Betty Draper (January Jones) with her therapist on Mad Men Source: Hatch When someone with a serious mental illness – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder — takes pharmaceutical drugs for their condition, we’re obviously talking about medicine and the medical profession. Drugs affect the physiology of the body, and drug use needs to be monitored by someone…
Taste — essential to our survival — is complex. It’s influenced by our past experiences, the associations we make with specific foods, advertising, brand loyalties, cultural and ethnic preferences, and price. If we think of it as totally objective, determined exclusively by our taste buds, we’re underestimating it. This post describes studies that show food preferences are determined more by marketing promotions than by actual taste.
There’s no question that artificial sweeteners have fewer calories than sugar, but does using a sugar substitute lower the total number of calories we consume? Research indicates we might actually eat more. “If you eat a pound of chocolate, you’re done with it. At least for most people, your brain says, ‘That’s enough.’ This is hypothetical and needs to be tested, but maybe the sucralose sets the sweet taste response in motion but it might not turn the brain response off.”
How the press scared readers with headlines like “Hunt for DVT Cause Reveals Link to Grapefruit.” Wouldn’t you read a story that claims grapefruit causes deadly blood clots? The case was much more complicated than the grapefruit diet. It included birth control pills, a long car trip, and a pre-existing condition. “As several of the better stories pointed out, it’s unwise to do anything in extreme. When part of a balanced diet, grapefruit should not be dangerous. Given increasing evidence of the potency of the grapefruit flavonoid naringin, medical science may want to consider whether women on birth control pills should avoid eating grapefruit every day.”
Grapefruit is a particularly bitter taste – something supertasters are unlikely to indulge in. This post and the next concern the story of a woman who had been on a grapefruit diet – and taken a long car ride – just before experiencing deep vein thrombosis (DVT). … “How did the media handle this story? It was all about the grapefruit, something anyone might innocently eat — and then promptly die. Or at least lose a leg to gangrene. I suppose, to give the media the benefit of the doubt, they probably saw this as a ‘teachable moment.’ Unfortunately, outright fear of ‘killer grapefruit’ was the wrong lesson.”
Are there health implications to being a supertaster as opposed to a medium or non-taster? The different groups have different preferences for and aversions to fruits, vegetables, sugar, and fats, all of which have implications for the impact of diet on health and weight gain. ”If you go through life as a nontaster, it takes more to get the flavor out of food than it does for a supertaster.” (Since this post was written (April 2009) there is new research that refutes the popular belief that fruits and vegetables protect against cancer. See Study further erodes evidence for eating fruits and vegetables to prevent cancer.)
The flavors that make good food taste delicious are dissolved in fat. Scientists used to think that when we ate fat, we tasted these dissolved flavors and that fat itself was tasteless. We now know that’s not quite true. But the efforts involved in isolating the “taste” of fat are considerable. … “Do we ‘taste’ fat? It’s complicated. Every so often you see headlines like ‘Taste bud for fatty foods found’ or ‘Tongue sensors seem to taste fat.’ I’m not yet convinced we ‘taste’ fat in the same way we experience the taste of sugar, salt, sour, and bitter.”
Fats can make any food taste better, and it’s in our interest — genetically — to prefer foods that the body needs. Unfortunately, a typical restaurant meal can have more than eight tablespoons of fat — more than an entire stick of butter. That’s way more than we need in one sitting. (The recommended daily allowance for fat is four and a half tablespoons.)
You can also have your DNA tested to see if you have the gene for bitter taste. As explained in the post on The genetics of supertasting, however, this may not be all that accurate. “It’s not clear that do-it-yourself genetic testing is worth the price. If you’re concerned about disease, you’d probably be better off with a healthy diet, not smoking, and moderate exercise.” (Since I wrote this post in April of 2009, the FDA has decided to look into new rules on direct-to-consumer genetic testing.)
