Sniff your way to health

Forget sugar tax. If the government wants to improve our diets it just needs to give us healthy food – and make it smell unhealthy.

Scientists have found a way to isolate tasty food aromas and reinsert them into foods. They showed that by doing this, they fooled people into thinking that the food tasted nicer.

In one experiment, people given a flan with a ham aroma, found to mimic saltiness, believed it tasted the same as a flan with 40 per cent more salt.

The nose plays a huge role in taste, which is one reason why appetite can be affected by a cold. In the research presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, a device called an ‘‘olfactoscan’’ was used to help isolate aromatic molecules associated with tastes such as fattiness, saltiness or sweetness.

They gave people sweetness molecules while they were drinking fruit juice to see how the smell affected the taste and said that preliminary results seemed to show a positive effect.

‘‘Most consumers know that they should be eating more healthful foods made with reduced amounts of fat, sugar and salt. But this is problematic because these are the very ingredients that make many of the foods we like taste so delicious,’’ said Thierry ThomasDanguin, from the Centre des Sciences du Gout et de l’Alimentation in France. ‘‘Based on our lab work, we’ve come to believe that aromas can help compensate for the reduction of fat, sugar and salt in healthful foods and make them more appealing.’’

He said that this might help with one of the primary problems in healthy food: it tastes unappealing. ‘‘If you buy a product made with 30 per cent less salt, and you don’t like it because it isn’t very tasty, what do you do?’’ he said. ‘‘You’ll probably reach for the table salt. So the target is missed.’’