Hyper
Palatable Foods that People Can’t Stop Eating
November 16, 2019 Don Porter
Hyper-palatable foods
are those made with a mix of ingredients/chemicals that light up people’s
brain-reward neural circuitry and overpower mechanisms that are supposed to
signal when we’ve had enough to eat. Because these foods essentially enhance
their consumption, overweight and obesity can be the result. Of 84,000 chemicals
listed only an estimates 30,000 are actually in use 2019. This class of foods which are often processed foods or sweets
containing alluring combinations of sugar, fat, sodium and carbohydrates, have
been found to be some of the most highly consumed foods in the United States.
Food companies have devised formulas for these foods to make them highly
palatable and thus enhance their consumption. TOO MANY foods are made to Look
good, Smell good, Taste good, Be addictive, and Last a Long time ! All done with use of MANY chemicals !!
While there is no
standardized definition for hyper palatable foods, typically descriptive
definitions such as “desserts”, “fast foods” and “sweets” will identify these
types of foods. However, those words aren’t specific to the actual mechanisms
through which the ingredients in a particular food lead to their enhanced
palatability. Defining these types of foods has been a substantial limitation.
A team sought to
define the criteria for hyper palatable foods through conducting a literature
review and then employing nutrition software and applying their definition to
over 7,700 food items. They essentially took all the descriptive definitions of
these foods from the literature and one by one entered them into the nutrition
program to see how it quantifies a food’s ingredients. The software provides in
fine grained detail a data set which specifies how many calories, fat, sodium,
sugar, carbohydrates and fiber are in the foods. They looked for items that met
the criteria established by the literature review as enhancing palatability and
specifically when the synergy between key ingredients in a certain food creates
an artificially palatable experience which is larger than any key ingredient
would produce by itself.
They identified these particular synergies with specific values
which were applied to three clusters – combinations of sodium and fat (such as
bacon and hot dogs), combinations of simple sugars and fats (such as ice cream,
cookies, and cake), and combinations of sodium and carbohydrates (such as
pretzels, chips and popcorn).
Essentially the team
wanted to be able to identify foods that seem to cluster together which what
seemed like similar levels of at least two ingredients. That is the theoretical
basis for producing the synergistic palatability effect. Through a process
using visualization, they were able to see there were essentially three food
types that appear to cluster together in relation to their ingredients. Once
the team was able to quantify characteristics of hyper palatability, they were
able to apply their definition to foods that are cataloged in the U. S. Dep of
Agriculture’s FNDDS (Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies). The hope
was to discover just how prevalent these types of foods are in the hope was in our
diets.
The team discovered
that 62% of foods in the FNDDS met the criteria for at least one of the three
clusters they had identified. Most of those foods (70%) were high in sodium and
fat (such as egg or meat dishes and milk based foods like cheese dips). 25% of
the hyper palatable foods were high in sugar and fat and 16% of those foods
were also high in sodium and carbohydrates. Less than 10% qualified in more
than one cluster. The most shocking
discovery were items labeled as reduced or no fat, salt, sugar or calories
represented 5% of hyper palatable foods. Additionally, of all the items that
were labeled as low/reduced/no fat, sodium and/or sugar in the FNDDS, 49% met
the criteria as a being a hyper palatable food.
·
Palm Oil. ...
·
Shortening. ...
·
White Flour, Rice, Pasta, and Bread. ...
·
High Fructose Corn Syrup, Sugar...
·
Artificial Sweeteners. ...
·
Sodium Benzoate and Potassium Benzoate. ...
·
Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) ...
·
Sodium Nitrates and Sodium Nitrites.
More evidence is
needed, however if research starts to support that these hyper palatable foods
may be problematic for society, it might warrant food labels saying “this is
hyper palatable”. And it might also lead to restriction of certain foods that
are available in particular places such as elementary school cafeterias that
serve kids whose brains are still developing and might be impacted by these
kinds of foods. The plan is to build
on the current work by analyzing how the ubiquity of these hyper palatable
foods in the U.S. diet compares to foods in other countries.
