Weight Loss
that much of what you “taste” when you’re eating isn’t about your palate. A new branch of research is proving the assumption that all of your senses are at play when you eat. To experience these findings firsthand, I paid a visit to Charles Spence, Ph.D., director of the University of Oxford’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory in London. Spence, an apple-faced man with a penchant for brightly colored pants, has popularized the term “gastrophysics” to refer to the science behind brain-belly communication. Spence guided me through a multicourse meal designed by Kitchen Theory, which is kind of a pop-up restaurant-slash-food lab that incorporates Spence’s findings. Each course, prepared by chef Jozef Youssef, was meant to manipulate one of my senses. Here’s what I learned.
Spence explained that there’s truth to the adage “we eat with our eyes.” When our food loses color, our brain loses context.
How Sight Makes You Fat
3/ Swap Your Dishes Try eating out of a small bowl instead of a big plate. The rim of a plate may fool you into thinking there’s less food than there really is, Spence says. A bowl, especially filled to the top, gives the impression of abundance, possibly leading you to eat less.
A FEAST OF THE SENSES
Charles Spence, Ph.D. (above, left), and Chef Jozef Youssef (above, right) mind-bend diners’ tastebuds. 64 MensHealth.com | March 2017
2/ Look Past the Package People tend to believe that a product in matte packaging is healthier than one in a glossy container, according to Spence. The nutrition facts are what matter: Always check them when you’re shopping for food.
How Smell Makes You Fat Back in 2000, in his research on iced tea for a food company, Spence made an interesting discovery: When people opened a bottle of iced tea, they thought it smelled evocative. But when they drank the tea, the flavor was far more subdued, disappointing them. Your brain doesn’t like having its predictions be wrong, he says. This may be why a fastfood chicken sandwich smells so good but never seems to deliver. He also found one way to fix the conflict between smell and taste: adding sugar. That way the tongue experiences the level of flavor it had expected based on scent. For example, peeling back a package of Oreos releases such a potent cookie smell that Nabisco likely had to dial up the sugar to meet expectations.
Photographs by ANDRE W WOFFINDEN
My first course was entirely white. Four appetizers sat atop an ivory platter: a snowy ball, cloudlike cotton candy, colorless globules with the consistency of egg yolk, and a triangular chip with a cuboid topping. With Spence looking on, I was told to eat them in order from sour to salty to bitter to sweet. I went for a chip. Spence asked why. I told him the topping looked like it was pickled, so it might be sour. Spence suggested that there could be something else going on. Sweetness is typically associated with round shapes (think chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter cups). Hard, angled edges (pickle spears, lemon wedges) communicate sourness and bitterness. But then I bit into the chip. It was sour, yes, but even after Spence told me the topping contained hearts of palm, white onion, lime, and olive oil, I couldn’t taste any of those.
1/ Shut Off the Neon Spence’s research suggests that people are so compelled by color that they trick themselves into tasting what they see. In an experiment he reviewed, for example, many tasters deemed a cherry-flavored soda citrusy because it had a vibrant orange color. So by avoiding processed foods in any hue not found in nature, you can cut down on junk like sugary cereals, Skittles, and boxed mac ’n’ cheese.