Scary Food Science

Sumber:
http://mytechnologyworld9.blogspot.com/2011/07/scary-food-science.html

Show me a chicken nugget and I will show you the world. The world, that
is, of highly palatable foods engineered by the food industry to go down
easily — in some cases, to quite literally "melt in the mouth" — while
also stimulating us to crave more.

Commercial foods like chicken nuggets, French fries, chips, crackers,
cookies and pastries are designed to be virtually irresistible. And, for
a lot of reasons most of us don't fully understand, they are.

There's a "biological basis for why it's so hard for millions of
Americans to resist food," former FDA commissioner David Kessler, MD,
explained in a recent National Public Radio (NPR) interview. "We are all
wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment," he says.
"For some of us, it could be alcohol; it could be illegal drugs; it
could be gambling, sex or tobacco. For many of us, though, one of the
most salient stimuli in our environment is food. And how do you make
food even more salient? Fat, sugar and salt."

Of course, fat, sugar and salt have been around as kitchen staples for
centuries, but it wasn't until the past few decades that they became as
abundant and cheap as they are now. And during the course of those same
few decades, food manufacturers have been busily leveraging science and
technology to enhance their products — manipulating food in ways that
not only play on our innate fondness for sugar, salt and fat, but also
dramatically boost their overall taste, texture, aroma and appearance.

Think about the flavor of beef infused into McDonald's signature French
fries, the creamy filling injected into a Twinkie or the fake
crosshatched grill marks stamped onto a KFC grilled chicken breast, and
you begin to get the idea. The stuff regularly served up at every chain
restaurant, gas station and food court amounts to an edible — and
irresistible — amusement park. And it's all fueled by food science and
technology we'd have a hard time imitating at home.

"It's the multisensory combinations that provide the roller coaster in
your mouth," says Kessler, a professor at the University of
California–San Francisco and author of The End of Overeating: Taking
Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (Rodale, 2009). And over the
past 30 years, food manufacturers have been coming up with increasingly
wild rides.

"When we were kids," recalls Kessler, "it was enough to put sugar in
water, add a little coloring and get a relatively simple sensory
experience called Kool-Aid. Since then, food makers have upped the
ante." Today we've got Flamin' Hot Cheetos and Double Chocolate
Strawberry Cake Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Doritos brand snacks come in
more than a dozen different varieties (including "Late Night All Nighter
Cheeseburger"), all of which promise to "deliver a powerful crunch that
unlocks the bold and unique flavors you crave."

If we're going to stand any chance of resisting this new breed of
consumables, we need to have a better understanding about what we're up
against. That starts with a brief lesson in food technology.

This Is Your Brain on Processed Food

The human brain has many attributes, but resisting Krispy Kreme
doughnuts is not one of them. "The most salient foods are those with
fat, sugar and salt," Kessler reminds us. "The advantage those foods
have is that they are hardwired from our taste receptors directly into
our brains."

Being attracted to high-calorie foods worked to our advantage when food
was scarce and humans had to hunt and gather for a living, explains
Christopher Ochner, PhD, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia
University's Obesity Research Center. "The problem is that, today, the
food never runs out."

On the contrary, it's dangled in front of us around the clock. Food
makers capitalize on the body's drive for calorie-dense food by
providing a steady, inexpensive supply of the stuff that's rendered
virtually irresistible through techno- and science-savvy enhancements
that our brains and bodies have not yet developed resistance to.

The taste preferences that food-product designers play upon today
evolved over many thousands of years as a survival mechanism, notes Dana
Small, PhD, a brain researcher at Yale University School of Medicine.
They were a means for our ancestors to identify which foods had the
dense caloric value their bodies needed to support huge daily energy
expenditures. Hardwired as they are, these preferences aren't something
from which we can easily free ourselves.

"You may not even like the taste of a sugary treat initially," Small
says, "but as long as it has a major caloric impact, the brain will keep
you coming back for more." That's why we are more easily triggered to
want cake than to want carrots. "Carrots are better for you, but they
have fewer calories," Small explains. And from the human body's
instinctive, short-term perspective, calories are more essential than
nutrients for survival.

The fact that evolutionary food cues from our primordial past still sway
our behavior today wouldn't be such a problem if the cue for cake came
only occasionally, as it did in generations past. But thanks to the
growth of fast-food restaurants and the ubiquitous presence of processed
foods — at schools, drugstores and even hospitals — the cue for a
high-calorie treat may now confront us several times a day.

"You can't walk 10 steps without tripping over a McDonald's and falling
into a Wendy's," says Ochner. "Highly rewarding food is available
everywhere."

And the chemicals in our brains are not designed to help us resist.
Dopamine, for one, is a neurotransmitter that creates and sustains
focus. Thanks to dopamine's knack for keeping the brain focused on the
most pressing stimuli, our ancestors outmaneuvered predators. But
dopamine can also shackle the brain to stimuli such as drugs, alcohol or
food. It makes certain stimuli highly meaningful, explains Kessler (who
admits his focus is easily usurped by chocolate-chip cookies): "For each
of us it's going to be different, but the food industry knows that
layering fat on top of sugar on top of salt makes the food that much
harder for the brain to resist."

A Sensory Explosion

When it comes to creating irresistible food products, the fat-sugar-salt
trio is only one part of a rather involved, high-stakes industrial
strategy. Manufacturers also work hard to develop mouth-watering aromas
and carefully engineered textures. They also invest in ad campaigns that
equate their products with happiness and success. "The more multisensory
the stimuli," says Kessler, "the greater the reward and the stronger the
emotional cues."

Companies are willing to pay big bucks for "sensory science," the kind
of in-depth research that tells them exactly how to design a product
that appeals to all the senses. No one knows this better than Gail Vance
Civille, founder and president of Sensory Spectrum, a New Jersey–based
consumer research firm. Civille tests consumer reactions across a range
of different sensory areas.

In the all-important area of taste, for example, what used to be a
simple question of sweet versus savory has evolved into a complex
science that the food industry calls "flavor dynamics."

Take a basic chocolate bar. The expert tasters at Sensory Spectrum
identified a wide range of flavors in a basic chocolate bar — everything
from winey, woody, nutty, citrusy, floral, alkaline and sourness to
flavors of soap, cardboard, casein, cooked milk, spray-dried milk and
developed milk. A client can then take this information and tweak its
formulas to boost certain flavors and suppress others.

Civille and her colleagues will also evaluate a product's texture. Food
manufacturers are always searching for the perfect "mouthfeel," which is
why fat is so prevalent in processed food. Fat not only bestows crunch,
creaminess and contrast, but it also blends flavors and even acts as a
lubricant, allowing people to eat faster. "Fat adds to a smooth, even
bolus (the wad that forms when you chew food) in the mouth," says Kessler.

Another texture trick is to presoften food by mashing it. "The substrate
of today's foods has been removed, meaning processed food is basically
prechewed," notes Kessler. This allows us to eat things like chicken
tenders more quickly and easily, which can lead to unconscious eating —
and overeating.

"We used to have foods that took more work," Civille explained in a
recent NPR interview. "In the [45 years] that I have been in the food
business, we used to have foods that we chewed 15 times and 20 times and
30 times before we swallowed. Now, there's rarely a food out there,
outside of a sweet, chewy candy, that you have to chew more than 12
times before it's gone." Instead, after a couple quick chews and a
swallow, "you're in for the next hit to get more pleasure."

Breaking the Cycle

With two-thirds of Americans now overweight, it's safe to say that our
processed-food addiction is messing with our metabolisms as well as our
brains. A number of health experts, including Kessler, assert that food
companies are actively capitalizing on our genetically hardwired
impulses. Food scientists like Civille, meanwhile, argue that the food
industry is simply giving people what they want. They may both be right.

Civille, for her part, says she does not believe the food industry is
consciously trying to "design food to trick, track or coerce consumers."
But she does agree with Kessler that government and media both have a
role to play in helping to educate consumers about what goes into the
processed foods we consume and how some of that pleasure-boosting
science and technology can work against us.

Regulations, incentives and information campaigns may all be a long time
coming, though. In the meantime, here are some tips that you can use to
curb your consumption of processed foods and to reduce your
vulnerability to conditioned hypereating:

Create structure: The Achilles' heel of a healthy diet, says Kessler, is
being caught off-guard — hungry and at the mercy of your environment.
Instead, plan what you're going to eat and when. Meals and snacks should
be eaten at regular intervals, and they should be appealing enough to
keep you satisfied (versus feeling tempted to make a fast-food run), but
predictable enough that your senses don't feel overstimulated.

Eat substantial foods: Foods made from ingredients that race willy-nilly
through your digestive system, like simple sugars and refined flours,
are not as satisfying as foods that digest more gradually. Protein has
the best staying power, taking 2.5 times longer to digest than simple
sugars. High-fiber foods, like legumes, fruits, veggies and whole
grains, also leave the body feeling full longer because they add volume
to meals and take longer to digest.

Re-size portions: In a culture of super-sized portions, it's easy to
forget how much it really takes to feel satisfied (vs. stuffed). To
regain a sense of portion control, try eating only half your normal
amount of food at a single meal. Then pay close attention to how your
body feels 30 minutes later. Notice how you feel 90 minutes later. For
most people, a just-right meal is one that staves off hunger for about
four hours; a just-right snack keeps you satisfied about two hours, says
Kessler, who calls this practice "just-right eating."

Get comfortable with eating real food: A lot of people opt for
easy-to-eat processed foods because "they don't like to be embarrassed
when they eat," says Civille. "They don't want to get something stuck in
their teeth, and they don't like to be eating complicated foods in
public." In the United States, many otherwise-civilized adults aren't
confident of proper knife-and-fork techniques, which may incline them
toward bite-size, hand-held and nuggetized foods, thereby limiting the
array of whole foods they eat regularly. If you don't yet feel confident
eating real foods and enjoying them in all their lovely messiness, make
a point of developing that confidence.

Change your relationship with food: Instead of looking at food as if
it's your friend, try and deactivate those emotional connections, says
Kessler: "I look at food that's highly processed and I say, 'It's only
going to stimulate me. It's not going to sate me. It's only going to
make me want more." In much the same way we changed our view of tobacco
from a sexy to a decidedly unsexy thing, he adds, we can try to do the
same with processed food.

Don't bring it into the house: If your pantry is full of processed
foods, some part of you will be constantly aware of their presence.
Those foods will "call out to you," says Kessler, and just seeing them,
or even knowing they are there on the shelf, may be enough to activate
your brain and trigger cravings.

Don't resort to deprivation: It's not that you can't ever have another
serving of French fries. In fact, Kessler argues, adopting a mindset of
deprivation will just trigger more intense cravings. The goal is to
reclaim control over what you eat and when, and to stay conscious of
your entire eating experience — before, during and after.

Ultimately, taking back your mind and metabolism means becoming more
aware of not only what you eat but also what drives you to eat it.
Self-awareness is the greatest tool people can wield against the assault
of processed foods, says Kessler.

But remember: Self-awareness doesn't mean self-denial. It means learning
how to delight in foods that are good for you, and how to enjoy less
healthy edible pleasures in moderation, on occasion, when you
consciously decide to.

"By consciously paying attention to the pleasures of taste and the
experience of eating, you can deepen the reward value of any food you
choose," says Kessler, "so choose well."