“This nutrition software essentially provides in fine-grained detail a data set that specifies how many calories per serving are in this food, and how much fat, sodium, sugar, carbohydrates, fiber and all sorts of other things.”
“We essentially took all of the descriptive definitions of the foods from the literature - for example, Oreos or mac and cheese - and we entered these one by one into a nutrition program that is very careful in how it quantifies a food’s ingredients,” Fazzino said. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS). This has been a substantial limitation in the field I thought was important to try to address.”įazzino and her KU co-authors - Kaitlyn Rohde, research assistant at the Cofrin Logan Center and Debra Sullivan of the Department of Dietetics and Nutrition at the University of Kansas Medical Center - sought to define criteria for hyper-palatable foods by conducting a literature review, then using nutrition software and applying their definition to 7,757 food items in the U.S. If there’s no standardized definition, we can’t compare across studies - we’ve just typically used descriptive definitions like ‘sweets,’ ‘desserts’ and ‘fast foods.’ That type of descriptive definition isn’t specific to the actual mechanisms by which the ingredients lead to this enhanced palatability. “But these definitions are virtually unknown to the scientific community, which is a major limitation. “Multiple documentaries have pointed out that food companies have very well-designed formulas for these types of foods to make them palatable and essentially enhance consumption,” said lead author Tera Fazzino, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Kansas and associate director of the Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research and Treatment at KU’s Life Span Institute. PST at the Seventh Annual Obesity Journal Symposium at ObesityWeek at the Mandalay Bay South Convention Centre in Las Vegas will change that, offering specific metrics that might qualify foods as hyper-palatable - and finding most foods consumed in the United States meet these criteria. Research published today in Obesity and presented at 4:45 p.m. Researchers call this class of foods - often processed foods or sweets with alluring combinations of fat, sugar, carbohydrates and sodium - “hyper-palatable.” While a slew of films, popular books and academic studies have addressed hyper-palatable foods over the past 15 or so years, none has yet to offer a broadly accepted quantitative definition of just what constitutes a hyper-palatable food. Maybe that’s because potato chips, like so many foods in the American diet, can pack a mix of ingredients apt to light up people’s brain-reward neural circuitry and overpower mechanisms that are supposed to signal when we’ve had enough to eat. brand of potato chips once promoted itself with the slogan “betcha can’t eat just one!”