Chefs have been using the sensation of chillies and other peppers to spice up their culinary experiments for centuries. But it is only in the last decade or so that scientists have begun to understand how we taste piquant foods. Now they have found the mechanism that not only explains the heat of chillies and wasabi, but also the soothing cooling of flavours like menthol.

The implications of this discovery extend far beyond cuisine. The same mechanisms build the body’s internal thermometer, and some animals even use them to see in the dark. Understand these pathways, and the humble chilli may open new avenues of research for conditions as diverse as chronic pain, obesity and cancer.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

{ Lee Price }

In two studies, we examine the effect of manipulating the position of different foods on a restaurant menu. Items placed at the beginning or the end of the list of their category options were up to twice as popular as when they were placed in the center of the list. Given this effect, placing healthier menu items at the top or bottom of item lists and less healthy ones in their center (e.g., sugared drinks vs. calorie-free drinks) should result in some increase in favor of healthier food choices.

{ Judgment and Decision Making | Continue reading }

Exposure to bright light is a second possible approach to increasing serotonin without drugs. Bright light is, of course, a standard treatment for seasonal depression, but a few studies also suggest that it is an effective treatment for nonseasonal depression and also reduces depressed mood in women with premenstrual dysphoric disorder39 and in pregnant women suffering from depression. […]

The fourth factor that could play a role in raising brain serotonin is diet. […] The idea, common in popular culture, that a high-protein food such as turkey will raise brain tryptophan and serotonin is, unfortunately, false. Another popular myth that is widespread on the Internet is that bananas improve mood because of their serotonin content. Although it is true that bananas contain serotonin, it does not cross the blood–brain barrier.

{ Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience | Continue reading }

The placebo effect is known far and wide. Give somebody a sugar pill, tell them it’s aspirin, and they’ll feel better. What’s less well-known is that there’s evidence of the placebo effect in domains that go beyond the commonly known medical scenarios.

One study found that hotel maids who were told their work was good exercise later scored higher than a control group on a range of health indicators. Another study found that when participants were told athletes had excellent vision, they demonstrated better vision when doing a more-athletic activity relative to a less-athletic activity. Many studies have also shown that placebo caffeine can have an impact. In one experiment caffeine placebos improved cognitive performance among participants who were in the midst of 28 hours of sleep deprivation.

Given that caffeine placebos can mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation, Christina Draganich and Kristi Erdal of Colorado College decided to take the logical next step and investigate whether the effects of sleep deprivation could be influenced by perceptions about sleep quality. In other words, could making people think their sleep quality was better or worse influence the cognitive effects of sleep?

{ Peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

images { 1. David Cutter | 2 }

Electric taste is the sensation elicited upon stimulating the tongue with electric current. We used this phenomenon to convey information that humans cannot perceive with their tongue. Our method involves changing the taste of foods and drinks by using electric taste. First, we propose a system to drink beverages using straws that are connected to an electric circuit. Second, we propose a system to eat foods using a fork or chopsticks connected to an electric circuit. Finally, we discuss augmented gustation using various sensors.

{ Meiji University | PDF | via Improbable }

image { Cildo Meireles, Insertions into ideological circuits: Coca-Cola project, 1970 }

Can computers be creative? […] The team has gathered information by downloading a large corpus of recipes that include dishes from all over the world that use a wide variety ingredients, combinations of flavours, serving suggestions and so on.

They also download related information such as descriptions of regional cuisines from Wikipedia, the concentration of flavour ingredients in different foodstuffs from the “Volatile Compounds in Food” database and Fenaroli’s Handbook of Flavor Ingredients. So big data lies at the heart of this approach—you could call it the secret sauce.

They then develop a method for combining ingredients in ways that have never been attempted using a “novelty algorithm” that determines how surprising the resulting recipe will appear to an expert observer. […] The last stage is an interface that allows a human expert to enter some starting ingredients such as pork belly or salmon fillet and perhaps a choice of cuisine such as Thai. The computer generates a number of novel dishes, explaining its reasoning for each. Of these, the expert chooses one and then makes it.

These human experts seem impressed. “Recipes created by the computational creativity system, such as a Caymanian Plantain Dessert, have been rated as more creative than existing recipes in online repositories,” say Varshney and co.

{ The arXiv | Continue reading }

Okay, if you want to know…

Will my date have sex on the first date?

Ask…

Do you like the taste of beer?

Because…

Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date. No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they’ve just met.

{ okcupid | Continue reading }

photo { Maurizio Di Iorio }

Fishing operations have expanded to virtually all corners of the ocean over the past century. […] How badly are we overfishing the oceans? Are fish populations going to keep shrinking each year — or could they recover? Those are surprisingly contentious questions, and there seem to be a couple of schools of thought here.

The pessimistic view […] is that we may be facing “The End of Fish.” One especially dire 2006 study in Science warned that many commercial ocean fish stocks were on pace to “collapse” by mid-century. […]

Other experts have countered that this view is far too alarmist. […] Overfishing isn’t inevitable. We can fix it.

Both sides make valid points — but the gloomy view is hard to dismiss. […] One reason the debate about overfishing is so contentious is that it’s hard to get a precise read on the state of the world’s marine fisheries.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Playboy, Miss December 1971 }

Researchers at the University of Kentucky were interested in the link between low glucose levels and aggressive behavior… […]

When you go several hours without eating, your blood sugar drops. Once it falls below a certain point, glucose-sensing neurons in your ventromedial hypothalamus, a brain region involved in feeding, are notified and activated resulting in level fluctuations of several different hormones. Ghrelin, a hormone that increases expression when blood sugar gets low and stimulates appetite through actions of the hypothalamus, has been shown to block the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin. The serotonin system is incredibly complex and contributes to a number of different central nervous system functions. One of the many hats this neurotransmitter wears is modulation of emotional state, including aggression. […]

If you have a predisposition to aggression, low serotonin levels circulating in your brain may lead to altered communications between brain regions that wrangle aggressive behavior.

{ Synaptic Scoop | Continue reading }

“Tell me what kinds of toxins are in your body, and I’ll tell you how much you’re worth,” could be the new motto of doctors everywhere. In a finding that surprised even the researchers conducting the study, it turns out that both rich and poor Americans are walking toxic waste dumps for chemicals like mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium and bisphenol A, which could be a cause of infertility. And while a buildup of environmental toxins in the body afflicts rich and poor alike, the type of toxin varies by wealth.

People who can afford sushi and other sources of aquatic lean protein appear to be paying the price with a buildup of heavy metals in their bodies, found Jessica Tyrrell and colleagues from the University of Exeter.

{ Quartz | Continue reading }

A banana may be healthier than a burger, but how it’s brought to you is not all that different. Before the fast-food industry learned to process, pack, and ship inexpensive temperature-controlled meals, banana carriers had already perfected their own shipping process. […]

The result “is bananas that arrive at the market on their final green day, and which will last exactly seven days before turning brown.” 

By the time bananas land on the supermarket shelf, their ripening process has already been carefully engineered through the use of three gases: ethylene, carbon dioxide, and oxygen.

{ Nautilus | Continue reading }

polaroid { Andy Warhol }

Horne, a raisin farmer, has been breaking the law for 11 solid years. He now owes the U.S. government at least $650,000 in unpaid fines. And 1.2 million pounds of unpaid raisins, roughly equal to his entire harvest for four years.

His crime? Horne defied one of the strangest arms of the federal bureaucracy — a farm program created to solve a problem during the Truman administration, and never turned off. […]

It works like this: In a given year, the government may decide that farmers are growing more raisins than Americans will want to eat. That would cause supply to outstrip demand. Raisin prices would drop. And raisin farmers might go out of business.

To prevent that, the government does something drastic. It takes away a percentage of every farmer’s raisins. Often, without paying for them.

These seized raisins are put into a government-controlled “reserve” and kept off U.S. markets.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

illustration { occasional head bunts }

Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness.

{ Sianne Ngai/Cabinet | Continue reading }

There are somewhere between 50 million and 100 million farms in the world (if you exclude those smaller than about three American football fields). But about half the crops produced by those farms rely on the seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides supplied by a mere dozen or so companies. Most of those crops are bought, traded, and transported around the world by another half dozen. […] And when it’s time for agricultural products to be processed and distributed to stores, that’s another dozen or so, many overlapping with the aforementioned traders and suppliers. […]

Researchers and activists have questioned the safety or long-term consequences (or both) of various Big Ag [Big Agriculture] practices, such as the use of certain pesticides, fertilizers, animal hormones, and food additives. […] Among the other specific complaints these days are deforestation and negligence. In Brazil, for example, a tripling of soybean production since 1990 has been blamed for the ongoing stripping of the Amazon basin. In the United States, ill-managed factory farms and processing plants have contributed to repeated outbreaks of food-borne illnesses that kill about a thousand people a year and sicken millions. […]
For farmers, oligopolies mean fewer choices of supplier and sometimes no choice at all about whom they will sell to. One ongoing trend is contract farming, in which farmers grow according to a food company’s specifications, with all supplies provided by the company, in return for its commitment to purchase the farmers’ output if it is acceptable.

{ IEEE | Continue reading }

related { The world is approaching Peak Meat, producing 7 times more than in 1950 }

photo { Kyoko Hamada }

Processed-food companies increasingly turn to their legions of scientists to produce foods that we can’t resist. These food geeks tweak their products by varying the levels of the three so-called pillar ingredients—salt, sugar, and fat. […]

[The] optimum amount of salt, sugar, or fat is called the bliss point. Scientists also adjust these ingredients as well as factors such as crunchiness to produce a mouthfeel—that is, the way the food feels inside a person’s mouth—that causes consumers to crave more. Technologists can also induce a flavor burst by altering the size and shape of the salt crystals themselves so that they basically assault the taste buds into submission.

The holy grail of junk-food science is vanishing caloric density, where the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is fooled into thinking it’s hardly consuming any calories at all, so it just keeps snacking.

{ IEEE | Continue reading }

art { Peter Palombi }

Skipping meals can sabotage your shopping – and your diet, according to a new Cornell study. Even short term food deprivation not only increases overall grocery shopping, but leads shoppers to buy 31% more high calorie foods.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }