Oh yeah they do. Check this cripsy liempo freshly taken out of a hot pan.
Oh but how about this double-layered burger filled with easy-melt cheese plus an incredibly triple-layered tender meat roasted to its perfect redness?
Or imagine munching on one of these?
Fats make this oh-so-bitter-full-of-misery-world up side down, as if one munch lets you forget about all the other saddening flavors of the world. I'm not personally a fan of fatty foods such as these but whenever I'm stressed out or pretty much want to get out of this world to the extreme level, which rarely happen (usually every three months or so), I do Hashbrown burger of Jollibee (ooh tween-tums!).
And what do you know? It's in fact actually true! MRI scans showed that eating food containing fats reduce activity in some brain areas that are responsible for detection of flavors. It makes you forget about other stuffs (Rayner-Nottingham, 2012).
The MRI scans done above was a three-year study done by the University of Nottingham and Unilever, a multinational food company. A group of participants in their 20s were made to consume four kinds of samples, all having the same level of thickness and sweetness but one contained no fat and the other three had fatty emulsions also with different flavor release properties (this was added probably so that they could assess whether the participants actually detected the right kind of flavor given that the food sample had a food emulsion in it).
According to the study, the somatosensory cortices and the anterior, mid, and posterior insula were significantly more activated during the consumption of the non-fatty food sample. These brain areas are responsible for flavor perception. This suggests that there is less detection of flavor whenever there is fat in the food. So what makes us addicted to fatty foods when in fact our flavor goes undermined? Perhaps it's because of the texture, of the chewiness, of the greasiness, of the smoothness of it in our mouth! Okay, I'm gonna stop.
In relation to the course, I think such a study can also be done without the use of MRI machines, which the department doesn't have so it's really impossible to do so with it! Absolute threshold is a technique that "measures the smallest amount of stimulus energy necessary to detect a stimulus" (Goldstein, 2010). Here the flavor will be constant (whichever flavor that goes well with fat or at least socially acceptable combination of a certain flavor with fat!) but then the percentage of fat in the food samples will be differentiated, hence the varying intensities. The combination should be done in an effort to not make the flavor too distinguished or too undermined so a pretest is necessary for the ideal combination to be possible and realistic. The participant will then be presented with different intensities of fatty emulsion and they will detect whether they have tasted the flavor. According the study discussed above, higher percentage of fatty emulsions should result in more difficulty in detecting the flavor. Doing this so will enable us to determine the amount of fatty substance in the food that still enable us to detect vividly the flavors. It can also be the other way around. Doing this so will enable us to determine the amount of fatty substance in the food that reduces our ability to detect food flavors. This can provide valuable information to food industry and to how they will create products that will provide the maximum benefit for the consumers and also for them.
Other points to be made in such a proposed research would be that the amount of fatty substance in the food samples should be just enough and not too much to the point that it will be harmful to the participant. There should also be caution in terms of the participant's health conditions (i.e. participants who are at risk of high blood or the like should rather not join the experiment).
Posted by: Kate Ilene Ang
References:
Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Sensation and perception (8th ed). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.
Rayner-Nottingham, E. (2012). How the brain reacts to the taste of fat. Futurity.org. Retrieved from http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/how-the-brain-reacts-to-the-taste-of-fat/
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