How ultraprocessed food rewires your appetite with Spencer Hyman and Prof. Tim Spector

Is flavor just a sensory experience? Or the secret key to eating for health? In this episode, Spencer Hyman, flavor expert and co-founder of Cocoa Runners, joins Prof. Tim Spector, a world-leading scientist in nutrition and gut health.

Together, they uncover how the food industry manipulates taste to make us overeat, and how rediscovering real flavor could transform our well-being.

For listeners curious about how to rebuild a healthy relationship with food, this episode includes a practical guide to retraining your taste buds. Spencer and Tim share tips on how to eat more slowly, savor each bite, and use flavor as a natural marker of nutrient-rich, satisfying foods.

Could learning the language of flavor be the most powerful way to eat better — without restriction?

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The crunch your gut’s* been craving.

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Transcript

Jonathan Wolf: Today's episode is going to be like herding cats, because I have two of my friends, both Tim Spector and Spencer Hyman, and they're friends with each other, and they've already been talking about this subject for two hours before we start the podcast. So Spencer, thank you for joining me today.

Spencer Hyman: Thank you very much. Very excited.

Jonathan Wolf: Tim, thanks for being here.

Spencer Hyman: Pleasure.

Jonathan Wolf: So I'm going to try and keep you on the straight and narrow, and at least we have this tradition at the beginning where we start with these quick-fire rounds of questions from our listeners. So I believe here at least I can keep you to a yes or a no. Tim, have our brains evolved to seek out high-fat, high-sugar foods?

Tim Spector: Yes.

Jonathan Wolf: Spencer, do big food companies design their products to encourage us to eat mindlessly?

Spencer Hyman: Definitely, yes.

Jonathan Wolf: Tim, can bolting your food down have long-term negative health effects?

Tim Spector: Yes.

Jonathan Wolf: Spencer, do highly processed foods reduce your ability to appreciate the flavors in natural food?

Spencer Hyman: Yes.

Jonathan Wolf: Tim, should you chew each mouthful of food 32 times?

Tim Spector: Probably not.

Jonathan Wolf: And finally, Spencer, what do you think is the most significant benefit of savoring your food rather than wolfing it down?

Spencer Hyman: Overall, savoring as opposed to wolfing it down or bolting it down fast is the key to identifying and getting on the path to eating a healthy diet.

Jonathan Wolf: Well, I look forward to unpacking all of that. And I think it's pretty obvious that people are attracted to foods that are sweet and salty and high-fat. It seems like it's sort of baked into us as human beings, and it's also clear that food manufacturers know how to hit the sweet spot of this and to sell the product. I don't think anyone listening to this is surprised, but Tim, could we maybe just start off with why are we evolved to seek out these sorts of foods?

Tim Spector: The first food we all encounter is breast milk, and that's sweet. The sugars in there, lactose, is something that all humans have to like and have to seek out, otherwise they would die. So that's, I think, something that stays with us the rest of our life, really, this life-giving food that we all need. So we are driven for it and we have various sweet receptors, not just in our mouth, but in other bits of our intestine as well, which drive us for that.

And we know that fats are also really crucial for our survival as well. We do need fats to get our brains to work and other essential parts of our bodies. Salt is the other one. If we're salt-deprived, then really our body doesn't work well either. So these are all hardwired really from birth, but this is manipulated by the food industry to take it to excess, where we didn't actually need that much excess of it. We just needed enough to survive.

Jonathan Wolf: Spencer, how have food manufacturers sort of capitalized on this innate desire that Tim was talking about for these properties?

Spencer Hyman: So I think there's a, there's a wonderful history here, which goes by the name of the Bliss Point, which is that back in the 1960s, a food scientist called Howard Moscowitz articulated this concept, which Tim has just been explaining, about if you combine sugar, salt, and fat in optimum amounts for different foods, people just don't know how to stop wolfing the food down without any thought. And that is generally taken as being the start of the junk food epidemic.

But actually, ironically, you can really argue that a hundred years earlier in the world of chocolate, this was discovered when Daniel Peter and Nestlé worked out how to make milk chocolate, because that is the ultimate bliss point food.

So big food really uses a number of tricks based around our tastes as opposed to our flavors. One of them is this bliss point, the one that Tim is talking about, sugar, salt, and fat. The other is this wonderfully named sensory specific satiety, which talks about different textures. And again, it's all designed to help us identify different foods because we need a variety of foods to survive. So if you get different textures as well as sugar, salt and fat, it really becomes pretty much game over.

Tim Spector: Did the first chocolate have salt in it as well, do you know?

Spencer Hyman: It did have a little bit because it was made—the very, very first milk chocolates were made with condensed milk as opposed to making it with just straight milk powder. But now a lot of chocolates, milk chocolates, have a tiny bit of salt added to them just to sort of give it that twist and lots of texture in mass-market chocolate, too, to try and sort of get you just to keep on wolfing it down as fast as you can.

Jonathan Wolf: So Spencer, could you help us understand a bit more about how those products encourage us to eat them so quickly? Because I think about it as like, I want that 'cause it's high in fat and sugar, but it's not clear to me why that would mean I would want to eat it faster or eat more of it.

Spencer Hyman: So there's one other dimension that they add to it, which is they make it hyper-palatable. So you don't really notice the calories. So if you take lots of junk crisps, when you put them in your mouth, they almost immediately dissolve, so you haven't got anything there. And that's one of the problems with sodas, too.

But basically, humans are programmed to love sugar, salt, fat because that's what we need energy-wise. We're also programmed to like diversity, sensory-specific satiety, and food companies, I don't think they've done this maliciously, but they've noticed that if you want to get people to eat more, that's one way of doing it.

The other advantage for food companies is that it lends to the other aspects of food production, like commoditization and also like the manufacturing. So it's much cheaper for them to actually make foods where they just can add stuff like sugar, salt, and fat, and a bit of texture, rather than taking wonderful fruits or vegetables or cocoa and crafting that carefully so that you bring out the flavors, which are very different to taste.

Jonathan Wolf: Spencer, could you explain a little bit more about what this Bliss Point is?

Spencer Hyman: Yeah, the Bliss Point appeals to your taste senses. So humans, as Tim was explaining, from birth, the first food we have is mother's milk, which has sugar, a little bit of fat, and a little bit of salt in it too.

We are programmed to seek out foods that are high in those areas. If you design foods which have got that in them, and chocolate is arguably the first—you can argue it's biscuits, but it's probably chocolate—plus they have a texture which literally melts in the mouth. Again, think of chocolate: hyper-palatability. Plus, then you can add different bits and pieces. You basically create this environment where people just want to wolf it down because they want more and more of that sensation.

Humans really should eat much more slowly because that brings out the flavor, and that also, as Tim will explain, helps you get the nutrients out of it. But you can basically play off our innate tastes, the things that we detect with our tongue, our esophagus, and our upper intestine, to get people to basically just wolf food down as if there's no tomorrow.

Tim Spector: I would say the bliss point is this precise chemical formula that food companies have come up with that is the exact proportions of the fat, the sugar, and the salt that creates in the mind the ability to overcome your normal fullness signals and overeat.

That's basically what the industry has done and how they've taken something that sounds really cool, nice, "Oh, bliss, perfect," and actually created a monster that artificially, they can tweak the food so that you eat much more than your body really wants it to. That's how I view this, whereas Spencer's often looking at it from a nice taste and, you know, the other way of bliss: really tasty. I'm looking at it from a health point of view, and it's overriding our normal fullness signals. That's what the companies are doing all the time with these foods.

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, when I hear that, it immediately makes me think about all of these GLP-1s, like the Ozempic and Wegovy and everything, which are treating us because we're constantly hungry. Like, we're not able to feel full in the way that obviously our ancestors were. Is that related in any way to food manufacturers and this bliss point food?

Tim Spector: Yeah, they're working in opposite directions, and actually the consumer is stuck between, you know, the Ozempic-like drugs and the food companies. And, you know, one are making us fat, and the other are giving us a drug to stop us being fat.

And the mechanism is the same. They are both of them focusing on these hunger signals. So the foods we eat are overriding the hunger signals, and the drugs we're taking are actually blocking that so that we do feel full much earlier than we would be otherwise.

So, it's really two sides of the same coin, really. It's what's happening here, and this is why all the research is pointing towards appetite and satiety as being the crucial factor in weight gain and health.

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Spencer Hyman: I think the other angle to put on this, though, is as well that tastes are instinctive. We are programmed to love stuff that is sweet. You know, if you take a little bit of sweet solution, put it on your finger and give it to a baby, it will be very happy. If you put in sort of a bitter solution, you know, quinine or coffee or anything like that, the baby will wince back. We have taste sensors to warn us and to encourage us to eat different foods. So if you combine sugar, salt, and fat, it does give you great pleasure, but there are other ways of getting pleasure, which are much healthier for you.

Jonathan Wolf: I've heard Zoe scientists quite often use this word hyper-palatability, that I've heard you both mention, and many of our listeners who are using the new Zoe app have probably seen that as sort of part of this new processed food risk score that you've been working on over the last year. But I think, certainly for me, I'd never heard this word until the last year. Could you explain what it really means?

Tim Spector: The general description is a food that is making you overeat more than you physiologically should be eating, what we call overcoming homeostasis, which is the normal balance of the body. It's tricking your body into eating more of it than you should. And it does this by this exact formula of how much fat relative to how much sugar and how much salt.

And there's an exact formula that's been worked out by scientists now that can take any food and work out, does it have this magic percentage in it: 25% of this and 75% of this? And this is what all the food companies have worked out over 70 years of experiments to work out this precise mix that they can put in that will mean that you overcome your normal fullness signals and you end up eating twice as much as you like.

So what we've done at Zoe is had to re-look at this whole question of what are the risky processed foods? When you look at a processed food, one of the things we're looking at is this hyper-palatability. We're scoring it because we now know the magic formula.

We put that into our model, our database, and we come up with, yes, this food is hyper-palatable because the food manufacturer has actually manipulated it in that way. So that's one of the factors we look at.

We also look at the additives. We've got a list of not just every additive, 'cause some additives can be quite healthy, like a bit of vitamin C or something. But it's if the additive is on a list that it's going to be unhealthy for you or has been shown to cause cancer or diabetes or whatever it is. That goes onto our waiting score. So we score the additives that way.

We also look at something called the eating rate, the speed at which you eat that food, which is another subset of what this is. So as Spencer was saying, if it just breaks up into your mouth immediately, like a potato crisp or something like this, that it's just so fast that you don't even notice you're eating it. That is another factor. And then of course, what we call the energy density as the final bit of our equation.

Despite eating it really fast, it's still getting lots of calories into your body in that short time. So we've got these four components really, of processed foods now, and that goes into our score, which is on the new Zoe app, and I think is replacing this old concept of ultra-processed food where everything was seen as bad.

We've worked out that from our current levels of the old-fashioned ultra-processed food accounting for like 57% of our UK diet, we are now highlighting 25% of the foods as being risky and something to be avoided, but at least half of those ones are probably fine to eat. So it's narrowing down what we should be worrying about, which I think is really useful for people.

Spencer Hyman: I think one thing you can add to it as well, which is a sign, is that if you feel like you are drawn to wanting to wolf down another piece rather than enjoying it, letting it slowly savor and melt and just talk about it, the odds are that they're just playing with taste.

So sugar, salt, fat, maybe a bit of umami in there too. What they're not doing is trying to get you just to savor the wave of flavors that you will be getting from any great fruit, any great chocolate, any great olive oil. And it's this taking your time to step back too. And it has sort of two benefits, one of which is as you eat more slowly, as Tim will explain, that is healthier for you.

But also it is nature's way of telling you that this food is still packed full of macronutrients, micronutrients, phytonutrients, because that's what gives you the flavor. So the more flavor you have, the more likelihood it is that it's also going to be good for you.

Tim Spector: What I love about this new score is it makes you realize what the food companies are actually trying to achieve. Yeah. And I think this is a real breakthrough. So un-labeling all bad. By looking at these scores in detail, you can see food for the first time.

It's revealed to you how that food company is fiddling with your taste buds in order to make you have three times as much of this stuff as you really need. And I think this gives us suddenly a weapon to fight back against these guys.

Spencer Hyman: It's fantastic to have this weapon. And the other thing it will also help people do is that if you don't detect any flavor, then you know that they're basically hacking your taste sensors.

Jonathan Wolf: So I think I'm sort of understanding Bliss point and this hyper-palatability, like the not being able to stop continuing to eat it. Just before we move on, are there a lot of foods in nature that we would've been eating in the past that are like either hyper-palatable or have this bliss point other than, you said my mother's breast milk when I was a baby? Other than breast milk?

Tim Spector: Really aren't. We have to make them. Some people would class some cheeses, for example, as, yeah, maybe as being on the verge of being hyper-palatable. You know, we've all been there and you know, that cheeseboard just ends up being nibbled away. But they are made.

Spencer Hyman: Again.

Tim Spector: But they are being made. They don't, they're not appearing in nature. So I don't, we don't really know of any in nature. No.

Jonathan Wolf: No. So that's really interesting. So what you're saying is we are surrounded now by foods in the supermarket that just don't really reflect any of the sort of foods that we would have evolved as ancestors to be around.

Tim Spector: Yeah, exactly. Our ancestors didn't have them. And you know, when you go to hunter-gatherer tribes, they're not faced with these. They have them more as individual items, but they're not put together.

Jonathan Wolf: So you can have honey and you can have something fatty, like a fatty piece of meat or something, but it's not natural; they would have them separately.

Spencer Hyman: Yeah. I think the other thing is, is that a lot of the components which go into these ultra-processed foods have also been bred now more to have sweetness inside them and less bitterness, and also to have less length of flavor because you need time to bring that out. So even the raw components have been commoditized. And so that's the other challenge that we have.

Tim Spector: Generally, bitter foods are those that are high in polyphenols and we've lost a lot of our ability to want to have those foods. And if children, after they've gone through the breast milk phase, are just given more and more sugar, then it makes it harder for them to appreciate these bitter tastes that are actually really healthy for them.

Spencer Hyman: And they're also not taught to articulate the flavors which come out the other side of it, because we don't eat together and we don't talk about the food as much.

Taste is instinctive, but flavor is a language that you almost have to learn. If you don't talk about it, it becomes much more difficult to appreciate it. And then that has this vicious spiral, which is almost all the foods that people are having are focused much more on the tastes as opposed to the flavors.

Jonathan Wolf: So I would like to talk about flavor, but first I'd like to cover why this eating fast actually impacts people's health. Why does it matter, Tim?

Tim Spector: It matters because the speed at which you eat is correlated with a number of health outcomes. We know that people eat at different rates. I was taught to eat very fast as a junior doctor because otherwise, I, you know, my bleep would go off and I wouldn't do this. So, most doctors eat very fast, and when they do surveys of saying, you know, "Are you a fast eater, a slow eater?" we all know. The last one to finish or the first one in families, et cetera.

There is a correlation with poor health and the fast eaters. They tend to be more likely to be obese, more likely to have type two diabetes, more likely to have heart disease, et cetera. So it's rather upsetting to think that, you know, that sometimes through no fault of your own, you did a job that trained you to eat very fast, or some do it in large families if they think their brothers are going to steal all the food, for example. That's another common one.

There's been quite a lot of research about chewing food and biting and eating fast, and the food companies have caught onto this, and actually they have created foods that make it impossible not to eat it fast.

So that you're getting this sort of feeling that you have to keep chewing and before you know it, you've finished the pack of biscuits, you've eaten far more than you wanted to. These are foods that are absolutely designed to make us overeat. And in Victorian times, they used to have these ways of dieting that you had to sort of chew your food 200 times. Yeah. Uh, you know, before every, every mouthful.

Jonathan Wolf: Well, Tim, I asked you this question at the beginning about chewing each mouthful 32 times, which seems weirdly specific, but we had a question about it. So clearly, that was a piece of advice one of our listeners got. Is there any truth to this idea that if you chew 32 times, somehow you'll be healthier?

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Tim Spector: Well, in general, the more you chew, the slower you'll eat, and this will have some benefits. Pinning down exactly how much you should chew is really pretty impossible. Yeah, most people chew somewhere between 15 to 45 times is a sort of rough range. But it's hugely variable what you're eating, what age you are, you know, environment.

So I don't think we should be having strict rules that would also make eating like a punishment, which, you know, which is not what we're about. It's, you know, eating is for pleasure. As an experiment, next time people who are listening are eating something, just try chewing it for twice as long as you would normally do and see what happens.

Spencer Hyman: Or take the Japanese trick, which is they have this great saying, hara hachi bu, which means that when you are 80% full, stop. You will overeat if you eat too fast, because it does take time for your gut to tell your brain, "Okay, I've had enough. I'm there."

The other thing I would sort of suggest is that when you look at a food, if it's not designed to be refolded and put back in its wrapper, be very skeptical. So one of the big differences between mass-produced chocolate and craft chocolate is craft chocolate comes in lovely wrappers, not just 'cause they look beautiful, because you can put the chocolate back in 'cause you're not supposed to eat the whole bar in one go.

Whereas if you buy a mass-produced chocolate bar, try putting it back in the wrapper. It's pretty much impossible.

Jonathan Wolf: And Spencer, Tim talked a lot about, I guess, the health impacts of eating more slowly, but I know you're really interested in other benefits.

Spencer Hyman: I mean, one of the tragedies today is that over 20% of American food is now consumed in cars, which is not exactly going to be conducive to savoring your food. You are definitely going to be wolfing it down like there's no tomorrow. But even here in the UK, even people who work, all too often do exactly what Tim and you were describing, which is they just sit at their desks.

80% of people sit at their desks even though they're in a work environment with other people, you know, wolfing down their food. And so from a social and from a mental health perspective, it's really not a good aspect to bring forward at all.

The other angle to eating slowly is that it's a bit like sort of learning to swim or learning to play any musical instrument. It actually, if you learn the language of flavor, it gives you another set of tools. And just as when you learn "the knowledge," if you were one of those people before we had GPS and were a black cab driver, it sort of activated different parts of your brain.

There's a lot of evidence now to suggest that actually learning the language of flavor is a great way of sort of, you know, energizing different parts of your brain too.

Tim Spector: I did hear a fact, it was about in the average British lunch, you know, which is this meal deal, is usually eaten in under five minutes. You think about it, what are you buying? You know, you're buying soft bread that doesn't have, you don't have to chew. You just, it is like baby food, really. Yes. It's disposable. The filling is mush inside. Uh, you know, you might have an orange juice and...

Spencer Hyman: Which would be full of sugar and...

Tim Spector: And salty fat crisps. And that's what most people are eating. It does generally take about 20 minutes before you start to feel full. That's what manufacturers are trying to do, get all the food in really quick time so that your brain doesn't say, "Hey guys, we are full here. We don't need more food."

Spencer Hyman: And then they'll also add a bit of sweetness to the end of the meal deal because they also know that even if they have somehow, you know, missed a trick and that you are feeling a bit full, once you see something sweet, your upper intestine sweet receptors will basically say, "I want some of that too." So that'll basically encourage the...

Jonathan Wolf: Second stomach.

Spencer Hyman: Yeah, the second stomach.

Jonathan Wolf: So Tim, I know that's led you to focus a lot more on this idea of mindful eating, and it's not something you were really talking about when I first met you eight years ago, but I know it's become really important now as we think about what we're doing at Zoe. Could you, I guess, explain a bit what that is and why sort of your scientific research has led you to focus so much more on this than, you know, when we first met?

Tim Spector: In a way, what mindful eating is trying to do is to combat what the food companies are trying to distort. So it's our way of rebelling. And to do that, it's about looking at the food you are eating in a different way. So rather than just seeing it as a source of energy, you actually are taking time to look at it and savor it. And so this is how we're developing the app, very much with this in mind so that people with the Zoe app will take a picture of their food, so they're snapping it first.

So that just allows you a moment to look at what's on your plate and evaluate it. How many plants have you got on there? Is it healthy? How much processed food is there? And then you get the results. And that's the discovery phase.

So this is where the app helps you work out what's actually in that food. Whether it's the macronutrients you're interested in or is it risky processing? What is the overall score going to be? Good for you? You know, is it good for your gut microbes? And this is very much a long-term experience, so you slowly become a food expert by doing this. And our food choices are the most important choices we make every single day for our health.

I use it now as a way of understanding what I'm eating. There's always some new food I don't know about. And I love counting my plants to see if that's all part of, you know, how am I achieving that at the end of the week. And this is all part of my way of mindful eating and, uh, you know, even people like me are still learning because of this amazing new technology with the AI and things that can help us.

Jonathan Wolf: So, Spencer, I think we're going to do an experiment here in the podcast studio, and I think what's exciting is that many of our listeners should be able to do the experiment themselves at home. And I can see that in front of you, you have a few plates.

One of them you've got some mint on, and then you've got a couple of different chocolates. One of which I think is a craft chocolate, 'cause I know Spencer well, so he will definitely have like a quality chocolate. And another one, which is like a, he said like a Hershey's or a Bournville.

Yeah. And you are now going to let us try some different ways to taste this, I understand, and see whether or not even someone with as poor a sense of flavor as me can tell any difference.

Spencer Hyman: I think you have a great sense of flavor, but yes. But I think as Tim was sort of saying, look, the key to being mindful is to learn the language so you can articulate it. And the first thing which everybody confuses, I think, is the difference between taste and flavor.

So taste—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, fat—you detect with your tongue, basically. And that's very easy to identify. Flavor, which we often conflate with taste 'cause we don't have a word which says "I flave," is actually your sense of smell. And it works in a very different way to taste. And so just to try and explain this to everybody, whenever we do a tasting or if you're just at home, what you need to do is basically go to your fridge or go to your herb garden, pick a herb, and we've just got some mint here.

I'm just going to hand it around. I'm going to take one too. And basically just take a piece of mint or take a herb of any sort. And then basically give it a quick sniff. Smells minty.

Jonathan Wolf: Minty. Yeah.

Spencer Hyman: But now rub it between your fingers a bit more.

Jonathan Wolf: Okay. Oh, it's much stronger. Much mintier.

Spencer Hyman: Right.

Jonathan Wolf: And if I was at home right now and I only had dried herbs, what would I need to do?

Spencer Hyman: That would work fine. If you could wet them a little bit before, that would be great. But if you've only got dried herbs, that's absolutely fine. The trick though, is the next bit, which is very difficult to get right. But it's not that difficult, which is you take the hand which doesn't have the mint in it, and you squeeze your nose tightly shut. Now you really do have to squeeze your nose shut, and you mustn't basically let go of it until five or 10 seconds have passed. So you squeeze your nose...

Jonathan Wolf: By the way, if you're not watching this on video, you're really missing a trick, 'cause Spencer and Tim look fantastically ridiculous as they're holding their nose.

Spencer Hyman: And then you take the piece of mint and you just drop it in your mouth and you start chewing it, but you have to hold your nose. And what you'll discover is it doesn't really resemble mint of any sort at all. If you've got mint in your mouth at this point, it might be a little bit spicy, a little bit bitter.

Jonathan Wolf: Yeah. Doesn't really taste very much. Maybe a little bit bitter. Zero mint.

Spencer Hyman: Zero mint. So if we count to three, one, two, three, and then we release our noses...

Jonathan Wolf: Oh, it's amazing. Within like one second I'm getting this massive hit of mint.

Spencer Hyman: Minty freshness. Minty freshness, right? So what we conflate is taste, which we detect with our tongues, and flavor, which is actually our olfactory system.

So it's our sense of smell. We've got our olfactory epithelium up at the top there, and that's what we smell with. But humans as well are amazing in that when we breathe in and out, or when we swallow, we pass those aromas back through our olfactory system, our sense of smell. So it's called retronasal olfaction. That's the technical term for it.

Jonathan Wolf: So Spencer, I just want to confirm that you're saying I actually taste with my nose.

Spencer Hyman: You "flave" with your nose. Your sense of flavor, that mintiness, is not a taste. You are detecting it with your olfactory system, which is your nose.

Jonathan Wolf: And that's because the, like the chemicals are going from my mouth sort of up and into my nose. Yeah. And this is presumably why when you have a bad cold, people say, "I, nothing tastes of anything."

Spencer Hyman: Exactly. That's exactly what they say. And it's also, it's the heat from your mouth, which is releasing the volatiles on the aromas. And that's what you're detecting. And that's one of the arguments as to why you should, going back to Tim's point about chewing, if you swallow it too fast, which is by the way, what the food companies want you to do, you won't be able to get any flavor 'cause it takes at least three to five seconds for most foods to start releasing the flavors, and probably 10 to 15 even more for all of the flavors to start coming through.

Tim Spector: And these are little chemicals. Just so people understand what's happening. When you break down these foods, you are breaking down the cell walls, that releases aromatics. Yeah. Chemicals that float in the air. And those are the ones that are being picked up as they rise into the back of your nose, into your brain, and they get picked up in your brain and then recognized in those memory centers as what's going on. So it's very much a brain function here, and that's what happened during COVID with people who lost their sense of smell. It affected the brain and a lot of people had major problems for months. And it is associated with early signs of dementia. Uh, many brain diseases, the first thing to go is your loss of sense of flavor, should we say? Yeah, aromas and flavors.

Spencer Hyman: So we're going to try now a couple of different chocolates. So what we've got here are two craft chocolates. The first one is made from beans from Uganda, and then the second one is going to be coming around from Lachuá in Guatemala. And the trick here is to give it a quick sniff, just as you did before.

Tim Spector: What percent are these? These are both...

Spencer Hyman: 70%.

Jonathan Wolf: It does smell of something. I thought it was going to be...

Spencer Hyman: Absolutely. It does. And if you want the real trick, if you want to become a real pro, what you want to do, this is going to be a little bit difficult on camera and everything else, but you take a little bit of chocolate between your fingers and then you rub it until it starts to melt.

And when you do this, what you'll discover is that you're going to get even more smell, even more aromas, because the heat is what's releasing the volatiles, which is why when you have a cold coffee, it has a very different flavor profile to a hot coffee.

But if you keep rubbing it, you'll see you're going to get more and more flavors coming through. And the other trick when you do this is this is a good way of testing if it's good chocolate. Because what should happen with good chocolate is it should completely dissolve because it's just got cocoa butter in it.

If you take a cheap chocolate, which has got lots of vegetable fats or PGPR or all those things, it would just get stuck in your fingers. Snap it next to your ear. Okay? Because one of the great amazing things about chocolate is that it's solid at room temperature and then it melts at...

Jonathan Wolf: Very satisfying. Satisfying little crack, don't you think, Tim?

Spencer Hyman: That snap is very important 'cause it's basically been tempered. It's the right crystal structure, so it's solid in your hands, but when you drop it on your tongue, which we can do now... Now you can, if you want, do the nose trick again, 'cause it's quite fun.

So if you don't have any mint or basil in your fridges at home, you can just take a good bar of chocolate. It has to be craft chocolate, and we'll explain why in a sec. Initially, what you're going to get is a little bit of taste. So is it sweet? Is it sour? Is it salty? Not in this case, but you will get a bit of sweetness and maybe a bit of sourness. And then texturally, it should start to melt.

Now you can do what Jonathan's doing, which is chewing it a bit, or you can... it's either of 'em are fine provided you don't swallow. And then what you want to start doing is thinking, okay, what are the flavors like? And this is where it becomes quite tricky and why we've sort of developed this sort of flavor wave, which you've all got sitting in front of you. But the tastes and textures are relatively simple. The flavors are much more difficult because we don't have a vocabulary.

So you want to sort of think, well, does this remind me of a vegetable, or is it a bit more floral, or is it a bit more minerally, or is it a bit alcoholic? Then the other thing you will discover is that you will get different flavor waves. So when you see a rainbow, you can see lots of colors at the same time. Similarly, with taste, you can get sweet, sour, salty, all at the same time. With flavor, the human brain can only process two or three flavors at any one time, so you really need to think about it as a journey.

Jonathan Wolf: It's not the same flavor all the time. As I'm letting this chocolate melt in my mouth, like the flavor I get after four seconds might be different from the flavor after 10 seconds.

Spencer Hyman: It will be different after 10 seconds, if it's a good chocolate, or if it's a great wine, or if it's a great tea or a great coffee. You will get different flavors because the volatiles, the aromas, are being released by the heat at different points.

Jonathan Wolf: And so those are the chemicals that Tim was talking about that are actually not all at the same... I don't pick it all up in one second like I do when I look at a picture. You're saying it's sort of like one after another.

Spencer Hyman: Exactly.

Jonathan Wolf: If I've learnt how to appreciate it. Which by the way, I definitely haven't.

Spencer Hyman: You definitely have. And the other thing though, is that it's difficult to do. So the easiest way to do it's to have somebody else there to discuss it mindfully, but to also have two different chocolates on the go at the same time.

So now we're going to have same make, so made in exactly the same factory, exactly the same way. And this one actually is a chocolate from Guatemala, from a group of people called the Kechi. Different continent, different beans and different fermentations, which I know that Tim is very keen on.

So fermentation is absolutely crucial to bringing out the flavor in chocolate as it is in beer, as it is in wine, in all great foods. So it's exactly the same percentage, but even straight out front...

Jonathan Wolf: Tastes a bit sweeter.

Spencer Hyman: Yeah, but it's, there's no difference in the sugar. So what's happening here is that there is a, there is a very strange thing, which is the way that flavors interact with your taste sensors is they will make things taste sweeter or more...

Jonathan Wolf: So this has the same amount of sugar?

Spencer Hyman: Exactly the same, yeah. But it tastes sweeter because of something to do with the way that its flavor volatiles are basically unlocking your sweet receptors slightly differently.

Tim Spector: And it's creamier as well, isn't it?

Spencer Hyman: Yeah, quite different. That, that's partly the cocoa butter, maybe slightly different, but it's also I think just a textural issue. But it's also, to me, a lot more fruity.

Jonathan Wolf: I was going to say, to me, it feels more fruity and the last one felt more, something not fruity. I don't know the right words for that.

Spencer Hyman: Well, is it floral or vegetal?

Tim Spector: Last one was more floral.

Spencer Hyman: Floral. And then you can dive down and say, "Well, what sort of flower is it?" Just like learning a language. The more you do this, the more fun you have and the better you get at articulating. But also, when you do this, you are showing that the food has not just been well crafted, but it's been well grown from good quality beans. So it's not a commodity bean, which has been made in a mass-processed way.

Jonathan Wolf: I'm also going to reassure all the listeners, 'cause whenever I do this with Tim or Spencer, I don't have any of the words to describe the flavor. I can see it tastes different. I can't figure out that it's floral...

Spencer Hyman: Practice. Just practice. When you have a dinner party or lunch, you're probably talking about other stuff. So if we could basically do what Tim was sort of saying, in addition to taking a photo of your food to get the macronutrients, if you then basically discuss the flavors with the people you were eating with, that will help you learn the language. It's, it is just a language. It's not instinctive.

Tim Spector: It's like what we do with wine. You know, you've got an expensive bottle, you're quite mindful of it, and that's part of the reason that then builds up this whole language of wine tasting that could be applied to food. But we don't do it.

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Spencer Hyman: No, that's the problem is that people don't do it. Can anybody do this? Yes, they definitely can. It's just practice, like anybody can learn a new language. Why is it important? It's important because it's one of the best defenses we have to identify that the food has been grown and crafted in a healthy way.

Because basically, flavor is the one thing that big food cannot replicate. They can add a little bit of a flavor agent here and there, but it'll be very, very quick. There are two more chocolates, which I'd love to try. One of them has got a little bit of texture in it.

So this is what I meant by encouraging you to eat more. So this is a fantastic chocolate made by Pump Street, Ecuadorian chocolate, but it's also got a little bit of Pump Street's well-known bread in it. So this, I think you'll find very, very more...

Jonathan Wolf: It's made in the UK?

Spencer Hyman: Made in the UK, down in Orford in Suffolk. And again, give it a quick sniff. Lovely smell. This is an Ecuadorian cacao. And yep, you're doing good. Immediately when you put this in your mouth, texturally...

Jonathan Wolf: Texture is completely different.

Spencer Hyman: It's got some breadcrumbs inside it. I think you can see Tim is almost there. Tim's almost got the next piece in his mouth ready to go. So if you want an example of sensory-specific satiety, this is it. So this is not a milk chocolate, it's a fantastically scrummy chocolate. But if you can just hold back just for a little bit...

Jonathan Wolf: I really want to chew it.

Spencer Hyman: You really want to. Exactly. That's exactly what it's designed to do. And that's the reason why if you think about almost all the chocolate bars you get out of a vending machine, they've all got stuff in it.

Jonathan Wolf: Crunchy bits.

Spencer Hyman: They've got these little crunchy bits. But wait. You're going to suddenly get the yeasty and the malty notes from that sourdough as it releases. So if you can just wait for five to 10 seconds, be a little bit more mindful, you're going to get this flavor wave and you will basically eat it more slowly.

Jonathan Wolf: I've already swallowed it, but I'll try better. We've still got some more down there. But help me for a minute because I think that's fascinating. So that reminded me a lot of the sort of traditional chocolate bars of my youth, 'cause it sort of had this like slightly biscuity texture to it. Mm-hmm. But I can imagine it's got like little air pockets or something and it's sort of crunching down. And you are saying that affects how I want to eat it?

Spencer Hyman: Yes. So Tim talked a lot about hyper-palatability, a lot about the bliss point. There's another trick, which is sensory-specific satiety.

Think of it like the buffet effect. Everybody eats more at a buffet because you want to try all the different things. We are also programmed to like novelty.

So, just to go back onto it though, once you learn to look for the wave and once you learn just to focus in on the flavor, it's amazing what people can do.

So we're now going to try one of the bestselling UK dark chocolates, even though it's mainly sugar, which is a Bournville. And what would that be in the US? That would be like a Hershey's. Now again...

Tim Spector: Although this is billed as a dark chocolate...

Spencer Hyman: This is billed as a dark chocolate here, 'cause it's above the 30%. But it does also have milk in it, which is a little bit confusing. But anyway. You give it a smell...

Jonathan Wolf: It doesn't quite have the same... it actually doesn't really smell of anything.

Spencer Hyman: No.

Jonathan Wolf: Because I'm thinking back to how this is what I expected when I smelled the first chocolate. I didn't expect to smell anything.

Spencer Hyman: And if you take a little bit of it and you drop it on your tongue... it's just sweet.

Jonathan Wolf: Tastes completely different.

Spencer Hyman: And it's just up, down. So you're not getting the wave.

Jonathan Wolf: I'm not really getting any flavor at all from it. No. I'm getting some sweetness. The texture is very like homogenized, as if it's been pulverized more compared to the other ones. Yep. And you just get sweetness.

Tim Spector: It also, it's dispersing quickly. So coming back to the fact that you can eat it quicker because there's nothing left after a few seconds.

Jonathan Wolf: It's melted really fast in my mouth. Yep. Very sweet compared to the others. 'Cause it was, I guess 'cause it was so fast. And basically none of the flavor that you were talking about, like the things I could smell, if you told me what to do...

Spencer Hyman: You won't get much flavor there. There is one flavor note that you may get from it now that you're really focused on the flavor, which is a sign of where these cocoa beans come from, which is, if I said the word coconut to you...

Tim Spector: Yeah, I get a little bit... there's a bit of a Bounty in there, isn't it? Yeah.

Spencer Hyman: But there is no coconut added to it. But now that you've learned to be mindful about flavor, you are actually able to use it to drill down and actually identify where this bean is likely to be coming from.

Jonathan Wolf: Suppose that was a fun experiment, and I think if anyone's listening to this in a place where they weren't able to try it, like when you get back to your kitchen, definitely have a go with just like holding your nose. It's really remarkable. I'd like to pull this now to, how does that help us to fight back against big food? Why does this matter for that?

Spencer Hyman: If you can detect flavor, it is a great sign that the food is going to be healthy for you.

Jonathan Wolf: Is that only true for something like chocolate, Spencer, where you're giving this example?

Spencer Hyman: No, it's definitely true for tea, which I have here. It's definitely true for wine. It's definitely true for coffee. It's definitely true for olive oil. I think what's interesting about all those examples though, is that they're all what I would call sort of complex flavor.

Because the same is also true when you pick a great strawberry or a great tomato. You can all tell the difference between something from an allotment and something which is, you know, the cheapest you can get in a supermarket.

So if you want a sort of trick, look for something called BLICD: Balance, Length, Intensity, Complexity, and Depth. If you have something which takes you on a wave, the odds are that that food, whether it be processed or even if it just be a natural one, actually is going to be much healthier for you.

And it runs across everything from your sandwiches to your burgers, to your apples, anything. It's not just craft chocolate.

Craft chocolate is just an amazingly good way to learn how flavor works because it melts in your mouth and because it has more complexity of flavor than just about anything else on the planet.

Jonathan Wolf: So, so can I take that to maybe, it's like, you know, the opposite extreme of across all that, hamburgers. So if I had like a bun that was actually somehow made, you know, at home and a burger that I had cooked myself with condiments versus, you know, going to like a McDonald's or a Burger King. Can I tell a difference in flavor there?

Spencer Hyman: Yes. I think you can just, just basically look for complexity. There are two ways I think you can learn to eat mindfully. One is by learning to cook and the other is by learning to eat mindfully itself. Any food. If you can learn the difference between taste—sugar, salt, fat, bitter—and those, that immediate hit, and then the flavor wave, you are on your way to being able to eat more mindfully and more healthily.

Tim Spector: And the burger bun is a great example because what they do is they add a lot of sugar and salt to it. Nothing else. There's no flavors in it at all, and it's designed to be eaten super fast. So it just goes straight into you and you're ready for the next one, which you wouldn't get if you made the bread yourself or you've got a really good loaf.

Jonathan Wolf: And so if I go back to the sort of the bliss point, highly processed food that we were talking about at the beginning, am I similarly going to see a difference in the flavor between, I don't know, eating an apple, which after all has a lot of sugar in it, and crisps, chips, or whatever. Am I going to be able to tell a difference with this flavor tool that you've just been teaching us, Spencer?

Spencer Hyman: Yes. If you look for BLIC, you will definitely. I mean, Tim I think, said this and wrote about this in one of the earlier books, is that to develop flavor, you need time.

So if you take a, you know, an apple from somebody's garden, it will not just be less sweet. It'll have much more length of flavor than a supermarket one, which has been shipped halfway across the world and bred just to be consistent and to be sweet and not necessarily have complexity of flavor. And you can definitely learn with any food to basically appreciate flavor.

Jonathan Wolf: So it sounds like we've somehow been educated by all of these fast food manufacturers and big food companies to really focus on what you're calling taste. This thing that I get in the first few seconds, which is like sweet and salt, rather than to focus on flavor because that's really expensive and hard to put into your food, but taste is really easy. You don't even need to use your nose for it. And so it's sort of cheap and also drives this sort of overeating.

Spencer Hyman: Exactly that. But it's also, if you think about what's happened in the food world today, we've commoditized food. We then learned how to grow it more efficiently with fertilizers and pesticides, and then we've figured out how to process it more effectively.

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And then we figured out how to put some marketing sizzle. The easy way to get you to wolf it down, gobble it down as fast as you can, is by using sugar, salt, and fat. And they're very, very cheap, very, very simple additives.

It's not accidental that, you know, over 50% of most chocolate bars sold in the UK, the primary ingredient is sugar, because sugar is extremely cheap, much cheaper than cocoa.

Tim Spector: And it's subsidized by the taxpayer.

Spencer Hyman: Yeah. Which is ridiculous. And it becomes addictive. What big food wants to do is to grow food as cheap as it possibly can, commoditizing it as fast as it possibly can, and then process it as cheap as it can and make us eat as much of it as they can. And they do that through the bliss point, sensory-specific satiety, and hyper-palatability. And the defense to it, in addition to taking pictures of your food, is to also learn to talk about food and learn the language of flavor.

Jonathan Wolf: If someone's been listening to this and they want to start savoring their food today and start this journey of understanding what flavor it is, could you suggest three things that they could do to start this journey?

Spencer Hyman: I think the first thing is, as you sort of suggested, is to go to your fridge, go to your herb garden, try the holding your nose trick, just to appreciate the difference between taste and flavor.

I think the second one would be to download something like the Flavor Wave, which we've developed, this tool which just takes you through step one, think about taste and texture; step two, think about the flavors; step three, did you get BLIC and did you enjoy?

So just get a framework. And you know there are apps which will do this too. And then thirdly, pick something that you really enjoy, whether it be olive oil, whether it be wine, whether it be tea, whether it be coffee. Hopefully it'll be craft chocolate. Either go to one of the tastings or just at home, get three or four of the bars and just basically taste them with other people and discuss them using this framework. So I think make it social, make it mindful.

Tim Spector: Yeah. And compare with a cheap, highly processed version as well that you might have been eating as well, so you can, you can see the difference. Yeah. Taste the difference.

Spencer Hyman: Yeah. To coin a phrase.

Jonathan Wolf: I thought that was a lot of fun. I'm going to try and do a quick summing up. So the thing that I take away above all else is that we are surrounded by this food being made by big food that is designed to basically take advantage of our inbuilt desire for certain things.

So it reminds me a lot of talking about cigarettes and cigarette companies, but in this case, it's not about smoking, it's about this Bliss Point, this combination of salt and fat and sugars in just the right combination.

Tim, you're talking about a chemical formula. And if I have that, then suddenly this food becomes hyper-palatable. So I just eat more. It overwhelms my natural sense of feeling full. And that's good for the food companies 'cause they sell more. That's what they care about.

They're not necessarily trying to make us sick, but we become sick as a byproduct of this 'cause we eat too much and then we end up having food that's not good for us. We can end up putting on weight, ultimately getting really sick as we know. And then pharmaceutical companies have a new drug to solve this for us. I thought we did this fascinating experiment where you like hold your nose and you eat something, you suddenly realize that you actually, from my words, can't taste anything.

But what you are explaining to me is actually I can taste, 'cause that's just this very limited thing of like it's spicy or it's sweet, and actually what's happening is I can't get any flavors. And I need my nose to get my flavors. And what's I think really exciting is we have these tools inside our body already to be able to detect whether these foods are full of the polyphenols and all these complex chemicals. Tim, that you talk about a lot has been so important for our gut health.

And actually, if you can learn to start to really notice what this food flavors like, then you really can tell the difference between that like ultra-processed chocolate at the end and these other ones, which are craft chocolates. And so we have more tools than we realize to be able to distinguish. And if we start to apply those to, you know, eating McDonald's or probably a lot of the food that comes into our house, the sandwiches we eat at lunchtime, you can really tell the difference.

And in terms of therefore, sort of specifically, if you're like me and you really don't feel that you have much understanding about flavor, you suggested this like a sort of simple 1, 2, 3 thing that you could do right now. So the first is try this experiment at home.

Try eating like a piece of mint or something like that. Hold your nose. You understand what you're just getting from taste. Let go, understand the flavor. Then try and get access to something that can give you the different ways to measure flavor. And we'll put a link in the show notes, Spencer to your "flavor wave" as you call it, which gives you these, you know, descriptions of mineral and vegetable and and so on. And then three, pick something that you would like to try. So if you drink coffee, maybe try some different coffees or whatever it is, and try a range, which also includes something which is really mass-manufactured.

Tim, as you're saying, through to maybe a couple of things that, you know, are supposed to be not highly processed, and you'll be able to see the difference in flavor. And it gives you a hint, I think, about how you might then rethink the cereals you eat or the snack bars or any of the rest of this. Which I think is a really brilliantly positive message.

Tim Spector: Absolutely, yes. No, we want everyone to get experimenting and let's change our national palettes.