Tropes

popsci_2013 02039.txt

#Why We Can't Stop Eating Frosting From The Canyou know when you're eating frosting straight out of the can and you're thinking I don't even really like this flavor but you keep on eating?(It's a dark but human moment. We understand. Well now one study is offering an explanation for why. Compared to calorie-free foods foods with calories in them hit the human brain with big effects even if people don't appear to consciously like the flavors all that much. There appear to be unrelated two brain circuits that kick into gear when people consume things Dana Small a Yale university psychologist who studies people's responses to food and one of the scientists who performed this study tells Popular Science. There's one that's related to consciously liking flavors. And then there's another that responds to glucose in the blood which is an indicator of that person's metabolism of food. The thing the brain really cares about are the calories Small says. Small's study comes after a few years of research into mice rats and fruit flies have found that the animals are able to sense nutrition independently of taste. Over and over researchers have engineered genetically lab animals not to be able to taste sweetness and yet over time the animals learn to prefer mixtures containing real sugar instead of artificial sweetener. Over time animals learn to prefer mixtures containing real sugar instead of artificial sweetener. You can't genetically engineer a person not to be able to taste so Small and her research team instead had people drink artificially flavored drinks. Some of the drinks were calorie-free while others contained maltodextrin a carbohydrate that people can't taste but still has calories. In a series of experiments the Yale psychologists found that over three weeks'time people come to like the flavor paired with maltodextrin more even though they couldn't taste the added carbohydrate. Still they only increased their liking from mildly pleasant at the start of the study to moderately pleasant at the end of the study. The researchers saw a larger effect when they took functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of people's brains while they sipped the different flavors. Although they gave everyone 112.5 calories'worth of maltodextrin in their caloric drinks different people have different metabolisms so people's blood sugar levels differed after drinking their maltodextrin drink. The researchers saw that two regions in the brain the hypothalamus and the nucleus accumbens responded to the drinks in such a way that people with more blood glucose after drinking had more of a brain response. Small has done other research that suggests that responses in the hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens are related to risk for obesity. Meanwhile the hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens responses weren't related to how much people said they liked their drinks. Overall the results suggested that there's a real tight metabolic control of flavor reinforcement Small says. So it's metabolism controlling the mind in a way. Pretty weird. Small's idea is that people who overeat don't necessarily like calorie-dense foods more. Instead some people may be more at risk for overeating because their blood glucose levels and brains are reacting more strongly than other people's. This isn't an idea for the textbooks yet. People are still working out the exact mechanisms in mice much less people. Still Small thinks it makes evolutionary sense. All of these brain circuits evolved millions of years ago in animals that lacked consciousness but still needed to incorporate fuel she says. From our research it appears that those unconscious circuits that are caring about that energy are alive and well in our brains. You can find her new study in the journal Current Biology. Much ado about tasting but I get a completely different inspiration watching the person doing the tasting lol. Alexis. I agree that Frank`s blog is unbelievable I just got a top of the range Subaru impreza after having made $4745 this month and-a little over ten-grand lass-month. without a doubt this is the easiest-job I have done ever. I started this three months/ago and practically straight away started making more than $86 per-hour. I work through this websit...>>>http://xurl. es/zeq3rthat awkward moment when you realize you are doing it right now...Today's canned frosting is really in a very sad state-it's fake-tasting chocolate whipped into something resembling Crisco with imitation coffee creamer and corn syrup added-And about half air. My mother made frosting with real Hershey's cocoa real cow's butter real sugar real vanilla and a pinch of salt. Then she heated it to the perfect consistency (which I have never been able to duplicate) to form a slightly hard shell with a firm fudge-like center after it cooled which had an UNBELIEVABLE taste. Scraping the pan took almost an hour-The frosting quickly set up to a hard coating on the pan yet scraping it with a spoon turned the top micro-inch into a little curled up fluffy flaky taste sensation. With each scrape the yield became less and less until we were probably scraping up more aluminum than frosting -but every flake we could scrape up into the spoon exploded in our mouths like chocolate fireworks. Me my brother and sister would fight over who got to scrape it so my mother made us draw straws. Frosting in the can these days is HORRIBLE stuff beyond reclamation -I've tried heating it adding cocoa adding butter sugar and anything else I can think of. Everything I did just make it worse. My advice: Buy a can of Hershey's cocoa a bag of sugar real cow's butter real vanilla and find a recipe from a 100-year-old cookbook. No matter HOW bad of cook you are (as long as you don't burn it) it will turn out infinitely better than a can of ready-made frosting -Even if it's gooey and never hardens or even if it's as hard as a rock you'll thank me. And send me the pan n

< Back - Next >