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Why Fat, Salt and Sugar Stimulate Our Appetite and Promote Over Eating at Times
Almost two-thirds (about 66%) of U.S. adults age 20 or older are overweight -- about 62% of women and around 71% of men. Nearly one-third (about 31%) of American adults are so overweight that they are considered obese.
A fatty guy utterly expressed, " The latest science seemed to suggest being overweight was my destiny. I was fat because my body's "thermostat" was set high. If I lost weight, my body would try to get it back, slowing down my metabolism till I returned to my predetermined set point".
It was a known fact that for thousands of years, human body weight had stayed remarkably stable in the USA and UK. Now the question arises why so many people, in the US and UK in particular, were getting significantly fatter. It is remarkable to note that millions of calories passed through our bodies, yet with rare exceptions our weight neither rose nor fell. A perfect biological system seemed to be at work. Then, in the 80s, something changed.
In the USA, the number of obeses is gradually increasing at alarming rate because of their habit in taking fast foods. It is observed that through research that the Americans are entering their adult years at a significantly higher weight but, while on average everyone is getting heavier, the heaviest are gaining disproportionately more weight than others. The spread between those at the upper end of the weight curve and those at the lower end is widening. Overweight people are becoming more overweight
Obviously the question comes out," What has happened to add so many millions of dollars to so many millions of people? Certainly food has become more readily available, with larger portion sizes, more chain restaurants and a culture that promotes out-of-home eating. But having food available doesn't mean we have to eat it. What has been driving us to overeat ?".
It is certainly not a want born of fear of food shortages. Nor is it a want rooted in hunger or the love of exceptional food. We know, too, that overeating is not the sole province of those who are overweight. Even people who remain slim often feel embattled by their drive for food. It takes serious restraint to resist an almost overpowering urge to eat. Yet many, including doctors and healthcare professionals, still think that weight gainers merely lack willpower, or perhaps self-esteem. Few have recognized the distinctive pattern of overeating that has become widespread in the population. No one has seen loss of control as it's most defining characteristic.
"Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more," which was read this in scientific literature, and heard it in conversations with neuroscientists and psychologists. But here was a leading food designer, a Henry Ford of mass-produced food, revealing how his industry operates. To protect his business, he did not want to be identified, but he was remarkably candid, explaining how the food industry creates dishes to hit what he called the "three points of the compass."
Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain's reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behavior and makes us want to eat more. Many of us have what's called a "bliss point", at which we get the greatest pleasure from sugar, fat or salt. Combined in the right way, they make a product indulgent, high in "hedonic value".
During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in our capability to access and afford what scientists call highly "palatable" foods. By palatability, they don't just mean it tastes good: they are referring primarily to its capacity to stimulate the appetite. Restaurants are available at the epicenter of this explosion, along with an ever-expanding range of dishes that hit these three compass points. Sugar, fat and salt are either loaded into a core ingredient (such as meat, vegetables, potato or bread), layered on top of it, or both. Deep-fried tortilla chips are an example of loading – the fat is contained in the chip itself. When it is smothered in cheese, sour cream and sauce, that's layering.
It is not just that fast food chains serve food with more fat, sugar and salt, or that intensive processing virtually eliminates our need to chew before swallowing, or that snacks are now available at any time. It is the combination of all that, and more. Some of worth-mentioning fast makers are as follows:
Kentucky Fried chicken- a chain of fast food restaurants.
The basic principle of the fast food companies is to prepare food such a way that once the people take them, they automatically come to take the food. The main ingredients are generally flour, salt, MSG(a form of artificial salt), maltodextrin, sugar, corn syrup and spice, the fried coating imparts flavor that touch on all three point of the compass while giving the consumer the perception of a bargain – a big plate of food at a moderate price. The fast food companies regularly use processed chickens with much fat, beef t and pork meat which are processed in such a way that they are very tasty with good flavors after adding some chemical substances. In keeping chickens, beef and pork meat afresh, some artificial preservatives are always used. In order to produce chicken and other meat tasty and cheaper, their suppliers use lots of different hormones and artificial growth substances. These burgers are grilled with artificial flavoring chemicals. They generally serve with fried potatoes which are mixed with lots of salt. Some catch-ups are served with the meal. They make the fried chickens with brown coatings, which are made tasty with artificial chemicals." That makes the chicken look like more and gives it this wonderful oily flavor." Over time, the company began to realize there was less meat in a chicken nugget compared with a whole chicken, and a greater percentage of fried batter. But the real breakthrough is their popcorn chicken. "The smaller the piece of meat, the greater the percentage of fat pick-up," said the food designer. "Now, we have lots of pieces of a cheaper part of the chicken." The product has been "optimized on every dimension", with the fat, sugar and salt combining with the perception of good value virtually to guarantee consumer appeal.
Burger King's Whopper touched on the three points of the compass- then was altered for further effect. In its first, stripped-down form, the burger was explosively rich in fat, sugar and salt. Then the chain began adding more beef, extra cheese or a layer of bacon.
McDonald's broke new ground in another different way- by making food available on a whim. "The great growth has been the snacking occasion. You get hungry, you want something, your mind pushes off the reality of what you ought to eat, and you end up picking up a hamburger and a giant soda or French fries".
Next they introduced a high-fat, high-salt morning meal. "They took what they learned from the core lunch and dinner menu, and applied it to breakfast. The sausage McMuffin and the egg McMuffin are stand-ins for the hamburger. In effect, we are eating a morning hamburger."
Next comes Dunkin's Donut chain of food stores where food is available 24 hours. They have morning serving, lunch and dinner. We can take food in a branch store or take away their food. The food is made delicious with high calorie value. They serve excellent tea, coffee or ice cream, highly delicious. The ultimate aim of this business is to attract many customers all the time. The customers are once habituated and will to come over again. The customers do not know what they are eating, because they provide their own list of foods.
This kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite that it readily overrides the body's signals that should tell us, "I'm full." The food designer offered coleslaw as an example. When its ingredients are chopped roughly, it requires time and energy to chew. But when cabbage and carrots are softened in a high-fat dressing, coleslaw ceases to be "something with a lot of innate ability to satisfy".
This isn't to say that the food industry wants us to stop chewing altogether. It knows we want to eat a doughnut, not drink it. "The key is to create foods with just enough chew – but not too much. When you're eating these things, you've had 500, 600, 800, 900 calories before you know it." Foods that slip down don't leave us with a sense of being well fed. In making food disappear so swiftly, fat and sugar only leave us wanting more.
According to food consultant, Gail Vance Civille of management consultants Sensory Spectrum, fat is crucial to this process of lubrication, ensuring that a product melts in the mouth. In the past, she says, Americans typically chewed food up to 25 times before it was swallowed; now the average American chews 10 times. "If I have fat in there, I just chew it up and whoosh! Away it goes," she says. "You have a 'quick getaway', a quick melt."
The bar Snickers, Civille says, is "extraordinarily well engineered". Unlike many products whose nuts become annoyingly lodged between your teeth, the genius of Snickers is that as we chew, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel picks up the peanut pieces, so the entire candy is carried out of the mouth at the same time.
Kettle chips are another success story. Made of sugar-rich russet potatoes, they have a slightly bitter background note and brown irregularly, which gives them a complex flavor . High levels of fat generate easy mouth-melt, and surface variations add a level of interest beyond that found in mass-produced chips. Heightened complexity is the key to modern food design.
Different of Ice-creams: Not so many decades ago, a single flavor of ice-cream was a special treat. Our options ran to vanilla, chocolate and strawberry – and when we could buy all three in a single carton, we saw that as a great innovation. Now ice-cream has countless flavors and varieties; it comes mixed with M&M's or topped with caramel sauce.
When layers of complexity are built into food, the effect becomes more powerful. Sweetness alone does not account for the full impact of a fizzy drink – its temperature and tingle, resulting from the stimulation of the trigeminal nerve by carbonation and acid, are essential contributors as well.
"The complexity of the stimulus increases its association to a reward," says Gaetenp Di Chiara, an expert in neuroscience and pharmacology at the University of Cagliari in Italy. "Elements of that complexity include tastes that are familiar and well liked, especially if not always readily available, and the learning associated with having had a pleasurable experience with the same food in the past."
" The visual cue gains power and stimulates the urge we call "wanting". The more potent and complex foods become, the greater the rewards they may offer. The excitement in the brain increases our desire for further stimulation."
In theory there's a limit to how much stimulation rewarding foods can generate. We are supposed to habituate – to neuroadapt. When Di Chiara gave animals a cheesy snack called Fonzies, the levels of dopamine in their brains increased. Over time, habituation set in, dopamine levels fell and the food lost its capacity to activate their behavior.
But if the stimulus is powerful enough, novel enough or administered intermittently enough, the brain may not curb its dopamine response. Desire remains high. We see this with cocaine use, which does not result in habituation. Hyper- palatable foods alter the landscape of the brain in much the same way.
When Dr.Di Chiara carried out a research study on an animal, exposing repeated a high-fat chocolate drink. When he'd completed his experiment, he found "Important results!!!!" in the subject line. He had shown that dopamine response did not diminish over time with the chocolate drink. There was no habituation.
Novelty also impedes habituation, and intermittency is another driver. When an animal is given enough sugar-laden food for some time, that food is withdrawn after wards. Then it is provided t again in sufficient quantities, and dopamine levels may not diminish.
There's still a lot we don't know about the relationship between the dopamine-driven motivational system and our behavior in the presence of rewarding foods. But we do know that foods high in sugar, fat and salt are altering the biological circuitry of our brains. We have scientific techniques that demonstrate how these foods – and the cues associated with them – change the connections between the neural circuits and their response patterns.
Rewarding foods are rewiring our brains. As they do, we become more sensitive to the cues that lead us to anticipate the reward. In that circularity lays a trap: we can no longer control our responses to highly palatable foods because our brains have been changed by the foods we eat.
Dr David Kessler, former commissioner of the US Food and Drink Administration said, " I wanted to know how much the industry understood about how the food we eat affects us; about what I have termed "conditioned hyper- eating" – "conditioned" because it becomes an automatic response to widely available food, "hyper" because the eating is excessive and hard to control. I turned to Joseph Stigliz, a Nobel laureate in economics.
"Does the industry know that what it feeds us gets us to eat more?" I asked."
"The industry has jacked up what works for it," Stiglitz said. "The learning is evolutionary." Practical experience has been its guide – it does not need lab rats when it can try out its ideas on humans. Its decision-makers do not have to analyze human brain circuitry to discover what sells.
A venture capitalist who knows the business intimately cited Starbucks as a company that has recognized and responded brilliantly to a cultural need. The caffeine and sugar in the coffee, with their energizing effects, are certainly part of the equation, but the chain also offers something much more primal. "It's about warm milk and a bottle," he says. "One of my colleagues said, 'If I could put a nipple on it, I'd be a multimillionaire'."
But it was thinking creatively about how to attract more consumers that led Starbucks to the Frappuccino, the venture capitalist told me. Although its stores were crowded early in the day, by afternoon "they were so empty you could roll a bowling ball through them". The creation of a rich, sweet and comforting milkshake-like concoction utterly transformed the business. A Starbucks Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino comes with whipped cream and 18 teaspoons of sugar: all in all, this "drink" contains more calories than a personal-size pepperoni pizza, and more sweetness than six scoops of ice-cream. By encouraging us to consider any occasion for food an opportunity for pleasure and reward, the industry invites us to indulge a lot more often.
Starbucks learned a basic lesson: make enticing food easily and constantly available, keep it novel, and people will keep coming back for more. With food available in almost any setting, "the number of cues, the number of opportunities" to eat have increased, while the barriers to consumption have fallen, says ,David Mela,, senior scientist of weight management at the Uniliver Health Institute. "The environmental stimulus has changed."
Of course, when food is offered to us, we're not obliged to eat it. When it's on the menu, we don't have to order it. But this takes more than willpower. As an individual we can practice eating the food we want in a controlled way. As a society, we can identify the forces that drive overeating and find ways to diminish their power. That's what happened with the tobacco industry: attitudes to smoking shifted. Similar changes could be brought about in our attitudes to food – by making it mandatory for restaurants to list calorie counts on their menus; by clear labeling on food products; by monitoring food marketing. But until then few of us are immune to the ubiquitous presence of food, the incessant marketing and the cultural assumption that it's acceptable to eat anywhere, at any time.
Another fascinating food chain stores we call them the "taco chip challenge" – the challenge of controlled eating in the face of constant food availability. "Forty years ago, we might face the social equivalent of that taco chip challenge once a month. Now we face it every single day," David Mela said. "Every single day and every single place you go, those foods are there, those foods are cheap, and those foods are readily available for you to engage in. There is constant, constant opportunity."
Besides, those fast food companies mentioned earlier, there are small companies which include "Papas"," Blimpie", "Pizza Hut", Taco Bel" ,"White Castle" "Wendy's" "Wimpy" etc.
All of these companies have the same basic principle is to make money so that they can become rich within shortest possible time. They do not bother to look after the health of the Americans, starting from kids to old ones.
About the Author
The End of Overeating: Taking Control Of Our Insatiable Appetite, by David A Kessler, published by Penguin,UK.,is acknowledged
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