Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food PDF
Preview Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food
WHY YOU EAT WHAT YOU EAT THE SCIENCE BEHIND OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD RACHEL HERZ, PHD W. W. NORTON & COMPANY Independent Publishers Since 1923 New York | London FOR JAMIE AND EVERYONE WHO LOVES TO EAT. CONTENTS Introduction 1 THE FAB FOUR 2 TASTY 3 FOLLOW YOUR NOSE 4 FOOD FIGHT 5 EYE CANDY 6 THE SOUND AND THE FEELING 7 MIND OVER MUNCHIES 8 ARE YOU FULL YET? 9 COMFORT FOOD 10 BUYING INDULGENCES 11 FOOD IS LOVE Acknowledgments Notes Index WHY YOU EAT WHAT YOU EAT INTRODUCTION In September 2013, The Telegraph, a British newspaper, reported on a “revolt” fulminating over the newly introduced rounded shape of Cadbury’s iconic Dairy Milk chocolate bar, which had previously more closely resembled a Hershey’s bar. Hundreds of disgruntled customers complained that the rounder pieces were “sickly” and “too sugary” compared to the original square pieces—according to 1 one critic, the new bar was “all wrong.” But the food titan Kraft, which had bought Cadbury in 2010, insisted that the recipe had not changed. If Kraft hadn’t changed the recipe, why were so many people protesting? Enter the budding field of neurogastronomy—the scientific endeavor to understand the interactions between our brain, food, and eating. Ever since I can remember I have been sensorially infatuated with food— feeling up the bread, taking bites out of chocolates and putting them back in the box, sniffing cloves of garlic and unground coffee beans, bewitched by the sizzle of fajitas. As a sensory and cognitive neuroscientist who has been studying the psychology of smell since 1990, I am captivated by how our minds change our perception of the world around us—especially what we put into our mouths. Why You Eat What You Eat stems from this intersection and my quest to answer the questions: how and why do our senses, mind, and environment impact our experience of food and our motivation to eat? And how does food alter our physiology, mood, and behavior? In this book, you will meet various people whose experiences with eating inform the complex and multilayered relationships with food that we all have, including an extremely picky eater, a man who lost his sense of smell, someone who never feels full unless he eats rice, and an accomplished political scientist who is forced to sabotage her diet in order to work as hard as she does. We will learn how scents change the way foods taste, how music and color alter our perception of wine, how visual illusions can determine both how much food we put on our plates and how fast we consume it, and why so many people order tomato juice on airplanes. In Why You Eat What You Eat I will explain how taste and our emotions are intertwined: why eating sweets can make us kinder, how depression can make grapes taste more sour, and how bitterness can change our moral outlook. I’ll also discuss how what we eat can change our behavior, like the surprising way making ethical food purchases, such as buying organic, can alter the way we deal with other people, as well as how our behavior can change what we eat, such as why bringing a reusable bag to the grocery store leads to more chips and cookies ending up in the cart. We will uncover the processes that cause us to be seduced by resplendent treats, and discover how the number of people who are at the Super Bowl party changes the number of chicken wings we’ll eat, and that whether our team wins or loses alters our eating behavior the next day. I’ll tell you the secret to resisting going back for thirds, and maybe even seconds, at the all-you-can-eat buffet. You will also learn various useful techniques for managing cravings and improving your experience of food, such as why paying attention to what you eat makes it taste more delicious, how aromas can diminish food urges, the ideal type of plate to use if you are trying to curb your intake, and why the first bite of blueberry pie is always better than the last. I’ll explain how marketing companies are using this science to take advantage of the link between our senses and our desires, and how publicizing the reality of how much we have to exercise to offset the calories in the food we eat can lead to wiser food and beverage purchases. We will explore how the time of day, our age, our hormone levels, the mood we are in, physical activity, our personality, our beliefs, and what drugs and alcohol we have consumed can influence our perception of food, what and how much we crave and eat, and even whether or not we’ll gain weight from doing so. We will question some of the latest headlines on diet and human health, including “Is salt bad for you?” as well as whether what we eat can change our susceptibility to disease. This book addresses how each of us—from omnivorous hedonists to strict vegans—brings different talents and weaknesses to the table, and how culture and our twenty-first-century obesogenic environment present challenges that humans have never before faced. Why You Eat What You Eat will take you on a voyage of sensory, scientific, and self discovery that will immerse you in how psychology, neurology, and physiology shape and influence our personal relationships with food, as well as how food alters the relationships we have with ourselves, society, and one another. Equipped with this knowledge, you will have a better understanding of how and why our senses, mind, and environment are woven into our experience of eating. With a fuller comprehension of your own gastronomic motivations, you will enjoy a happier, healthier, and more satisfying relationship with food. So let’s start at the beginning. So let’s start at the beginning. 1 THE FAB FOUR T he very first life forms on this planet had what we might call a sense of taste —the ability to recognize chemicals in their environment so as to know whether a little tidbit would be nutritious, and to stay away from other tidbits that might want to devour it. Taste and smell—the chemical senses—were the first senses to evolve. And taste is everywhere. Moths have taste receptors on their wings. Flies have taste receptors on their knees. Tarantulas taste with their feet. Octopuses taste with their whole body—even their eyelids. We humans have taste receptors all over us as well. We have taste receptors in our pancreas, liver, and—if you’re a man— testicles. We have taste receptors in our lungs that, when we inhale something noxious, send a signal to the brain to make us cough, so as to expel what shouldn’t be in there. We have taste receptors in our nose that help fight infections, and taste receptors in our gut that influence our perception of food. The taste receptors in our gut also tell the brain whether we should keep eating an ice cream sundae or a cheeseburger, and when to stop, and it is believed that disturbances in the signaling pathways of these taste receptors play a role in the development of a variety of diet-induced illnesses, from irritable bowel 1 syndrome to diabetes. But only the taste receptors located inside the 5,000 to 10,000 taste buds on the tongue and, what may come as a surprise, taste buds that are located on the roof of the mouth and in the throat are hooked up to the taste cortex in the brain to give us the perception of what we call taste. We can’t tell how sour an apple is with our liver. There are many mysteries and misconceptions about taste. For one, not all animals experience the same taste sensations as we do. Cats, from Fluffy the house cat to Cecil the lion, can’t taste sweet. Whales and dolphins only taste salt. Moreover, the notion that we perceive salty, sour, sweet, and bitter on different Moreover, the notion that we perceive salty, sour, sweet, and bitter on different parts of the tongue is wrong. Here is the story of how the false “tongue map” was born. In 1942, Edwin Boring, a psychology professor at Harvard University, read a confusing description of taste sensitivities that had been published by a German graduate student in 1901, and somewhere between the student’s fuzzy account and Boring’s translation the facts were lost. Boring incorrectly inferred that specific areas of the tongue were responsible for detecting specific tastes—the back of the tongue for bitter, the tip for sweet, the sides of the tongue for sour and salty—and lo, the notorious tongue map emerged. Then, in 1974, Virginia Collins, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, reexamined the original German data and found that though there are tiny differences in taste sensitivity throughout the tongue, these differences are inconsequential and all tastes can be detected anywhere on the tongue—except, as it turns out, along the center line, which is “taste blind.” If you dip your finger in salt water and place it on the center line you won’t taste anything, but move your finger to the right or left and you will. For the past forty years the truth about taste and the tongue has been plainly known, but the fiction of the tongue map still routinely makes its appearance in textbooks and online taste anatomy descriptions. Although the tongue map is wrong, the taste cortex in the brain does appear to be laid out in a maplike fashion, with different clusters of neurons specialized to respond to the different basic tastes in discrete regions: one region for sour, one for bitter, one for sweet, and one for salty. In fact, the most recent research suggests that we may not need a tongue at all in order to perceive tastes. Charles Zuker, a neuroscientist at Columbia University whose laboratory has transformed our understanding of taste, found that electrically tickling the bitter neurons in the brains of mice caused their mouths to purse and their bodies to shudder as though they were tasting bitter, but when they were given a real bitter liquid and the “sweet” brain region was stimulated, they behaved as though they 2 enjoyed the bitter taste. Your mouth detects the chemicals for salt, sour, sweet, and bitter, but it’s your brain that tells you the difference between anchovies and applesauce, and signals that sugar is pleasurable and bitter is nasty. The tantalizing implication is that our problems with resisting sweet foods and beverages could be solved by switching on specific neurons when we want to turn chocolate cake into the devil’s food. This is not mere science fiction. Pharmaceutical companies are working feverishly to develop drugs that will take the joy out of jelly and make kale taste like candy, in an effort to motivate healthier eating habits.
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