We know it's not good for us, but why are we so addicted to processed foods? Part of it is related to convenience, but perhaps the real reason is because processed foods taste good -- that is, if you like a lot of sugar, salt, and fat. As much as we would like to not think about it, a lot of science (and money for research, development, and marketing) goes into designing the perfect-tasting junk food that will have people coming back for more. Here are a few examples of how science is being used to trick our taste buds.

• The science behind the creation and marketing of junk food can be useful for food companies, but it can also be contributing to the rising rates of obesity in the U.S. Apparently, the key to designing the perfect junk food is to find the "bliss point" by optimizing levels of ingredients like sugar, salt, and fat. Also, in addition to taste, the crunch and mouth feel of junk food is just as important. For example, the perfect potato chip is one that breaks with about four pounds of pressure per square inch. [url]
• PepsiCo has reportedly developed a low-sodium potato chip that tastes just as salty as the original. The secret ingredient is "Crystal Salt" which is powdery like confectioner's sugar, allowing it to dissolve more efficiently on the tongue, so people taste more salt even though there's actually less of it on the chip. [url]
• The airline food industry should take some tips from the junk food industry and find a way to make airline food taste better. It turns out that people's taste buds don't work so well in-flight due to a combination of low cabin humidity and changes in air pressure. Astronauts in zero gravity seem to suffer from similar diminished tasting ability as well. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Thanks to the receptors in our taste buds, eating is one of life's greatest pleasures. Of the five different taste sensations, sweetness is probably the most pleasing. Starting from infancy, our bodies are already programmed to seek out sugar because it provides the energy to keep us going. There is also some indication that babies can be influenced to like salt if they are exposed to salty foods early on. As part of an evolutionary survival mechanism, our bodies are programmed to avoid eating bitter tasting things because many toxic compounds taste bitter. People like to eat sour-tasting foods, like citrus fruits or pickles, but from an evolutionary perspective, sourness is generally a warning for food spoilage. Finally, umami is supposed to be a "savory" taste, which is produced when our taste buds detect glutamate, the salt of the amino acid glutamic acid. Foods that naturally have an umami taste include cheese and tomatoes, so it's no wonder that pizza tastes so good! Here are a few more tasty tidbits.

• Many animals, including cats and dolphins, can't taste sweet things. It turns out that a large number of carnivores can't taste sugars because they have non-working versions of the genes responsible for making sugar receptors on the tongue. [url]
• Researchers are working on developing artificial tongues that can mimic the human taste response to various flavors. However, to fully reproduce the experience of taste requires the development of an artifical nose, because a large part of "taste" is actually due to smell. [url]
• The elusive "salt receptor" is unlike the receptors for all the other tastes, and figuring it out is complicated by the fact that sodium is essential for life but can kill you at high enough doses. (Apparently, it takes only a few mouthfuls of salt water from the Dead Sea to kill a person.) Researchers now believe that there are two receptors or mechanisms involved in tasting salt -- one that makes salt desirable and another (the elusive one) that makes it undesirable at high concentrations. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Alcoholic beverages have been part of human culture for thousands of years. But what do we really know about these drinks? Red wine goes with red meats, and white wine goes with fish... Liquor before beer, you're in the clear... Here are just a few more interesting tidbits of information regarding ethyl alcohol.

• A group of Japanese physicists discovered that red wine could induce superconductivity in an iron telluride -- so they tried a bunch of other alcoholic beverages like sake, beer and white wine to try to figure out what was going on. The researchers found that more tartaric acid in red wine correlated well with the superconductive state, but the alcohol also played some role. With just a bit more study, red wine will solve all of our energy problems and allow us to live forever.... [url]
• University of Connecticut wine researcher Dr. Dipak K. Das published fake data on the benefits of resveratrol, so there's some doubt that this component of red wine has as many magical health benefits as some have reported. Still, the anecdotal evidence behind the "French Paradox" makes people think red wine has more than a correlation with a lower incidence of heart disease (even if there's no causal relationship). [url]
• The 'drunken monkey hypothesis' proposes that humans like alcohol because our primate ancestors were highly dependent on fruits in their diet... and ethanol can be found in overripe fruits. But did those drunken monkeys exhibit superior Kung Fu skills? [url]
• You might think that wine experts can tell the difference between an expensive French wine and a much cheaper wine from New Jersey, but you'd be mostly wrong. Wine tasting is hard. Sometimes experts can't even tell the difference between red and white wines -- and the perception of wine can be influenced significantly by the label on the bottle. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Quantifying how our taste buds react to different ingredients isn't an easy task. It's hard enough to get 4 out of 5 dentists to agree on a toothpaste, so it's understandably difficult to get untrained taste testers to agree on what kind of flavors they prefer. The assumption that there is a single "best-tasting" formula for a particular food is unrealistic in many cases, anyway, as Malcolm Gladwell's popular TED talk on spaghetti sauces discusses. Still, food science has to take some kind of measurements, and here are just a few examples.

• If you want to hone your tasting skills, you have to practice, practice, practice. And maybe buy a bushel of different apples and try to describe each variety in as much detail as possible.... [url]
• A fascinating study of Asian and Western food recipes shows that Western dishes tend to pair ingredients with similar flavors, whereas Asian recipes don't. So the "sweet and sour" sauce is only on an Asian menu, but this study goes into far more depth than that. (And there's a free article on taste, sponsored by Ajinomoto.) [url]
• The hottest pepper on the planet goes to the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion with an average Scoville Heat Unit value of 1.2 million. Some individual peppers from this plant have hit 2 million Scoville heat units, and this research will allow hot sauce companies to scientifically claim to use the hottest known peppers. [url]

If you have some more free time, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

The sense of taste is surprisingly complex. It's related to the sense of smell, but various foods also have combinations of textures and consistencies that make taste tests an interesting (and difficult to fully understand) field of study. There are "perfect Pepsi's" -- not just a single "good" taste that everyone can agree upon. Here are just some other tidbits on tasting.

• Japanese scientists have studied the properties of miraculin -- the glycoprotein from the West African plant Richardella dulcifica that makes sour things taste incredibly sweet (for up to an hour). It works best in an acidic environment to bind your taste receptors, and unfortunately, the FDA considers it a food additive and has not approved its use as an artificial sweetener. [url]
• Some folks are investigating "Pine mouth" syndrome -- the phenomenon where a metallic aftertaste lingers in your mouth for days after eating pine nuts. The effect was first documented in 2001, but more cases are being reported and various food agencies are trying to track down the cause. [url]
• There are over 600 flavor compounds that combine to create the taste of chocolate. However, humans can recognize the aroma of chocolate by only 25 of those volatile flavors. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

With recent reports claiming that food coloring might increase hyperactivity in children, leading the FDA to say that there isn't enough proof that such dyes are really a problem for most, it has some people asking if we really need food coloring at all. While there's one argument, which says that if you're eating food that needs to be colored, you're not eating food (think of that as the Michael Pollan argument). But, on the other side, some people are wondering why the same products can't be made without food coloring. Apparently, those people aren't aware of just how much color impacts taste. Apparently it can more or less override our tastebuds. I'd always heard that smell could override tastebuds, but it sounds like color might do an even better job.

In an experiment with "uncolored" Cheetos Crunchy Cheese Flavored snacks, apparently, the bland color matched people's feelings about the taste:

Their fingers did not turn orange. And their brains did not register much cheese flavor, even though the Cheetos tasted just as they did with food coloring.

"People ranked the taste as bland and said that they weren't much fun to eat," said Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University and director of the university's Food and Brand Lab.

Tests in the other direction also had a similar impact. Seeing a different color than is actually the flavor can make that flavor seem apparent:

When tasteless yellow coloring is added to vanilla pudding, consumers say it tastes like banana or lemon pudding. And when mango or lemon flavoring is added to white pudding, most consumers say that it tastes like vanilla pudding.

Of course, this may be tempting me to start adding more food coloring to various things, rather than less...