Why Fat, Salt and Sugar Stimulate Our Appetite and Promote Over Eating at Times
moderate price. The fast food companies regularly use processed chickens with much fat, beef t and pork meat which are processed in such a way that they are very tasty with good flavors after adding some chemical substances. In keeping chickens, beef and pork meat afresh, some artificial preservatives are always used. In order to produce chicken and other meat tasty and cheaper, their suppliers use lots of different hormones and artificial growth substances. These burgers are grilled with artificial flavoring chemicals. They generally serve with fried potatoes which are mixed with lots of salt. Some catch-ups are served with the meal. They make the fried chickens with brown coatings, which are made tasty with artificial chemicals.” That makes the chicken look like more and gives it this wonderful oily flavor.” Over time, the company began to realize there was less meat in a chicken nugget compared with a whole chicken, and a greater percentage of fried batter. But the real breakthrough is their popcorn chicken. “The smaller the piece of meat, the greater the percentage of fat pick-up,” said the food designer. “Now, we have lots of pieces of a cheaper part of the chicken.” The product has been “optimized on every dimension”, with the fat, sugar and salt combining with the perception of good value virtually to guarantee consumer appeal.
Burger King’s Whopper touched on the three points of the compass- then was altered for further effect. In its first, stripped-down form, the burger was explosively rich in fat, sugar and salt. Then the chain began adding more beef, extra cheese or a layer of bacon.
McDonald’s broke new ground in another different way- by making food available on a whim. “The great growth has been the snacking occasion. You get hungry, you want something, your mind pushes off the reality of what you ought to eat, and you end up picking up a hamburger and a giant soda or French fries”.
Next they introduced a high-fat, high-salt morning meal. “They took what they learned from the core lunch and dinner menu, and applied it to breakfast. The sausage McMuffin and the egg McMuffin are stand-ins for the hamburger. In effect, we are eating a morning hamburger.”
Next comes Dunkin’s Donut chain of food stores where food is available 24 hours. They have morning serving, lunch and dinner. We can take food in a branch store or take away their food. The food is made delicious with high calorie value. They serve excellent tea, coffee or ice cream, highly delicious. The ultimate aim of this business is to attract many customers all the time. The customers are once habituated and will to come over again. The customers do not know what they are eating, because they provide their own list of foods.
This kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite that it readily overrides the body’s signals that should tell us, “I’m full.” The food designer offered coleslaw as an example. When its ingredients are chopped roughly, it requires time and energy to chew. But when cabbage and carrots are softened in a high-fat dressing, coleslaw ceases to be “something with a lot of innate ability to satisfy”.
This isn’t to say that the food industry wants us to stop chewing altogether. It knows we want to eat a doughnut, not drink it. “The key is to create foods with just enough chew – but not too much. When you’re eating these things, you’ve had 500, 600, 800, 900 calories before you know it.” Foods that slip down don’t leave us with a sense of being well fed. In making food disappear so swiftly, fat and sugar only leave us wanting more.
According to food consultant, Gail Vance Civille of management consultants Sensory Spectrum, fat is crucial to this process of lubrication, ensuring that a product melts in the mouth. In the past, she says, Americans typically chewed food up to 25 times before it was swallowed; now the average American chews 10 times. “If I have fat in there, I just chew it up and whoosh! Away it goes,” she says. “You have a ‘quick getaway’, a quick melt.”
The bar Snickers, Civille says, is “extraordinarily well engineered”. Unlike many products whose nuts become annoyingly lodged between your teeth, the genius of Snickers is that as we chew, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel picks up the peanut pieces, so the entire candy is carried out of the mouth at the same time.
Kettle chips are another success story. Made of sugar-rich russet potatoes, they have a slightly bitter background note and brown irregularly, which gives them a complex flavor . High levels of fat generate easy mouth-melt, and surface variations add a level of interest beyond that found in mass-produced chips. Heightened complexity is the key to modern food design.
Different of Ice-creams: Not so many decades ago, a single flavor of ice-cream was a special treat. Our options ran to vanilla, chocolate and strawberry – and