hedonic escalation

I listened to an episode of the radio show 'One Dish' about cheese. I heard something in there that seemed at first to contradict what I believed about processed food. It is the idea of 'hedonic escalation'. The idea is that the more flavours that a food contains then the more it will be enjoyed.

By 'more flavours' I mean things like sweet, sour and salty. It doesn't seem to mean the flavours of herbs and spices, which are as much to do with our olfactory sense than the four of five tastes from the tongue.

For a long time I have believed that processed food lacks flavour, and to make up for it they add sucrose, glucose syrup, citric acid and salt. Sucrose and glucose have the same function, but they like to add glucose even though it is more expensive because then both come further down the list of ingredients. That makes it look better for them. It doesn't look good to have 'sucrose' at the top of your list of ingredients.

People are so used to everything tasting sweet, sour and salty that they don't know or want anything else. Their food doesn't taste of vegetables, herbs and spices because these subtler flavours cannot be retained well for months in a can or a plastic tray. Most people now in Britain and America would think there was something missing if their food wasn't both sweet and sour.

I have always felt that sugar spoils the flavour of any savoury food. I dislike an aftertaste of sucrose and citric acid. So I didn't like this idea of hedonic escalation. The show seemed to be saying that sweet and sour are something people naturally crave.

However, on doing some research I realise that it doesn't mean this. Research shows that it is salt, sugar and fat which enhance each other's flavours. Another one of my long-standing beliefs is that there is a problem with combinations of sugar and fat. It seems to me that when they are combined you can't really taste all of the sugar and fat. So you will eat more before it becomes unpleasant.

Some people say they have a sweet tooth. Yet few people will eat sugar from a sugar bowl. Neither will people eat scoops of butter. That would be disgusting. Put them together in a cake though and people will happily eat lots of sugar and butter. Cake just doesn't seem that sweet or that fatty. This is one reason why we have so much obesity.

It's not just cake, it is chocolate, donuts, ice cream and many other common foods that are like this. Combinations of sugar and fat. We are told by evolutionary psychologists that we keep eating because on the savanna where we supposedly evolved we were uncertain when we could eat next. I don't believe that though: sugar and fat were never encountered together by hunter-gatherers. Protein and fat yes, in a hunted animal.

I think that is part of the reason why the Atkins diet works. Fat that hasn't been sweetened is less palatable. Sugar that hasn't been mixed with fat likewise. Perhaps you could have a diet where you have no carbohydrate one day and no fat the next. You will never encounter cake, chocolate etc.

So I am quite happy to accept that salt, sugar and fat together are the problem. And I am happy to continue to believe that people should not accept their sweet and sour savoury processed foods. I think the traffic light system is a disaster. You can't complain about mayonaisse, taramasalata and hummus containing sugar because you will be told that it's a low-sugar product. But mayonaisse, taramasalata and hummus should be no-sugar products. Just as a cottage pie for an old person should be. If you eat low-sugar products throughout the day you end up eating a lot of sugar.

Marks and Spencer had a brand of hummus that contained sugar. That's not usual, but I can't seem to buy mayonnaise or taramasalata anywhere that doesn't have sugar in it.

This has an effect on blood sugar levels. They go up high then come down low. Obesity and type 2 diabetes are the result. The health service will become even more overstretched.

Why should a cottage pie for an old person contain sucrose and glucose? These are not ingredients in a traditional cottage pie. I don't want a pizza with a sucrose and citric acid aftertaste. I want a pizza where I can taste the herbs, the vegetables and the dough. I don't want a curry that tastes sweet, I want one where I can taste the turmeric, the ginger and the coriander (chilli is one flavour that is retained but I don't want too much of that either).

I know that chefs sometimes add sugar to a pasta sauce to counter the acidity of the tomatoes. That acidity though comes from citric acid added by the manufacturer. If chefs want to be clever then let them source tomatoes that have naturally ripened and have not had these quite large amounts of citric acid added. You would think that a can of tomatoes is a basic natural product: it could be but it's not.

The first time I had pasta with a puttanesca sauce I liked it. I thought it tasted of seafood. That's because of the anchovy. Now all pasta sauces taste the same. You can't buy puttanesca that that tastes of seafood. It tastes of sugar and citric acid.

It's not as if processed foods are cheap. You can buy a kilo of rice for about 45p. Dhal is just about the cheapest high-protein dish you can make. Especially if you make it with yellow split peas. Suitable for vegetarians and vegans. I've had some delicious dhal but also some unpleasant dhal. Dhal and rice together with vegetables (in the form of subzi) is cheap and nutritious. Millions of people in India eat it every day.

You wonder what effect added sugar and acid have on people's teeth. You can't expect a Conservative government to try to restrict companies, they would see that as red tape. Better to dose the water supply with fluoride. However a new study shows that fluoridation has little benefit for children. We have always known that it has no benefit for adults.

wheat shortage

I read an interesting article in a recent New Scientist magazine which said that there is an easy way to make more food available considering that the war in Ukraine will mean shortages of wheat. The article said that governments around the world can easily stop converting grains into alcohol. This is done so that alcohol can be added to vehicle fuel. It means we use less fossil fuels.

Palm oil is also used in fuel.

Many countries will experience food shortages especially Egypt, which is heavily dependent on imported wheat. The problem though is that if we convert less grain into alcohol then we become more dependent on fossil fuels - crude oil converted to petrol and diesel. That would mean more global warming.

We could get around that by having fewer car journeys. That would suit me just fine, fewer cars on the road and more public transport. Even just stopping the increase in the numbers of cars would be good. We seem to have more and more cars on the road and they are getting bigger - more SUV types. That's why we have the problematic smart motorways, we are running out of space on the roads.

However, there is another easy way to free up grain to feed people. That is to breed fewer farm animals such as chickens, pigs and cattle. There are billions of them and they eat vast quantities of grain and soya. Fish such as anchovies too.

Farmers are dependent on subsidies. Governments should ask farmers to breed ten or twenty percent fewer animals for the next year or two. They can withhold subsidies or offer financial incentives.

You might say that this would mean less food available. Not so, animals do not efficiently convert plant calories and protein into animal calories and protein. You might say that people don’t want to eat maize and soya but many people in poor countries like Egypt will want to. I don’t care so much about the affluent countries. Other grains and pulses are available. People should be eating more plants and they don’t need as much protein as they think they do.

So less global warming, especially because there will be fewer cattle to produce methane. Also less animal cruelty and less slurry.

balanced for you

In papers are full-page ads for the Marks and Spencer range of foods 'Balanced For You'. They are advertised as 'High Protein Healthy Meals'. What is healthy about high protein? High protein is a fad that began with athletes who thought they could get bigger muscles by eating protein at certain times such as after a workout.

There is no evidence that for ordinary people eating more protein improves health. People already eat more protein than they need. Extra protein is just extra calories and is only going to make people fat. It seems that Marks and Spencer are happy to confuse people about their health to make a profit.

The three examples all contain animal protein. The main one illustrated is Pulled Pork Ramen, which contains sugar. High Protein Healthy Food, it says on the packaging, the other two examples say High Protein with Balanced Carbs. The word 'balanced' is nutritionally meaningless.

I get the feeling that there are a lot of people who wish to confuse the public about their health to get their way. They are not honest. I heard someone on the radio say that some people can't afford to eat less meat of better quality. I think she hasn't understood what this means. If you eat half the meat you used to, then you can buy meat at up to twice the price while still saving money.

It's not difficult to understand. Did she really not understand, or did she just want to confuse people?

What some people can't afford is to eat more protein than necessary, and to eat animal protein which is the more expensive type of protein. People have been persuaded to munch their way through vast quantities of cheap chicken, pork sausages and cheap cheddar because they think they need the protein and because they think that's all they can afford. They are wasting their money.

People with vested interests, such as farmers and retailers, have to stop trying to confuse people.

Here are other examples:-

• vegetarians and vegans eat lots of avocados, which means more forest cut down
• we will have to grow more soya to feed vegetarians and vegans, which means more forest cut down
• if we grow trees on pastureland it will decrease biodiversity

Vegetarians and vegans don't eat more avocados than anyone else, when we cut the number of farm animals then people can eat the grains and pulses we currently feed to animals, if you plant native trees eg oaks and not one species of conifer there will be greater biodiversity.

glucose in artificial sweeteners

I've just been looking at the list of ingredients on a sachet of artificial sweeter. I found it is a coffee shop. The first two ingredients are dextrose and maltodextrin. If someone is trying to cut down on their sugar intake, is it not worse to have dextrose - also called glucose? It's going to have the same effect, making your blood sugar (blood glucose) levels go high. Then a drop in blood sugar level. What about diabetics? I realise that maybe there's not a great deal of dextrose and maltodextrin, with most of the sweetening coming from the two artificial sweeteners, but even so it can't be a good thing.

obesity, calories, starch and saturated fat

The National Obesity Forum have criticized Public Health England and their Eatwell Guide. There are two polarized opinions expressed here. One side says that obesity is about calories in (from food) and calories out (through exercise). The other side say that calories have nothing to do with obesity.

One side says all starchy foods are good. The other side says all starchy foods are bad.

One side says all saturated fats are bad. The other side says all saturated fats are good.

I think both sides should be ashamed of themselves. The public are confused. Both side are treating all starchy foods as if they are the same. They aren't. Pasta has a low glycemic index, and potatoes have a high glycemic index. That means that pasta eaten in moderation is unlikely to contribute towards the development of diabetes. The starch in potatoes is digested quickly into glucose and pushes up blood glucose and insulin levels soon after eating.

We now know that the fat in cheese, despite being saturated fat, is unlikely to contribute towards heart disease. That's good for me because I like cheese. If I liked burgers though, the news is not so good. We are unsure if beef fat will contribute towards heart disease. All fat can contribute towards obesity though because it is calorie-dense. Now I realize that not all calories are the same. 100 calories-worth of sugar will be treated differently by the body that 100 calories-worth of olive oil. To say though that obesity has nothing to do with calories can't be right.

Why do both The National Obesity Forum and Public Health England have so little to say about the glycemic index? Perhaps they think ordinary people can't take it in. Maybe it seems counter-intuitive (why would starch from pasta and potatoes be so different?). If you like to think of food as something natural and not worry about the science too much then don't like to talk about indexes.

It's not rocket science. They should both get their act together.

A Meaty Problem

On Sunday I listened to the repeat of the Radio 4 documentary 'A Meaty Problem'. In it Henry Dimbleby said he was guilty about not being able to give up meat altogether. I think he was being a bit hard on himself though because he said he mostly eats meatless meals and has meat once a week or so.

Henry was talking to Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London's Centre for Food Policy. Henry said that he'd been talking to an intensive chicken farmer who had said to him that "to farm free range chicken is actually immoral" because intensively-reared chicken uses fewer resources.

That's wrong, for three reasons.

Firstly, although intensively-reared chicken is more efficient in terms of converting animal feed to meat than free-range chicken (or intensively-reared pork or beef), it will always be most efficient for people to eat the grain and pulses that go into animal feed. So, using the logic of this chicken farmer, if it's immoral to buy free-range chicken then it must be immoral to buy any kind of meat. The moral thing to do is to eat bread, pasta, cous cous, polenta, beans, peas and lentils.

Secondly, even intensively-reared chicken is not the most efficient animal protein. Fresh water fish (I'm not sure about farmed salmon) such as carp is better. So are crayfish. Because they are cold-blooded creatures they don't waste calories on keeping warm the way chickens or pigs do. Some have suggested growing and eating insects, but they're not necessary and it would be difficult to persuade people to eat them.

Thirdly, nobody is saying we can't have luxuries sometimes. We're not going to grub up the vineyards of France and Italy and plant potatoes. That might provide more food, but luxuries sometimes are good. We should regard meat as a luxury. Eat something that tastes nice, but not every day. Obviously we can't ever have 23 billion chickens raised free-range. That's just impossible. But if there were let's say 10 billion chickens instead of 23 billion then we could raise them much less intensively than now.

If I eat one free-range chicken per week, am I being less moral than someone who eats meat every day? Especially when that meat is more often pork or beef, which are less efficient converters of grain and soya? Why didn't this chicken farmer say that it is immoral to eat free-range chicken and any kind or pork or beef?

Morality has to be more than just feed conversion rates; chickens are clean animals that enjoy dust baths, if you keep them in a shed without ever cleaning the shed during their lifetimes (as happens with intensive rearing) they breath ammonia, they walk on their own faeces and their skin is burned with the acidity of what they have to lie in.

In the brutally unnatural surroundings of a factory farm, “broiler” chickens live the entire 45 days of their lives on urine- and manure-soaked wood shavings, unchanged through several flocks of 30,000 or more birds in a single shed. Excessive ammonia levels in the litter and air cause severe skin burns, ulcers, and painful respiratory problems, as well as pulmonary congestion, swelling, and hemorrhage. A Washington Post writer who visited a chicken shed wrote, “Dust, feathers and ammonia choke the air in the chicken house and fans turn it into airborne sandpaper, rubbing skin raw.” Excretory ammonia fumes often become so strong that chickens develop a blinding eye disease called ammonia burn, so painful that the birds try to rub their eyes with their wings, and cry out helplessly.

from this site.

Dr Annie Gray food historian said on the programme about chicken "today we regard it as really cheap protein". It isn't. Animal protein will always be more expensive than plant protein. Chicken and rice is a boring food. It looks bad, it smells bad and it tastes bad. Dal and rice however is wonderful. Dal (also spelled daal or dahl or dhal) is usually made with lentils but can be made with yellow split peas (which is the cheapest of the high-protein foods). If you like Indian food you'll like dal.

Cheap chicken is neither one thing nor another. It is neither cheap protein nor a luxury. I think people should get most of their protein from plants and have meat and cheese sometimes. Have something that you enjoy the taste of, even if it's a bit more expensive. That might sound a bit like Marie Antoinette saying 'let them eat cake' but in fact it's just the opposite. Neither is it being self-denying, just the opposite: people will enjoy their food more.

It saddens me that poor people munch their way through quite large quantities of cheap chicken, cheap pork sausages and cheap cheddar. They are wasting their money, usually quite large amounts of money. I'm sure this chicken farmer wants people to believe that he is providing cheap protein for poor people. Retailers and food manufacturers want us to believe that too. Governments want to support the British meat industry. But British people eat far more protein than they need, don't understand that you can get substantial amounts of protein even from low-protein foods (pasta is 11% protein), and as I've said before ANIMAL PROTEIN IS ALWAYS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN PLANT PROTEIN. So if you want cheap protein buy yellow (or green) split peas.

belvita soft bakes

I saw the adverts for Belvita soft bakes recently so I thought I would try them. At the top of the pack it says 'slow release carbohydrates' with an asterisk and '4h' which I guess stands for '4 hours'. The asterisk refers to the statement 'belVita Soft Bakes with proven slow release carbohydrate ...'.

On the other side of the pack it states 'Energy for the whole morning' with two asterisks. They refer to the statement 'belVita Soft Bakes have a high content of slowly digestible starch, which is a slow release carbohydrate. Consumption of foods high is slowly digestible starch raises blood glucose concentration less after a meal compared to foods low in slowly digestible starch.'

If you look at Nutritional Information there are three asterisks that refer to the statement 'Contains minimum 15 g Slowly Digestible Starch per 100 g.' You would think that all this would mean that this product has a low glycemic index (GI). However, if you look at the list of ingredients on the base of the pack it contains sugar, glucose syrup, dextrose and  isomaltulose (a source of glucose and fructose).

From a list of ingredients it's difficult to know how much of these sugars go into the product. If we go back to Nutritional Information however, each 100 g of the product contains 21 g of sugars (for the Choc Chips version). Compare that to 0.8 g of sugars per 100 g of Sainsbury's rough oatcakes, which have no added sugars at all.

There's something seriously wrong here. Just because a product contains some ingredients which will be low GI, it doesn't mean that the product itself is low GI. The addition of these sugars means that it's not going to be low GI. No mention is made of GI on the box, so I expect they would say that they are not making the claim that they are low GI. But that is what they seem to want people to believe. Also, the 'traffic light' label isn't colour coded as with other products so you can't tell at a glance if it's high in sugars.

Oatcakes are much cheaper than soft bakes and seem to be a genuinely low GI product. Oatcakes would raise blood glucose concentrations less after consuming them, but that cannot be true of soft bakes. This will increase someone's risk of developing diabetes. It can also increase risk of obesity because people will feel hungrier sooner and more likely to want to snack. People are being misled in matters concerning their health and I think that's wrong.

We know from the recent Volkswagen scandal that big companies are happy to mislead the public. This shouldn't be happening. It's like Marks and Spencer who had a range of ready meals that they called 'Fuller Longer'. I have copied-and-pasted from here.

"In 2010, Marks & Spencer launched their ‘Fuller Longer’ range of products, where each dish is designed to contain the right balance of proteins and carbohydrates to increase satiety and therefore reduce the desire to snack in-between meals. Consumers certainly bought into the concept, with it being a big seller for Marks & Spencer.

However, it has now emerged that Marks & Spencer have been asked to change the title of their range, in light of Trading Standards discovering that they are in breach of EU law on health claims.

Health and nutrition claims are perhaps a point of confusion for many brand marketers. They know that health statements sell products but they are perhaps unaware of the legal red tape that surrounds their use. Under EU law, a health claim must be authorised by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and included in the list of authorised health claims in the EU Register before they can be used. Nutrition claims on the other hand, can only be used if they are listed in the Annex of the EU Regulation and meet the specific conditions stipulated."

What Marks and Spencer could have done is to remove all the added sugars from this range. They were all savoury dishes but they all contained added sugar. The could have taken out the high GI starches and replaced them with low GI starches. Long-grain rice could have replaced short-grain rice. New potatoes could have replaced ordinary potatoes. But they didn't want to do that.

Instead they left the ingredients the same as before but just rebranded the range 'Balanced for You'. Which doesn't mean anything nutritionally. Having a more meaningless name gets them off the legal hook. This has decreased my respect for M&S. They just want to cash in on a premium range of foods by confusing people about their health.