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Tampering with Taste Buds for Better Coffee?
An anonymous reader writes "A Globe and Mail article states that scientists are busy working on making everything taste great: " In a small office just west of the New Jersey Turnpike, researchers are taking the human taste bud into a brave new world.
Here, it is not cream or milk that the employees of Linguagen Corp. add to their morning java, but a dash of a biological compound that fools their brain into thinking that black, bitter coffee is as smooth as a milky double latte"
Every fast food restuarant ( cough McDonalds) will add this to their coffee and secret sauce to their big macs. God knows whats in their patties.
Isn't this true they add fat and chemicals to their fries so they taste better ?
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Taste is very important in determining what is safe to consume. When milk turns sour, it has gone bad and generally is no longer safe to drink. The first bad-tasting drop results in the milk being spit out, and disaster prevented.
Imagine if that milk has been redesigned to taste fresh long after it has already gone bad...
Okay, so we're talking about AMP which although as the article says is a 'natural' chemical, is also one of the very basic molecules used by every cell in our bodies as part of the mechanism for determining their metabolic needs and monitoring what's going on within them. This gives me a case of the screaming heebie jeebies.
I somehow can't help thinking of Monosodium Glutamate here... Flavour enhancers don't have what you might call a *glowing* record of healthiness...
What this compound is doing is bitter-blocking, and I don't know about you, but there are bitter flavours I actually find rather enjoyable - strong black coffee being one of these... But an awful lot of foods contain bitterness to a greater or lesser degree, and it makes up one of the five tastes we're actually able to percieve - the effect of using this stuff widely would have to be tantamount to knocking out the blue channel in our eyes! It's going to do all kinds of really bizzare things to how things taste, not all of them good...
Besides which, the article mentions that the side effect is to induce a flavour of raw fish... I dunno, I'll take my coffee with a kick please, not with a side order of sushi...
- Gasoline that makes your dashboard always report that you have a full tank - even if you're about to run out of gas
- A helmet that convinces defendants to confess - even if they're innocent
- A panacea that stops children from ever crying - even if they've just been hit by a car
- An instrument that tells pilots they're flying at a safe altitude - even if they're about to hit the ground
Really, what's the point in celebrating creating something whose only purpose is to make our well-evolved biological sensors and filters fail.Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
I had a girlfriend who was acutely sensitive to MSG; she got an instant headache over her left eye after just one or two bites of something. (My grandomother is the same way, and they both suffer from the thyroid condition known as Graves Disease. Coincidence?)
It made me very aware of what did and didn't contain MSG. Over the years we watched various products stop using it, much to her delight. In recent years however (we broke up in '99), it seems to be making a comeback. Anybody know why this is, other than the obvious?
I can't detect it in foods myself, but since it's classified as an excitatory neurotoxin I try to avoid it anyway.
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Is it just me or has this not been around long enough for there to be any meaningful safety studies? I for one don't want to eat something until its been tested.
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What really gets me is that this is America's response to having pretty much the worst coffee in the world. My wife doesn't care for coffee, but while we were living in Germany, she started drinking it because of how smooth it is compared to American coffee. I thought I was going to die when we moved back and had to start drinking this swill American's call coffee again. It's so bad that I've asked some friends of mine in Germany to ship me some coffee. My only fear is that the problem is as much in how we brew our coffee as it is in how the beans are prepared. I'll find out any day now. Does anybody in Germany know the appropriate method for brewing coffee? Do I need to switch back to a percolator instead of automatic drip?
GreyPoopon
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I'd agree with that. If you have the advantage of living in a city, find out where the Italians drink (and buy) their coffee. They won't settle for the domestic swill.
Interesting note: the Scandinavians drink the most coffee per capita, with Finland well in the lead.
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I don't know where to get it from, a friend of mine at a former job grew it in her garden in Florida. She said it wasn't hard to grow in that climate.
It really works too, lemons and limes taste incredible -- way better than an orange, after you've eaten a berry.
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What most people aren't aware is that by the time you buy your beans, they're already stale. Whether you get them from the local supermarket or from a Starbucks, they've been prior-roasted, shipped, and in most cases, have sat around for far too long. Roasted beans last about a week before they start losing their flavour.
If you've never tried freshly roasted coffee, make it a point of going to a specialty roaster in your city and getting the freshest coffee they have - if you can get some that was roasted the previous day, pay whatever they ask for it.
Use a French press, there's really nothing better for black coffee (except for an espresso machine) and make sure not to let it sit for two long - 4 minutes with boiling water should do the trick.
You'll never go back. (and if you do some research on roasting it yourself [which is incredibly simple], you'll be amazed at how cheap green beans are)
... particularly for those with problems losing weight. If you haven't noticed, foods with sugars (carbohydrates) and fats taste better than those that don't, pretty much as a result of eons of natural selection*. Tricking the taste buds into thinking that indigestible/low-calorie food is more appetizing than it is would be a good thing for this application imho.
Imagine if you could trick your tongue/tastebuds into thinking celery tastes like chocolate.. Particularly helpful if you could introduce textured cellulose food products with vitamin enrichment that could be used in snack foods.
Now if someone can only make treadmill grinding (and repetitive exercise in general) LESS BORING..
*whenever a political vegetarian bugs me (at a party for example), my reply: "If we weren't supposed to eat animals, they wouldn't be so delicious!".. It works as both a smartass remark and a statement on the evolution of human nutrition biology...
so now there will be no reason for good tasting food. rather we'll be stuck with shitty pre-packaged food like KD, McDonalds, etc and it will taste good. This food will be/is full of so much chemicals cancer will be hitting people before puberty. The french (France not french Canadians) eat 30% more fat and have 40% less heart disease (G&M article) because they don't eat crappy food. Europe has a much higher food quality than NA does.
The big conglomorates have so abused food, that sometimes when I serve food to people, they look puzzled (like home made mayo).
I agree 100% about coffee and chocolate. Three products where I spend good money (and probably totally spend the same, as a bar of Green and Blacks organic choc lasts me a long time, as I only need a little to get a good rush).
I mostly buy premium ice cream, but have made my own. There's a great book called Ices by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir (I think the same book is called Frozen Desserts: The Definitive Guide to Making Ice Creams, Ices, Sorbets, Gelati, and Other Frozen Delights in the US). You need very few ingredients, and it's wonderful. Machines cost about £40 in the UK, don't know US prices.
As for beer, in the UK it's funny. Beer like Budweiser (the US stuff, not to be confused with an excellent Czech beer) is marketed and sold as a premium beer. You can buy locally produced ale for a much lower price, which tastes wonderful.
BTW I'm trying to develop a portal to do with excellent food on the web, a bit like slashdot but for food and drink. It will mostly be UK based, when I get some time.
However, most consumers (maybe due to the stupifying effects that you've described) refer to any form of free glutamate as "MSG", which is incorrect.
For that reason, if you see a label on food that says "No MSG", or "No Added MSG", the FDA requires that it be free of all "free glutamate" additives, including MSG and hydrolized protiens.
Aspartame appears to have a far larger impact on the general populace and much of it's documented. As for MSG problems, a lot of it is anecdotal and clinical studies have not shown that it has any detrimental effect on brain or nervous funtion.
Being that the same salt occurs naturally in seaweed and is used frequently in both Chinese and Japanese cooking, I would expect that the Japanese and Chinese should be raving idiots after thousands of years of use if it were actually toxic.
While I don't doubt there are people including yourself who are sensitive to MSG and other additives (eg. aspartame), most people don't consume enough to even come close to toxic levels. You're just as likely to die from consuming honey, the perfect anaerobic environment for botulism.
I typically avoid any artificial sweetener, simply because I don't think they taste very good. For the occasional Diet Pepsi I have (8-20 ounces/week), I haven't noticed any health problems that weren't present when I've gone for months without any intake of artificial sweeteners.
Like all else, moderation is the key. The person that puts 5 packets of sacharine in his iced tea is the same as a smoker. We all haves choices and we make them daily. The consequences are ours to pay.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Wow... interesting to see that there are a few others here on slashdot who know the annoyances of being highly sensitive to MSG and L-glutamic acid in general.
I've been avoiding monosodium glutamte, hydrolyzed proteins, autolyzed yeast, modified starches, and a list of about 20 or more things for a couple of years now and I've never felt better. Most of my symptoms prior to eliminating MSG from my diet were as yours, albeit perhaps not as severe. I suffered from panic attacks, migraines, memory loss, dizziness, heart palpitations, disorientation, and general feelings of very unpleasant weirdness. All of those have long since gone away. To top matters off, when I quit eating food additives (I figured if I was cutting out MSG, I'd cut them all out and eat naturally), I shed 67 lbs in less than six months without cutting my diet and without doing a lick of exercise. I certainly wasn't complaining about that, as I'd always fought to keep my weight in check my entire life!
I don't know if you're aware of this, but I find that I'm able to eat trace amounts of MSG if I take Vitamin B6 prior to the meal that might be suspect. Apparently, from what I've read, B6 speeds up the metabolization of MSG. I find this a helpful technique for when I want to eat out at a restaurant that I'm fairly sure is safe (I've had particularly good luck with Thai restaurants, and they generally seem to be MSG-informed) but that may still use certain questionable ingredients that contain things like "natural flavours". YMMV, but I thought that I'd pass along the tip all the same!
This article had my rapt attention until I got up to this:
"So far, the company has found the only drawback of adding too much AMP to their coffees, either in the mug or the grinds, is that it generates the taste of raw fish in your mouth, said scientist Stephen Gravina, Linguagen's associate director."
Ok, so the coffee's not bitter, but instead it tastes like raw fish. This is an improvement?
And yes, I realize it says that's only if you don't use the AMP properly. But coffee's only bitter if you don't make it properly too. If I had to choose between the two tastes of a bad brew - bitterness or the taste of raw fish - I don't even need to think about which one is worse.