The popularity of nutritious snacks is surging, but so are sales of ice cream or salty snacks.”

A big beneficiary is Twinkies, Hostess’ golden child. One cake is 130 calories and 14.5 grams of sugar, compared with a Coke that has 140 calories and 39 grams of sugar. Apollo Global Management LLC and Metropoulos & Co. bought Hostess for $410 million and hopped on the wave of Twinkie-love at just the right moment. For fans, being without Twinkies and other Hostess products like Ho Hos and Ding Dongs in 2012 and 2013 unleashed a wave of sentimentality, driving them a little bit mad.

Twinkies’ new popularity came at a cost. The Hostess bankruptcy enabled the private equity buyers to start over with a fraction of a workforce that once numbered about 8,000 at several bakeries across the country.