How learning to savour flavour can transform your health | Spencer Hyman

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Have you ever wondered why foods that are high in salt, fat and sugar are so tempting? Today, we worry that these things damage our health. So why would evolution shape our brains to find them so delicious? The truth is, fat, sugar and salt are rare in nature. And when we lived in the wild, they provided much needed nutrition. So finding them irresistible motivated us to track them down, which helped keep us alive. Today, big food companies exploit this feature of our evolution, employing highly paid, incredibly smart food scientists to fine-tune their recipes. Slowly tweaking them, they hijack our ancient brains and make their products irresistible. But there is something you can do to break free from their spell. Today, Spencer Hyman, a world-renowned chocolate expert and flavor evangelist, is helping us to fight back. Alongside ZOE's scientific co-founder, Professor Tim Spector, we learn about the hazards of wolfing down your food. And why learning to savor it could protect our health, protect the planet, and help us break free from big food stranglehold. By the end of today's episode, we will have a new appreciation for flavor. You'll also learn how we've lost the art of savoring and how you can rediscover it. Today's episode is going to be like herding cats, because I have two of my friends, both Tim Spector and Spencer Hyman, and they're friends with each other, and they've already been talking about this subject for two hours before we start the podcast. So Spencer, thank you for joining me today.

**Spencer Hyman** (1:55)
Thank you very much. Very excited.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:57)
Tim, thanks for being here.

**Tim Spector** (1:59)
Pleasure.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:00)
So I'm going to try and keep you on the straight and narrow. And at least we have this tradition at the beginning, where we start with these quick fire round of questions from our listeners. So I believe here at least I can keep you to a yes or a no. Tim, have our brains evolved to seek out high fat, high sugar foods?

**Tim Spector** (2:18)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:20)
Spencer, do big food companies design their products to encourage us to eat mindlessly?

**Spencer Hyman** (2:25)
Definitely yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:27)
Tim, can bolting your food down have long term negative health effects?

**Tim Spector** (2:32)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:34)
Spencer, do highly processed foods reduce your ability to appreciate the flavours in natural food?

**Spencer Hyman** (2:40)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:41)
Tim, should you chew each mouthful of food 32 times?

**Tim Spector** (2:47)
Probably not.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:48)
And finally, Spencer, what do you think is the most significant benefit of savouring your food rather than wolfing it down?

**Spencer Hyman** (2:56)
Overall savouring, as opposed to wolfing it down or bolting it down fast, is the key to identifying and getting on the path to eating a healthy diet.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:05)
Well, I look forward to unpacking all of that. I think it's pretty obvious that people are attracted to foods that are sweet and salty and high fat. It seems like it's baked into us as human beings. It's also clear that food manufacturers know how to hit the sweet spot of this and to sell the product. I don't think anyone listening to this is going to be surprised. But Tim, could we maybe just start off with why are we evolved to seek out these sorts of foods?

**Tim Spector** (3:30)
The first food we all encounter is breast milk and that's sweet. The sugars in there, lactose, is something that all humans have to like and have to seek out, otherwise they would die. So that's, I think, something that stays with us the rest of our life, really this life-giving food that we all need. So we're driven for it and we have various sweet receptors, not just in our mouth, but in other bits of our intestine as well, which drive us for that. And we know that fats are also really crucial for our survival as well. We do need fats to get our brains to work and other essential parts of our bodies. Salt is the other one. If we're salt deprived, then really our body doesn't work well either. So these are all hardwired, really from birth, but this is manipulated by the food industry to take it to excess where we didn't actually need that much excess of it. We just needed enough to survive.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:31)
Spencer, how have food manufacturers capitalized on this innate desires that Tim was talking about for these properties?

**Spencer Hyman** (4:39)
I think there's a wonderful history here, which goes by the name of the Bliss Point, which is that back in the 1960s, a food scientist called Howard Moskovitz articulated this concept, which Tim has just been explaining about, if you combine sugar, salt, and fat in optimum amounts for different foods, people just don't know how to stop wolfing the food down without any thought. That is generally taken as being the start of the junk food epidemic. But actually, ironically, you can really argue that 100 years earlier in the world of chocolate, this was discovered when Daniel Peter and Nestle worked out how to make milk chocolate, because that is the ultimate Bliss Point food. So big food really uses a number of tricks based around our tastes as opposed to our flavors. One of them is this Bliss Point, the one that Tim was just talking about, sugar, salt and fat. The other is this wonderfully named sensory-specific satiety, which talks about different textures. And again, it's all designed to help us identify different foods because we need a variety of foods to survive. So if you get different textures as well as sugar, salt and fat, it really becomes pretty much game over.