Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (56 page)

H
umans have junk food faces. Daniel Lieberman, Harvard professor and author of
The Evolution of the Human Head
, writes, “There is much circumstantial evidence that jaws and faces do not grow to the same size they used to
precisely
because of our softer, more processed diets.”

A chimpanzee can spend half its waking hours chewing because its plant-based diet requires a lot of mastication to break down the cells of plants into something they can swallow and digest. This gives “slow food” a new meaning. Humans, on the other hand, spend less than two hours a day eating meals, and much less time chewing, which takes up a small fraction of mealtime.

Our industrious species has learned how to mill, tenderize, cook, blend, and bake nutritious food that’s dense with calories. The majority of what we eat is so soft that we can spend a lot less of our time chewing and a lot more of our time surfing the web. But unless you’re chewing food, you’re not consciously savoring it. So let’s think about this differently. Those lucky chimps! They spend half their day
eating!
Wouldn’t it be great if we could spend more waking hours with delicious food in our mouths?

We could, but we’d have to change our diets to food that requires significantly more chewing. Some people have tried, but it’s hard to get proper nutrition from plant-based, raw food. There’s no need to be so extreme,
though. We just need to work a few more jaw-challenging bites into our repertoire.

Horace Fletcher, an overweight nineteenth-century entrepreneur, devised his own diet regimen, the basic tenet of which was to slow down and chew often, lengthily, and repeatedly. He refused to swallow food until every last drop of flavor and every last shred of texture was gone from it. He once chewed a green onion 700 times before he deemed it ready to be swallowed. This style of eating became known as Fletcherizing. Mothers around the United States harped on it, urging their children to chew every mouthful no less than forty-five times before they swallowed. But even at the turn of the twentieth century, people were too busy to masticate every mouthful for three minutes or more.

Savoring food in the process of all that chewing, Fletcher wrote:

When one comes to think about it, what sense is there in throwing away a palatable morsel of food when the taste is at its best, or while taste lasts at all, even if the purpose of the meal is merely to contribute to the pleasure of eating? . . . The desire for acquisition, sometimes called greed, impels one to swallow one mouthful of food to take in another, without ever dreaming that the very last contribution of taste to the last remnant of a delicious morsel is like the last flicker of a candle, more brilliant than any of the preceding ones . . .

Taste, if allowed to serve its full purpose, furnishes its own draught of cheerfulness by means of the very pleasure it distributes, and at the same time it prevents, instead of inducing, gluttony.

Fletcher wrote this in his 1903 book,
The New Glutton or Epicure,
by which date he had lost much of his excess weight and become a health evangelist. Although it was eventually considered a fad diet and faded away, Fletcherizing had its followers, including John D. Rockefeller.

Like many things in life, there may be some benefit to Fletcherizing in moderation. Next time you eat dinner, swap your normal side dish for some raw vegetables. Because you will need to chew more in order to get the vegetables ready to swallow, your meal will last longer, and when you’re finished, you’ll have eaten fewer calories than if you’d eaten a more highly processed side dish. As you’re chewing those carrots, consider how lucky you are that your species has conquered fire and you can choose when to eat raw food. Revel in the natural sweetness of the vegetable, its crisp, almost woody texture, its vivid orange color,
and thank the jaw workout for reminding you that you don’t have to live on raw food alone. Of course, even if you’re eating soft foods, by chewing them—or swishing them around more—you’ll get more flavor from them.

Another consequence of our soft food diet is that our teeth no longer fit in our mouths. Because we don’t engage in the vigorous chewing that our ancestors did, our jaws don’t grow as big as they used to. The result is that our wisdom teeth have nowhere to go, end up impacted, and have to be cut out. If we ate the same fibrous, chewy foods as our ancient ancestors, we’d spend far less money on orthodontics than we do today.

Losing your sense of smell can lead in some rare instances to weight loss, so you would think that sensory scientists would have cracked the obesity code by now, but they have not. It’s not for want of trying, regardless of how opportunistic their attempts may be.

Dr. Alan Hirsch runs the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Center in Chicago. He is a licensed doctor and prolific researcher and inventor. Passionate and eccentric, he has published books correlating smell to personality type with provocative titles like
What Flavor Is Your Personality
? Mine, after reading his book, is skeptical. He has patents for using aromas to alter vaginal blood flow and treat male impotence. He has written papers with headline-grabbing titles such as “Sexually Exciting Odors.” He is one of the few medical professionals trying—desperately, it seems—to apply sensory science research results to real world problems. And the biggest one, pun intended, is weight loss.

Dr. Hirsch markets a product called Sensa that, according to the marketing materials, works with your sense of smell to help trigger sensory-specific satiety. It is said to trigger the “I feel full” signal, so the user eats less and feels more satisfied.

However, sensory-specific satiety (SSS), a well-accepted phenomenon, doesn’t necessarily work to curb hunger or cravings. The concept behind SSS is that we can become sated—full of, sick of, finished with—a food after continued exposure to it in a single sitting. For example, if you sit down alone in front of a huge pepperoni pizza, at some point you’ll become sated with the flavors of the pizza and want to stop eating it. This doesn’t happen quickly or completely, but it is one of the mechanisms that helps us to avoid overeating. The
issue is that sensory-specific satiety works only for food that you’re eating. It means you can be as full as a tick on pepperoni pizza but still have a hankering for something else. Ice cream, for example. That’s right. The reason you can always find room for sweets after a meal is sensory-specific satiety (no, you do not have a separate dessert stomach). All you’d have to do to throw off the supposed benefits of Sensa is switch from pizza to dessert. And then to something else, the way people normally eat.

I ordered a box of Sensa from
Sensa.com
, which, incidentally, utilized one of those annoying sign-up schemes: you give them your credit card and the onus is on
you
to cancel the next month if you don’t want to continue being billed for and receiving products.

Because I am in the food development business, I’m familiar with food ingredients and had hoped Sensa would contain some magic botanical that would mysteriously work to curb hunger. In fact, the ingredients list says that it contains nothing more than processing aids (such as malodextrin, a corn syrup solid used to add bulk to intense ingredients like sucralose); tricalcium phosphate, an anticaking agent; and silica, a desiccant, plus flavors and coloring. I sprinkled Sensa on my food for a few days and didn’t notice anything. It also became a pain to remember to sprinkle before taking a bite. Like many consumers, I’m sure, I abandoned it swiftly and returned to my normal way of eating.

Next I discovered SlimScents, a product that was developed by a “Chicago doctor” whose name and image have been stripped out of the video reels on the website. In fact, it’s pretty hard to identify who is behind this product. The special diet pens deliver aromas that you’re supposed to sniff when you feel hungry, at least ten times per day, before you are about to eat something. Supposedly, the scents block or limit your appetite by means of the concept of adaptation.

This, however, doesn’t exactly jibe with the concept of adaptation. In fact, as long as enough time elapses between sniffs, and assuming you’re going about your normal business between sniffs, you shouldn’t suffer from adaptation, or “loss of effectiveness.” The real question is whether or not sniffing a pen before or instead of eating is effective at all. SlimScents’s website offers visitors the PDF of a clinical study that proves the effectiveness of the pens. The paper was coauthored by none other than Dr. Alan Hirsch, inventor of Sensa.

Mattson does lots of work developing new foods that are low in calories, sodium, or fat, or are better for you in some other way. We’ve worked for most of the big food companies and not one of them has asked us to develop an aromabased
diet aid. If only the human metabolism were so easily satisfied when it wants fuel.

And of course we have other reasons for eating, which have nothing to do with being hungry. The bottom line is that there are still huge gaps between what we know about sensory science and how it relates to human behavior. We’re on the trail but nowhere close to solving the obesity problem.

When I was reviewing restaurants I met a woman, Deborah, who lost her sense of smell and proceeded to lose thirty, almost forty pounds. She simply stopped eating. This got me thinking. What if all we had to do was temporarily disable our sense of smell in order to lose weight? What an easy thing to do: clamp your nose shut for six months, lose thirty pounds. I even envisioned a simple but fashionable nose clip, perhaps designed by the likes of Tom Ford, Hello Kitty, or Nike. It could be the inexpensive, reversible alternative to bariatric surgery.

Then I consider my other olfactorily challenged friend, Carlo Middione. Carlo, like many people who lose their sense of smell, began to
gain
weight. He told me of eating and eating and overeating, hoping in vain that the next elusive bite would be able to satisfy him the way it used to when he had a functioning sense of smell. So which is it? Does knocking out your sense of smell result more often in weight loss or weight gain? At this point, there aren’t any definitive studies on this. So I went to someone who works at a Center for Taste and Smell, figuring she’d have the answer.

“The fact is, loss of taste and smell generally doesn’t produce weight loss,” said Linda Bartoshuk matter-of-factly. People who lose their sense of smell don’t lose their hunger-producing mechanisms. In other words, they still get hungry. They eat because they’re hungry. The amount and type of food they eat may vary by person, but if all their other bodily systems are working fine, when their stomach empties, they’ll feel hungry, just like someone with an intact sense of smell. They may eat
less
because the food doesn’t savor as good as it used to, like Deborah. Or they may eat
more
because it doesn’t savor as good as it used to, like Carlo. Or their loss may not affect the amount of food they eat. How people handle smell loss is as dependent on the individual as how they handle other major changes in their life.

Of course, there are other circumstances that can cause weight loss, which may occur at the same time that someone loses sense of smell. Oftentimes these other things become the scapegoat for weight gain or loss. For example, chemotherapy can result in a loss of taste or smell as well as debilitating nausea. Which one is responsible for weight loss during cancer treatment is hard to say. It’s different for each patient. Let’s not forget the emotional trauma of being diagnosed with and treated for cancer, or being injured in a car accident. Emotions spiraling out of control can result in a change in diet. Whether you eat more or less when you’re undergoing stress is probably apparent from your body mass index. The point is, we’re all different.

What if we could raise children who would gladly finish all the vegetables on their plate without having to negotiate peace treaties to get them to do so? What if we could raise kids who preferred the flavor of fruit to candy? What if tweens would request broccoli and spinach for their birthday parties in lieu of cake? Could we accomplish this if we understood what drives food preferences? Of course, we don’t have the whole picture (yet), but a basic understanding of sensory science can start us down the road.

First of all we need to remember that approximately 25 percent of the population is made up of HyperTasters. These supersensitive individuals are going to be very difficult to train. So let’s start with the easier ones: the 75 percent of the population that’s made up of Tasters and Tolerant Tasters.

Remember that children start to learn flavor preferences in utero. Researchers at Monell proved this with the carrot experiment. So the first and easiest step is to advocate—strongly—for pregnant and nursing mothers to eat more healthful foods. Yes, this sounds naive and obvious, but it’s not that they need to eat
only
healthful foods. They just need to expose their growing kids to those flavors during the critical periods of pregnancy and breast-feeding. Their kids need to be exposed to fish. They need to be exposed to a wide range of bitter vegetables. They need to savor tea, red wine,
²³
walnuts, salmon, and other complex-tasting foods that have been proved to provide health benefits.

Once kids are born, we need to nurture them to develop their palates. This means letting them know that food that tastes good doesn’t have to be overly sweet, overly fatty, or overly salty. We need to communicate that bitter means health. Cultures that believe bitter foods are healthful tend to eat bitter foods more readily simply because they think these foods signify health.

I believe that part of the reason that lower-income communities suffer more from obesity, hypertension, and diabetes is that they never learn to appreciate bitter tastes. Lower-income households tend to (on average) eat more processed foods. On average, processed foods contain far fewer bitter tastes than fresh. If you grow up in a household where bitter foods are not served, you’ll never learn that vegetables can taste good.