How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains

How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains

Synopsis

Conditioned Hypereating - a biological challenge made more difficult by an over stimulating food environment

Exploring reasons people overeat

Objectives:

Be able to list three components of hyperpalatable food

Describe a layered, multisensory food

Describe two strategies to counteract a conditioned response.

Points

The End of Overeating former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Dr. David A. Kessler

I saw a woman on Oprah who said she ate when she was happy, when she was sad, before her husband left for work and then after he left. I wanted to understand what was driving her behavior. It was not just that she was eating too much -- she was eating when she didn't want to eat. And nobody could explain why. I wanted to know, how could we help her? What was driving her? The greatest surprise was understanding how highly palatable foods had hijacked her brain.

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Definitions

“Hyper-palatable food that requires little chewing and goes down easily,”

Highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain.

Food companies “design food for irresistibility,” multisensory affects, most often through the brilliant combining of “layers” of salt, fat, and sugar, and varying combinations of “mouth feel”, texture, temperature and viscosity

‘bliss point’ - The precise point at which we derive the greatest pleasure from fat, sugar and salt

Take a Snickers bar. As we chew it, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel traps the peanuts so the entire combination of flavors is blissfully experienced in the mouth at the same time.

highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain

Photo #2, #3

– think of your own

How it works:

Food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system by combining fats, sugar...