Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss Read Free Book Online

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    Tatyana sat at a small table, with little stuffed versions of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch perched next to her. As a lab assistant started to assemble the food to be tested, Mennella explained that the protocol for this experiment had been derived from twenty years of trials and was designed to elicit a scientifically measurable response. “We are dealing with foods that are very well liked, and so we’re going to ask the child which one they like
better
. The one they like better, they are going to give to Big Bird because they know he likes things that taste good. We’re looking at a wide range of children, as young as three, and we don’t want language to play a role here. The child doesn’t have to say anything. They either point to the one they like, or in this case, they give it to Big Bird. It’s meant to minimize the impact of language.”
    Why not just ask the kids straight out if they like it? I asked.
    “It just doesn’t work, especially for the young ones,” she said. “You can give them everything and they will say yes or no. Though, in this context,it tends to be yes. Children are smart. They’ll tell you what they think you want to hear.”
    We tested this notion out by asking Tatyana which she preferred: broccoli or the Philadelphia-made snack called the TastyKake.
    “Broccoli,” she said, ready for a pat on the head.
    For our bliss point test, Mennella’s assistant had whipped up a dozen vanilla puddings, each at a different level of sweetness. She started by putting two of the variations into small plastic cups and setting them in front of Tatyana. Tatyana tasted the one on the left, swallowed, and took a sip of water. Then she tasted the one on the right. She didn’t speak, but she didn’t have to. Her face lit up as her tongue pressed into the roof of her mouth, pushing the pudding into the thousands of receptors waiting for sweetness. Being an old hand at the test, she ignored the stuffed animals and simply pointed to the cup she preferred.
    There was one problem with watching Tatyana work her way through the puddings, though. So much was going on in creating the bliss she felt that was invisible to us. Each little spoonful disappeared into her mouth, and we could see her facial expressions and, ultimately, her decision. But in between tasting and choosing, a whole chain of events was unfolding inside her body, starting with her taste buds, that was critical to understanding how and why she was so happy.
    To better understand what, exactly, was going on, I turned to another Monell scientist, Danielle Reed, who had trained in psychology at Yale. Reed, when we met, was using quantitative genetics to examine how inheritance might affect the pleasure we derive from sensations like tasting sugar, but her research on the sweet taste has also focused on the mechanics. Reed was among the group at Monell who discovered T1R3, the sweet receptor protein. She told me that Tatyana’s swoon for the sugar in the pudding begins with her saliva. After all, we don’t call tasty food “mouthwatering” for nothing. The mere sight of a sugary treat will start the saliva flowing, which in turn primes the digestive system. “The sugar, or sweet molecule, dissolves in your saliva,” Reed said. Our taste buds are not smooth little bumps like we might imagine, she explained. They haveclumps of tiny, hair-like fronds that rise up from the bud, and it’s these fronds, called microvilli, that hold the cell that detects and receives the taste. “And that sets off a series of chain reactions inside the cell. So that the taste receptor cell talks to its friends in the taste bud. There is a lot of microprocessing of that signal, and then eventually it decides that what is in your mouth is sweet, and it squirts out neurotransmitters onto the nerve, which then goes to the brain.”
    Like most everything that goes on inside the brain, what happens up there in relation to food is still being sorted out. But