Readings - The New Yorker - Biology Lessons
There's a really excellent article in this week's New Yorker on the search for artificial sweeteners and the science of taste. Of course, this bugger isn't available online (grumble). I'm making a copy for myself (man, it's a long article when you're typing it up) and will be happy to share it if anyone else is interested.
Being a fact lover and a fan of interesting statistics, I found this part interesting:
People will eat almost anything, it seems, as long as it's sweet. And, until fairly recently, this mental programming served them just fine. When Columbus introduced cane to the New World, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz has noted, sugar was an exotic luxury. Most Europeans had never eaten sugar, but they quickly developed a taste for it. By 1700, the Americas had become a vast sugar mill and the English were eating four pounds per person per year. By 1800, they were eating eighteen pounds; by 1900, ninety pounds. But nowhere was the rise of sugar as dramatic as in the New World. Last year, the average American consumed about a hundred and forty pounds of cane sugar, corn syrup, and other natural sugars - fifty percent more than the Germans or the French and nine times as much as the Chinese.
Which makes sense, considering how blubbery we all are. We've adapted to our high-sugar diets, and unfortunately for us, there doesn't seem to be a point in which our bodies say "enough!" In fact, we appear to have adapted to *increase* our sugar appetites. The younger we are, the more sweet we like it. Of course, this also has the adverse effect of tuning our bodies to store carbohydrates (as we're taking in more calories) and inversely affects our response to sugar, resulting in what we now consider to be Type 2 Diabetes (typically adult-onset, but now being seen in children as young as twelve), as our consumption and flabbitude makes our insulin-producing cells resistant to the "feel" of sugars in our bloodstream. When sugar hits our tastebuds, it appears to create a reaction in the brain similar to the effect of a good hit of opium, blocking pain and upping our pleasure sensors. That feeling of bliss after a good pile of ice cream? Opiate bump. And doesn't it feel great?
Biologically speaking, the sense of "taste" is regulated by the clumps of cells on our tongues making up what we call our "taste buds." Each cell is specifically wired to respond to one flavor: sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and umami. When a cell strikes upon a flavor it likes, it fires a series of neurons, resulting in the brain going "a ha! This is X!" Originally, it is thought that we developed our tastes (just as a random aside, most other animals cannot taste sweet. Your dog doesn't know sugar.) in order to help us decide whether something was 'bad' or 'good.' If it tasted like umami, it was good. If it came across as bitter, it was probably toxic. We test ourselves daily, however, as the article author coyly points out:
Nothing in the biology of taste could really explain the appeal of Spicy City [a restaurant in San Diego, near the lab of the taste specialist Charles Zuker] . Our tongues are wired for yes and no, good and bad, not for "It tastes like it's rotting but I can't stop eating it" or "It's incinerating my flesh and I find this oddly pleasureable." ...
We eat chilies, Warheads, and bitter greens, and drink bitter tonics and bitter coffee, for the same reason that we ride roller coasters and watch horror films: to fool the body into thinking it's in danger, and then enjoy the adrenal ride. Our taste buds may tell us that nothing is as good as sugar, but our minds can be taught to know better.
So what does all this mean for modern living us? Who knows, exactly. Besides taunting our biology daily with the foods we eat, adapting ourselves to lethargic, sugar-laden lifestyles, we seem to be doing pretty well as a species. We're living longer and better (though some would debate this as an effect of the intervention of modern medicine), we're living happier through chemistry, and we still fear Soylent Green. We're thrill seekers, long lovers, ingenious and industrious. We just happen to have a problem, and it's our love of eating and the satisfaction it brings us(mmm opium ice cream).
It just tastes too good to stop.
(Of other interesting notes: the smell receptors in your nose are believed to work very similarly to those of the taste buds, as do pheromone receptors in the mouse - the presence of pheromones and pheromone receptors in humans is still debated; the process of discovering new formulations for sugar compounds (e.g. Splenda and NutraSweet) uses the same methodology of high-throughput screening of thousands of molecular compounds as does the search for new drug compounds in pharmaceutical companies to help and cure human disase; I freaking love biology for these types of discoveries and tidbits.)
Being a fact lover and a fan of interesting statistics, I found this part interesting:
People will eat almost anything, it seems, as long as it's sweet. And, until fairly recently, this mental programming served them just fine. When Columbus introduced cane to the New World, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz has noted, sugar was an exotic luxury. Most Europeans had never eaten sugar, but they quickly developed a taste for it. By 1700, the Americas had become a vast sugar mill and the English were eating four pounds per person per year. By 1800, they were eating eighteen pounds; by 1900, ninety pounds. But nowhere was the rise of sugar as dramatic as in the New World. Last year, the average American consumed about a hundred and forty pounds of cane sugar, corn syrup, and other natural sugars - fifty percent more than the Germans or the French and nine times as much as the Chinese.
Which makes sense, considering how blubbery we all are. We've adapted to our high-sugar diets, and unfortunately for us, there doesn't seem to be a point in which our bodies say "enough!" In fact, we appear to have adapted to *increase* our sugar appetites. The younger we are, the more sweet we like it. Of course, this also has the adverse effect of tuning our bodies to store carbohydrates (as we're taking in more calories) and inversely affects our response to sugar, resulting in what we now consider to be Type 2 Diabetes (typically adult-onset, but now being seen in children as young as twelve), as our consumption and flabbitude makes our insulin-producing cells resistant to the "feel" of sugars in our bloodstream. When sugar hits our tastebuds, it appears to create a reaction in the brain similar to the effect of a good hit of opium, blocking pain and upping our pleasure sensors. That feeling of bliss after a good pile of ice cream? Opiate bump. And doesn't it feel great?
Biologically speaking, the sense of "taste" is regulated by the clumps of cells on our tongues making up what we call our "taste buds." Each cell is specifically wired to respond to one flavor: sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and umami. When a cell strikes upon a flavor it likes, it fires a series of neurons, resulting in the brain going "a ha! This is X!" Originally, it is thought that we developed our tastes (just as a random aside, most other animals cannot taste sweet. Your dog doesn't know sugar.) in order to help us decide whether something was 'bad' or 'good.' If it tasted like umami, it was good. If it came across as bitter, it was probably toxic. We test ourselves daily, however, as the article author coyly points out:
Nothing in the biology of taste could really explain the appeal of Spicy City [a restaurant in San Diego, near the lab of the taste specialist Charles Zuker] . Our tongues are wired for yes and no, good and bad, not for "It tastes like it's rotting but I can't stop eating it" or "It's incinerating my flesh and I find this oddly pleasureable." ...
We eat chilies, Warheads, and bitter greens, and drink bitter tonics and bitter coffee, for the same reason that we ride roller coasters and watch horror films: to fool the body into thinking it's in danger, and then enjoy the adrenal ride. Our taste buds may tell us that nothing is as good as sugar, but our minds can be taught to know better.
So what does all this mean for modern living us? Who knows, exactly. Besides taunting our biology daily with the foods we eat, adapting ourselves to lethargic, sugar-laden lifestyles, we seem to be doing pretty well as a species. We're living longer and better (though some would debate this as an effect of the intervention of modern medicine), we're living happier through chemistry, and we still fear Soylent Green. We're thrill seekers, long lovers, ingenious and industrious. We just happen to have a problem, and it's our love of eating and the satisfaction it brings us(mmm opium ice cream).
It just tastes too good to stop.
(Of other interesting notes: the smell receptors in your nose are believed to work very similarly to those of the taste buds, as do pheromone receptors in the mouse - the presence of pheromones and pheromone receptors in humans is still debated; the process of discovering new formulations for sugar compounds (e.g. Splenda and NutraSweet) uses the same methodology of high-throughput screening of thousands of molecular compounds as does the search for new drug compounds in pharmaceutical companies to help and cure human disase; I freaking love biology for these types of discoveries and tidbits.)