Food Flavorings and Obesity

By Jack Dini —— Bio and Archives August 22, 2015

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Journalist Mark Schatzker has released a new book titled, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising Truth About Food and Flavor, which details how increasingly flavor packed junk foods like soda and chips have made regular food seem bland. (1)

In this book which takes its name form the tortilla chip that became a nationwide sensation once it was flavored to have a taco taste, Schatzker shows just what the industrialization and subsequent dilution of our food supply has wrought. Junk food has been flavored to taste like things they are not while diluting the flavors that allow real food to be the treat we should expect. Schatzker's argument is simple: as big food producers find new ways to make our favorite snacks more flavorful, we run the risk of forgetting what real food tastes like. He links growing obesity problems to this so-called 'manufactured deliciousness.' It's a vicious cycle. Flavor packed junk food alters our ideas of what regular food tastes like. To make these regular things flavorful again we resort to more flavor packed junk. We may perceive delicious foods to be bad and tasteless ones to be good he suggests because much of our real food has so diminished in actual flavor due to overproduction. Examples: tomatoes that taste like tap water and chicken that needs to be drowned in seasoning to be made palatable. At the same time, the snack and processed food industries have excelled at engineering foods that are so exaggerated in their sensory appeal, they are irresistible. “No matter how much you like peaches,” Schatzker says, “there's no way you could eat 1,200 calories worth of them because your body gets its nutritional quota in two or three. A bag of Doritos, on the other hand, calories dense but nutritionally void.” The thing that's really changed over the years is the flavor. Making the case that the conversation about obesity is missing any discussion of flavor, added flavorings are 'obesity-inducing food toxicants,' he writes. “The rise of obesity is the predictable result of the rise in manufactured deliciousness.” According to Schatzker's research, Americans consume over 600 million pounds of flavoring every year. Over the past 50 years, volumes of salt, sugar, carbohydrates, and fat we consume have only increased because flavor chemicals incentivize us to eat more of them. The solution, Schatzker says, is simple. We must recalibrate our palates. In order to do that, we must seek out flavorful whole foods—easier said than done, he admits. Jack Dini Livermore, CA References 1. Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising Truth About Food and Flavor, (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2015)