From WSJ
How Flavor Drives Nutrition
For more than 50 years, our food has been getting blander—but the best diets turn out to also be delicious
By MARK SCHATZKER
April 9, 2015
For nearly a half century, America has been on a witch hunt to find the ingredient that is making us fat. In the 1980s, the culprit was fat itself. Next it was carbs. Today, sugar is the enemy—unless you’re caught up in the war on gluten.
And none of it has worked. Obesity is now closing in on smoking as our No. 1 preventable cause of death. The U.S. has rarely failed at anything the way it has failed at weight loss.
Perhaps that is because we’re missing a crucial piece of the food puzzle. Oddly enough, all those diet gurus and bureaucrats hardly ever ask the simplest question: How does it taste? We’ve fixated on what food does inside the body, but we’ve almost totally ignored why it gets there in the first place. Even a child knows: We eat because food is delicious.
We have been trained to see this as a bad thing. After all, if food weren’t so appetizing, we wouldn’t eat so much of it. But the human body takes flavor very seriously. Our flavor-sensing equipment occupies more DNA than any other bodily system. If deliciousness is our enemy, why are we programmed to seek it out?
Every other animal depends on taste and smell to identify nutrients crucial to life. Insects use flavor chemicals to distinguish between food and poison. Diabetic lab rats instinctively avoid carbs. Sheep who are deficient in essential minerals, such as calcium or phosphorus, will crave flavors associated with them. And monkeys infected with gut parasites will eat specific leaves that alleviate their conditions. “Flavor,” says Fred Provenza, a behavioral ecologist and professor emeritus at Utah State University, “is the body’s way of identifying important nutrients and remembering what foods they come from.”
Humans are no different. In the 18th century, sailors ravaged by scurvy were gripped by intense longings for fruits and vegetables. Pregnant women are nauseated by foods that their bodies perceive as toxic.
But perhaps the most striking proof of such nutritional wisdom comes from a 1939 study in which a group of toddlers were put in charge of feeding themselves. They were offered 34 nutritionally diverse whole foods, including water, potatoes, beef, bone jelly, carrots, chicken, grains, bananas and milk. What each child ate, and how much, was entirely up to him or her.
The results were astonishing. Instead of binging on the sweetest foods, the toddlers were drawn to the foods that best nourished them. They ate more protein during growth spurts and more carbs and fat during periods of peak activity. After an outbreak of mononucleosis, curiously, they consumed more raw beef, carrots and beets. One child with a severe vitamin D deficiency even drank cod liver oil of his own volition until he was cured. By the end of the experiment, one doctor was so impressed with the toddlers’ health that he described them as “the finest group of specimens” he’d ever seen in their age group.
These toddlers knew nothing about carbs, fat or gluten. They just ate what tasted good to them.
A 2006 paper in the journal Science shed light on the chemistry underlying those flavor cravings. Scientists Stephen Goff and Harry Klee discovered that the 20 most important flavor compounds in tomatoes are all synthesized from important nutrients, such as omega-3 fats and essential amino acids. In other words, what makes a tomato nutritious also makes it delicious. This undeniable link, they wrote, suggests that flavor compounds “provide important information about the nutritional makeup of foods.”
Read more from WSJ >>
How Flavor Drives Nutrition
For more than 50 years, our food has been getting blander—but the best diets turn out to also be delicious
By MARK SCHATZKER
April 9, 2015
For nearly a half century, America has been on a witch hunt to find the ingredient that is making us fat. In the 1980s, the culprit was fat itself. Next it was carbs. Today, sugar is the enemy—unless you’re caught up in the war on gluten.
And none of it has worked. Obesity is now closing in on smoking as our No. 1 preventable cause of death. The U.S. has rarely failed at anything the way it has failed at weight loss.
Perhaps that is because we’re missing a crucial piece of the food puzzle. Oddly enough, all those diet gurus and bureaucrats hardly ever ask the simplest question: How does it taste? We’ve fixated on what food does inside the body, but we’ve almost totally ignored why it gets there in the first place. Even a child knows: We eat because food is delicious.
We have been trained to see this as a bad thing. After all, if food weren’t so appetizing, we wouldn’t eat so much of it. But the human body takes flavor very seriously. Our flavor-sensing equipment occupies more DNA than any other bodily system. If deliciousness is our enemy, why are we programmed to seek it out?
Every other animal depends on taste and smell to identify nutrients crucial to life. Insects use flavor chemicals to distinguish between food and poison. Diabetic lab rats instinctively avoid carbs. Sheep who are deficient in essential minerals, such as calcium or phosphorus, will crave flavors associated with them. And monkeys infected with gut parasites will eat specific leaves that alleviate their conditions. “Flavor,” says Fred Provenza, a behavioral ecologist and professor emeritus at Utah State University, “is the body’s way of identifying important nutrients and remembering what foods they come from.”
Humans are no different. In the 18th century, sailors ravaged by scurvy were gripped by intense longings for fruits and vegetables. Pregnant women are nauseated by foods that their bodies perceive as toxic.
But perhaps the most striking proof of such nutritional wisdom comes from a 1939 study in which a group of toddlers were put in charge of feeding themselves. They were offered 34 nutritionally diverse whole foods, including water, potatoes, beef, bone jelly, carrots, chicken, grains, bananas and milk. What each child ate, and how much, was entirely up to him or her.
The results were astonishing. Instead of binging on the sweetest foods, the toddlers were drawn to the foods that best nourished them. They ate more protein during growth spurts and more carbs and fat during periods of peak activity. After an outbreak of mononucleosis, curiously, they consumed more raw beef, carrots and beets. One child with a severe vitamin D deficiency even drank cod liver oil of his own volition until he was cured. By the end of the experiment, one doctor was so impressed with the toddlers’ health that he described them as “the finest group of specimens” he’d ever seen in their age group.
These toddlers knew nothing about carbs, fat or gluten. They just ate what tasted good to them.
A 2006 paper in the journal Science shed light on the chemistry underlying those flavor cravings. Scientists Stephen Goff and Harry Klee discovered that the 20 most important flavor compounds in tomatoes are all synthesized from important nutrients, such as omega-3 fats and essential amino acids. In other words, what makes a tomato nutritious also makes it delicious. This undeniable link, they wrote, suggests that flavor compounds “provide important information about the nutritional makeup of foods.”
Read more from WSJ >>
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