'Hyper-palatable food': scientists identify worst offenders to snack on
The adverts, for once, are spot on. When it comes to some snacks, it’s hard to deny “once you pop, you can’t stop”.
No matter how much you want to resist, one taste and you’re doomed to eat more.
We tend to call such food moreish or yummy. Naturally, scientists have a more esoteric term: high “palatability”.
And it’s known that some foods are especially likely to bring us back for more. Unsurprisingly, the food industry has spent billions creating such “hyper-palatable food” (HPF) because it means greater sales.
But there’s a dark side to HPF: its ability to undermine so-called satiety – the biochemical response that tells us to stop. And that opens the way to binge eating, obesity and premature death.
Research suggests the effect is triggered by certain combinations of fat, carbs, sugar and sodium – principally in the form of salt.
But until now it’s not been clear precisely what those combinations are, and how to tell if a food may be irresistibly hyper-palatable.
Doing so could play a key role in research to combat obesity – including in the UAE, where it affects more than 1 in 4 of the population.
And it could also help consumers through more precise labelling. Alongside standard information about fat, sugar, salt and calorie content, some food could be identified as especially unhealthy because of its ability to trigger binge eating.
Now a team of researchers believes they have solved the mystery of moreishness.
Professor Tera Fazzino and colleagues at the University of Kansas made their discovery by combing the research literature to identify foods found to be potentially hyper-palatable in tests, and noting their nutritional content.
They then looked for combinations of fat, carbs, sugar and sodium that seemed to occur unusually often in such foods – suggesting they were boosting the palatability more than expected by any one ingredient alone.
The team found that three specific combinations emerged repeatedly.
The first of these “HPF clusters” are foods with a mix of fat and sodium (FSOD), where the fat provides at least 25 per cent of the total calories, and 0.3 per cent sodium by weight.
Everyday examples of such FSOD foods are cookies and butter popcorn – both famously irresistible.
The second cluster identified is a combination where carbs providing at least 40 per cent of the total calories, plus 0.2 per cent sodium by weight. This CSOD [carbs and sodium] category contains the likes of pizzas, pasta and salty snacks.
Finally, the researchers identified a mix of fat and sugar, where each provide at least 20 per cent of the total calories. This FS category contains notorious diet-busters like cakes, pies and sweet cereals.
The researchers have gone beyond simply identifying this “evil triplet” however. They decided to see just how much of the US diet is hyperpalatable by comparing the various proportions of fat, carbs, sugar and sodium to those for foods registered in the official US Department of Agriculture database.
Astonishingly, they found that 62 per cent of them were hyper-palatable, falling within one or more of the HPF clusters.