Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (57 page)

If we want to improve the health of children in low-income communities (and all communities, for that matter), there’s an easy class we could teach to give kids an appreciation for the flavor of some healthful foods. We could take a page from the supersour candy playbook and make tasting bitter foods a daring, laudable accomplishment. In other words: a game. Who can tolerate radicchio the best? Who makes the fewest faces when eating Brussels sprouts? And who actually likes the flavor of radishes? The more we teach kids that bitter foods are usually telling you that they’re healthy, the more information we arm them with. And, of course, the more fun we can make it, the better the lesson will stick with them.

I challenge you to remember the last time you experienced really angry, gnawing hunger pangs that lasted for more than a few minutes. For most people in developed nations this is hard to do. The minute we feel the teensy itch of hunger we satisfy it. We spoil our hunger like a precious newborn, stuffing a metaphorical breast in its mouth each time it threatens to cry. As a result we’ve lost touch with hunger cues.

When we sit down to eat—or worse: stand or drive—we don’t really know if we’re eating because we’re a little bit hungry, bored, or famished, or just because it’s the time of the day when we normally eat. I wanted to see if the scientific community agreed with my perspective, so I called Patricia Pliner, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto. She studies why people eat what they eat as well as why they eat the quantity they do.

I asked her to give me her professional opinion. Does our ridiculously easy access to food from the time we wake up until the time we fall asleep play a bigger role than hunger in what and how much we eat?

“Absolutely. One hundred percent,” she confirmed. “I think that—except under pretty extreme circumstances—the amount people eat is dictated by social norms and the presence of food to a much greater extent than by what you might call hunger or satiety. I think those two things are very unimportant in determining how much people eat.”

Unimportant? Hunger and fullness are unimportant? We think we eat when we get hungry and stop eating when we’re full. But here is someone who has conducted research on hunger, who tells us that this doesn’t happen. Pliner then told me of an experiment she did that proved this fact.

First, she brought people into her lab and gave them a set amount of food: a bowl of chicken noodle soup, crackers, a turkey sandwich, and strawberry yogurt with fruit. Exactly 369 calories. Half of the people were fed this amount of food while they stood alone at a counter and ate it in one standing. This scenario was meant to mimic the way we snack. The researchers also primed these subjects with snack-y language. The other half of the participants were taken into a room where each was seated across from another subject at a dining table, while music played in the background. Their food was divided into three courses: a soup starter served with crackers, a sandwich entree, and a yogurt and fruit dessert. It was served on real plates with real silverware. Same caloric content: 369. This scenario was meant to mimic a formal meal setting. Later, when both groups were offered an unlimited amount of pasta, those who had eaten casually standing up ate more than those who had eaten in a more formal meal setting. Remember, both groups had eaten the same amount of food before being offered the pasta.

The takeaway: don’t eat standing up! More seriously, the results show that simply changing the way you think about snacking can change the way you eat later. If you are really hungry and feel that you need to eat a substantial snack of, say, a handful of crackers, cheese, and some soup, sit down at a table, use plates and silverware, and convince yourself that this amount of food is a small meal. Then, when you sit down to eat your next meal, pass on the appetizers and soup, or maybe eat a smaller entree, because you’ve already ingested a small meal in the form of cheese, crackers, and soup. They count against the whole amount of calories you’ll eat in a day. But instead of seeing the glass as half empty, consider it in the positive. If you do it right, you can treat yourself to more than three real meals a day! What a luxury. What indulgence!

Snacks—especially substantial snacks—are not free. This insidious self-delusion is part of what has made the Western world fat.

I recently spent the night at an airport hotel in Houston. It was late and I hadn’t eaten in hours, so I ordered a bowl of pasta. The thirty or more ounces of food I was served arrived in a bowl bigger than the wheel of my car. My frame of reference for pasta is the judicious portions of house-made pasta at Delfina in San Francisco, where a small mound of it is served on a flat ten-inch dinner plate. I considered how disappointed the regular eater at this hotel would have been with the size of Chef Stoll’s spaghetti entree. You get used to a norm and anything else looks out of whack.

In the chapter on sight I wrote about how a visual norm for portion size can influence how much you eat. Remember the bottomless bowl of soup. Pliner has found that you will also adjust how much you eat to match your dining companion. Like a recovering alcoholic who needs to avoid his partying buddies, an overweight person or unhealthy eater may need a new set of friends (or family!) to change the norms for how much she eats. Or she could use smaller plates, keep unhealthful food out of view, and make healthful food easily accessible.

Let’s return to the concept of adaptation: the idea that the flavor of a food or drink is perceived as being weaker and weaker with repeated bites. Put another way, you need more and more of it to be stimulated. Consider that the reverse may also be true.

When I set out to write this book, I also set out to improve my personal nutrition. I am a fanatically healthy eater, subsisting almost entirely on fruits and vegetables for the first two meals of the day plus the dozens of bites I take in the lab at work. I indulge myself at dinner with a restaurant habit that seems to get worse every year as I get busier. I’m lucky that I can afford to buy and eat fresh foods prepared well all the time. But I simply cannot control my sodium intake. This is not just a trivial matter for me. I lead a self-inflicted high-stress lifestyle. My mother and brother suffer from hypertension and my father did, too, before
he died of what was probably a massive heart attack. When I first started to understand the concept of adaptation (earlier defined as how sensitivity to a stimulus is decreased with each additional tasting), I thought it could be helpful for me
in reverse,
to reduce my salt intake.

Nutritionists preach reducing sodium intake. But it’s too radical a change to go from deliciously salty potato chips to the low-sodium (or, God forbid, salt-free) kind. This type of shock to the system causes people to fall off the wagon, as happened to me during tomato season. The trick is to slowly decrease the amount of sodium in your diet until you adapt to the lower level. Then decrease it again. In fact, this is exactly what the packaged food industry is doing. Years ago there were many famously failed attempts at introducing low-sodium versions of foods. The problem is that humans can’t readily adapt to a large percentage cut in their sodium. If you’re eating regular chicken noodle soup on Monday and you try a low-sodium version on Tuesday, you’re going to be overwhelmingly disappointed by how much you miss the salt. It’s not our choice to be disappointed by low-sodium foods. It’s the way our taste system operates.

Today, however, the food industry has finally absorbed the science and manufacturers have vowed to slowly decrease the sodium in their formulas. They plan to do this slightly and imperceptibly over the course of the next few years. Since consumers have proved that they can’t easily adapt to lower-salt products, the food industry is going to do it for them. This is one tactic for resetting the unhealthy norms we’ve gotten used to in the United States.

For the past fifteen years that I’ve been working in food development, I’ve been hoping that Coke or Pepsi would call me with an initiative around my pet cause, my own “semisweet initiative.” I want to create a soda that is less sweet and less bad for your health. Alas, they haven’t. Then I landed a carbonated beverage project with a major grocery store chain (for their own brands, formerly known as “private label” or “generics”). I knew right away that this was my opportunity to pitch my idea.

The food industry’s extraordinary ability to reformulate products that are healthier—but taste similar to the unhealthy ones—has done a huge disservice to the population. Let’s use the example of a carbonated cola. If we wanted to make a cola that is less bad for consumers, we could start by removing the sugar
(or high fructose corn syrup, but that’s another issue). So for years the food industry has been removing the sugar and replacing it with sweeteners that mimic the same hedonic level of sweetness in the sugar version. In fact, we’ve gotten very, very good at it, but this does nothing to retrain consumers’ taste buds to like colas with less sweetness. In fact, it teaches the consumer just the opposite: that beverages are supposed to taste exactly as sweet as they’ve always tasted. This is the wrong approach.

A better alternative would be to slowly reduce the amount of sugar and simply not replace it in order to create a reformulated drink that tastes
less sweet
. This is the only way we’re going to recalibrate consumers’ palate for sweetness, exactly as I’m suggesting for salt. The only reason the food industry hasn’t been quicker to reformulate food with less salt is that there’s no silver bullet for sodium in the way that sucralose or aspartame works for sugar. As you remember from our experience with the NASA meal program, every single flavor in every single product requires rebalancing after you remove salt from the equation. Still, the point is that what you eat on a daily basis sets your norm for what tastes right. But there is no definitive right: you can change your norm.

When I presented the concept of Semisweet Soda, the grocery store chain was very receptive to it. I wrote it up, and while we tested the idea with consumers, Silvina Dejter, a Mattson product developer with a fantastic palate and work ethic, started creating a prototype. I was sure she’d nail it in two weeks. I was soon to realize that my idealistic concept is a slam dunk in theory only.

It’s the seemingly easy projects that usually end up stumping you. We once were working on a dry seasoning mix with only four ingredients. It ended up being the hardest prototype we developed for that client. With only four ingredients there was nowhere to hide. We had only four levers to move up or down: move one and the other three changed significantly. My vision for Semisweet Soda was similar: I wanted a clean, short, simple ingredient statement. Most importantly I did not want to resort to using high-intensity sweeteners. The idea was to deliver a clean, pure sweet taste—without the bitterness or aftertaste of the nonsugar sweeteners—that was less sweet than regular sodas, and as a result, more refreshing. A secondary benefit of Semisweet Soda would be that it was lower in calories—something that we could use as a nation. But lowering calories was by far second to my bigger industry initiative, which, if successful, could be the model for how to lower the calories in many product categories over the years to come.

The first few rounds of these prototypes just didn’t taste right. Something was missing. Silvina had balanced the other ingredients in the formula—the acidity, the amount of flavor, the amount of color—and we still could not get it to taste good. I started thinking that maybe the reason why we couldn’t get this right is that there’s some magic carbonated soft drink “golden ratio” out there that we were unaware of. Even if there was, I was intent on breaking the sweetness paradigm. We tinkered and tried and still we couldn’t get it to taste right. This prototype became the bane of the project. The other carbonated drinks we were developing for the client—much more complicated in concept—were progressing nicely. Why was making a less-sweet soda so difficult? We tried mouthfeel enhancement, sweetness potentiators, and different sources of acid. With the prototype tasting meeting right around the corner, we put together what we thought was a damn good—though not yet perfect—semisweet beverage and flew out to drink the samples with our client.

Semisweet Soda was killed at that meeting, but not because it wasn’t a good idea. Consumers told us they wanted to buy it. The problem (I’m convinced now in retrospect and with sour grapes in my mouth) is that Semisweet Soda was sampled along with four or five other fully sweetened beverages at the meeting. These others set a sweetness norm for the tasters such that Semisweet Soda came up short. Our client had to focus on the products that they could get to market quickly, so Semisweet Soda didn’t make the cut even though I pleaded that, with few more months of development work (Rome wasn’t built in a day!), we could have nailed the product. I’m guessing that this very scenario has played out across the beverage industry many times. I’m also guessing that this is why there isn’t anything like Semisweet Soda on the market. In this country, at least.

In Japan in mid-2011, Pepsico introduced a product called Pepsi Dry. Upon first sip I felt vindicated. This was exactly the product I had wanted my client to launch. Pepsi Dry measured 5° Brix, which is about half the sweetness of a regular cola, yet it doesn’t contain any nonnutritive sweeteners to muck up the purity of the sweetness profile. It’s a tiny step in the right direction.

The most pressing health epidemics in today’s developed world are obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. Each disorder is influenced by what you eat, which is influenced by what you taste and smell. More federal, state, and nonprofit research
dollars need to be spent on basic taste and smell research, so that we can understand more about why we make the choices we do.

The fact that baby boomers are now aging may help fund the research done at institutions like Monell. This enormous group of older (read: wealthier) consumers will soon start—if they haven’t started already—to experience slight losses of smell (and possibly of taste). They would be the biggest beneficiaries of advancements in cures. There’s nothing quite like losing one of your senses to spur donations to the cause.