#499: How Sensory Cues Impact Food Choice & Behavior – Prof. Ciarán Forde
Sigma Nutrition Radio
Danny Lennon
4.8 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2023
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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About This Episode:
Sensory cues, comprising taste, smell, texture, and appearance, serve as the initial drivers that influence our food preferences and liking for particular items. These sensory cues can be both inherent, such as the natural sweetness of fruit, and learned, as in the association between a particular aroma and a favorite dish.
One crucial aspect of this research is delving into how sensory properties of food, like texture and taste, contribute to our choices and consumption patterns. Food texture, for example, plays a key role in determining how quickly we consume a meal, with softer textures often being associated with faster eating rates.
Sensory intensity and palatability are also central themes in this research. Moreover, research into dietary fat reveals intriguing phenomena like "fat blindness," where the ability to discriminate different levels of fat diminishes as taste intensity increases. Understanding these relationships can help shed light on factors contributing to overeating and potential avenues for behavior modification.
To give us a better insight into this field of research, Professor in Sensory Science and Eating Behavior at Wageningen University, Prof. Ciarán Forde, is on the podcast to discuss these ideas.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 499 of the podcast. We are getting close to that milestone of 500 very soon. I hope you do join us for that. |
| 0:25.9 | My name is Danny Lennon. And if this is your first time listening, you are very welcome to the show. |
| 0:30.0 | This is a place where we have evidence-based discussions about nutrition science and other related fields. |
| 0:36.0 | And we try and dig into what the evidence actually says. And also |
| 0:39.1 | go a bit further and give you an understanding of how to interpret some of the evidence. And today |
| 0:44.3 | will be no different. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to Dr. Kiran Ford, who currently is |
| 0:50.5 | professor and chair in sensory science and eating Behavior at Vagenden University in the |
| 0:55.3 | Netherlands. And his research group there primarily focuses on how sensory cues influence our |
| 1:01.9 | food choice and food intake behaviors. And within that, they have a particularly strong focus |
| 1:06.9 | on things like texture cues, eating rate, energy intake and metabolism. |
| 1:12.4 | They've also developed a number of new techniques to understand how eating behaviors can |
| 1:16.4 | be influenced by the way we eat within and across meals. |
| 1:20.8 | And this in recent times has led to them being pulled into some of the big discussion around |
| 1:26.1 | ultra-processed foods, which has kind of grabbed hold of both academia and beyond at the moment. |
| 1:31.8 | And his work has been really useful in being able to inform some of the possible explanations |
| 1:37.3 | that we see in differences in energy intake, as I'm sure we'll discuss here. |
| 1:42.3 | And indeed, some of this work on the sensory |
| 1:45.2 | properties of foods and how that has an impact on food selection, eating |
| 1:49.4 | behavior, energy intake, and beyond has been something that Dr. Ford has been |
| 1:53.0 | doing for probably more than 10, 15 years now and some really impressive work |
| 1:59.1 | if you go back and look at his body of work, which we |
| 2:02.1 | will link to in the show notes. And previous to joining Vagin University, he was based in |
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