Overeating – defined as eating even after your brain has gotten the message from your stomach that it is full – is a significant contributing factor to America’s much publicized obesity “epidemic.” My theory is that a lot of people take seconds, or even thirds, because they simply want more of the taste of whatever they are eating in their mouths. Indeed, product developers at food companies talk endlessly about the importance of things like mouth-feel and aroma (smell being about 75% of taste) when it comes to making new products.
So what if we had a way to get the taste of anything we wanted in our mouths without having to ingest a huge number of calories to do it?
No, I’m not talking about the girls from the toothbrush brigade that we all knew in high school. I’m thinking more along the lines of nanotechnology.
Imagine a gum that would “learn” the taste of another food after you removed it from the wrapper and held it in proximity to the original dish for a fixed amount of time. The length of time would need to be long enough that you wouldn’t end up with table cloth flavored gum but short enough that it wasn’t onerous to have gum that tasted of death by chocolate cake. You’d get the taste, enough to satisfy the senses but not all the calories of another helping of cake or beans and rice, or even asparagus (if you so chose).
Things I think about while plowing my way through the decadence of a frozen Mexican dinner.