Stuffing Chips - © Michael Moss - Salt Sugar Fat Book

Hyper-Palatable Foods: Killing Us Softly?

Researchers have, for the first time, looked into what the scientific community calls ‘hyper-palatable’ foods; foods that combine ingredients apt to light up people’s brain-reward neural circuitry and overpower mechanisms that are supposed to signal when we’ve had enough to eat…

Arbys CurlFries Poutine - © 2018 ArbysPoutine would be one of the foods that fall into more than one
category of hyper-palatability ingredient combination.

These are often processed foods, or sweets, and have been around for years. In fact, researchers say food processors have, over time, developed tried and true formulas designed to get consumers to eat more of their products. And now, the scientists say they’ve come up with a way to quantify the ‘palatableness quotient’ of such foods to allow objective comparison. The bad news is, most foods consumed in the U.S. (and by association Canada and Europe) today meet the criteria for inclusion in this decidedly unhealthy class of foods.

“Multiple documentaries have pointed out that food companies have very well-designed formulas for these types of foods to make them palatable and essentially enhance consumption,” said study Lead Author Dr. Tera Fazzino. “But these definitions are virtually unknown to the scientific community, which is a major limitation. If there’s no standardized definition, we can’t compare across studies – we’ve just typically used descriptive definitions like ‘sweets’, ‘desserts’ and ‘fast foods.’ That type of descriptive definition isn’t specific to the actual mechanisms by which the ingredients lead to this enhanced palatability. This has been a substantial limitation in the field I thought was important to try to address.”

What they did

“We essentially took all of the descriptive definitions of the foods from the literature – for example Oreos or Mac and Cheese – and we entered these one by one into a nutrition program that is very careful in how it quantifies a food’s ingredients,” Fazzino explained. “This nutrition software essentially provides in fine-grained detail a data set that specifies how many calories per serving are in this food, and how much Fat, Sodium, Sugar, Carbohydrates, Fiber and all sorts of other things. […] Essentially, we wanted to identify foods that appear to cluster together with what appeared to be […] similar levels of at least two ingredients, because that’s the theoretical basis for inducing the synergistic palatability effect”

What they found

“Through a visualization process, we were able to see there were essentially three types of foods that appeared to cluster together in terms of their ingredients,” Fazzo says.

Researchers discovered that 62 percent of the foods listed in the USDA’s Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) qualified as ‘hyper- palatable’. Shockingly, items labeled as reduced or no fat, sugar, salt or calories represented 5 percent of hyper-palatable foods identified by the researchers. Moreover, of all items labeled as low/reduced/no Sugar, Fat, sodium, and/or Sugar in the FNDDS, 49 per cent of those met the criteria for being hyper-palatable.

Some 70 percent of those foods that qualified were high in Fat and Sodium, such as Meat dishes, or Egg- and Milk-based foods like Omelets or Cheese Dips. Some 25 percent of the hyper-palatable foods were high in Fat and Sugar, and 16 percent of these foods were high in Carbohydrates and Sodium. Less than 10 percent qualified in more than one cluster.

The takeaway

“We need more evidence – but eventually if research begins to support that these foods may be particularly problematic for society, I think that could warrant something like a food label saying ‘this is hyper-palatable,’ ” Fazzino suggested. “We might even think about the restriction of certain types of foods that are available in certain places – for example, in elementary school cafeterias for kids whose brains are still developing and who may be impacted by these types of foods.”

My take

The abstract of this study report opens playfully with a quote from an old Potato Chip advertisement: “Bet you can’t eat just one!” That just goes to show how long the food processing industry has known about the phenomenon Fazzino has dubbed ‘hyper-palatability’. And the industry has traded heavily on its effects.

I suggest that no time be wasted in conducting the additional research Fazzo recommends and that appropriate measures – also as Fazzino recommends – be taken. Imagine the positive effects on the health of all of us and the the burden that could be lifted from the health care system, if such a course was followed.

But I fear that the Food Processing mega industry would lobby governments and their agencies hard not to take any measures that might discourage people from consuming their products. We’ll have to see. In the end, I suspect that the coming move to plant-based nutrition across the world will help push processed foods out of the Western Diet, or at least place pressure on the manufacturers to reformulate their products to be healthier and more nutritious.

And no; I don’t see Junk Food completely disappearing from the face of the earth. Just getting ‘better’…

~ Maggie J.