How learning to savour flavour can transform your health | Spencer Hyman

25:10So 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? Is it good for your gut microbes? And this is very much a long-term experience. So you become slowly a food expert by doing this. And our food choices are the most important choices we make every single day for our health.

25:51I 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, how am I achieving that at the end of the week? And this is all part of my way of mindful eating. And even people like me are still learning because of this amazing new technology with the AI and things that can help us. 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 their home. And I can see that in front of you, you have a few plates.

26:29One 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, because I know Spencer well, so he will definitely have like a quality chocolate and another one, which is like a, you said like a Hershey's or a Bourneville. 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. I think you have a great sense of flavor, but yes. But I think, as Tim was sort of saying, the key to being mindful is to learn the language so you can articulate it.

27:05And 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 they're very easy to identify. Flavor, which we often conflate with taste because 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 or herb garden, pick a herb, and we've just got some mint here.

27:37I'm just going to hand it around. and 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 very minty. But now rub it between your fingers a bit more. Okay. And it should become even more minty. Oh yeah, it's much stronger. Much mintier, right? And if I was at home right now and I only had dried herbs, what would I need to do? 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 ham which doesn't have the mint in it, and you squeeze your nose tightly shut.

28:10Now, 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 - And by the way, if you're not watching this on video, you're really missing a trick because Spencer and Tim look fantastically ridiculous as they're holding their nose - And then you take the piece of mint, and you just drop it in your mouth, and you start chewing out. 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, you might find it's a little bit spicy, a little bit bitter.

28:40Doesn't really taste very much, maybe a little bit bitter. Zero mint. So if we count to three, one, two, three, and then we release our noses. Oh, it's amazing. Within like one second, I'm getting this massive hit of mint. 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.

29:14So it's called retronasal olfactory. That's the technical term for it. So Spencer, I just want to confirm that you're saying I actually taste with my nose. You flave with your nose. Your sense of flavor, that mintiness is not a taste, but you are detecting it with your olfactory system, which is your nose. And that's because the chemicals are going from my mouth sort of up and into my nose. And this is presumably why when you have a bad cold, people say nothing tastes of anything. Exactly. That's exactly what they say. And it's also, it's the heat from your mouth, which is releasing the volatiles and the aromas.

29:47And 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 because it takes at least three to five seconds, that most foods to start releasing the flavors and probably 10 to 15, even more, that all of the flavors to start coming through. And these are little chemicals just so people understand what's happening when you break down these foods. You're breaking down the cell walls that releases aromatics, chemicals that float in the air.

30:17And 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 recognize 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 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, many brain diseases. The first thing to go is your loss of sense of flavor, shall we say? Yeah, aromas and flavors. So we're going to try now a couple of different chocolates.

30:56So 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 Latua in Guatemala. And the trick here is to give it a quick sniff, just as you did before. What percent are these? These are about 70%. It does smell of something. I thought it was going to be absolutely... 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.

31:23And 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 will just get stuck in your fingers.

31:52Snap it next to your ear, because one of the great, amazing things about chocolate is that it's solid at room temperature, and then it melts at - Very satisfying little crack, don't you think, Tim? That snap is very important, because 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, because 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 draft chocolate and we'll explain to you why in a sec.

32:21But 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, 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, either of them 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 taste and textures are relatively simple, but the flavors are much more difficult because we don't have a vocab.

32:58So 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? And 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. It's not the same flavor all the time as I'm letting this chocolate melt in my mouth.

33:29The flavor I get after four seconds might be different from the flavor after 10 seconds. 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. 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 one after another. Exactly. If I've learned how to appreciate it, which by the way, I definitely haven't.

33:58You definitely have. You definitely have. And the other thing though is that it's difficult to do. So the easiest way to do it is 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 the 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 Quechi. 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.

34:31So it's exactly the same percentage, but even straight out front. Tastes a bit sweeter. Yeah. But there's no difference in the sugar. So what's happening here is there is a very strange thing, which is the way that flavors interact with your taste sensors is they will make things taste more sweet or more sour. So this has the same amount of sugar, exactly the same, but it tastes sweeter because it's something to do with the way that it's... The flavor volatiles are basically unlocking your sweet receptors slightly differently. And it's creamier as well, isn't it? Yeah. That's partly the cocoa butter, maybe slightly different, but it's also, I think, just a textural issue.

35:00But it's also, to me, a lot more fruitier. I was going to say, to me, it feels more fruity, and the last one felt more something not fruity. I don't know if I have the right words for that. Well, is it floral? Is it vegetal? The last one was more floral. And then you can dive down and say, well, what sort of flower is it? And 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 hasn't been made in a mass-processed way.

35:29I'm also going to reassure all the listeners because whenever I do this with Tim or Spencer, I'm like, 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 or what floral. 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 would help you learn the language. It is just a language.

35:56It's not instinctive. It's like what we do with wine. You've got an expensive bottle. You're quite mindful of it. And that's part of the reason that then build up this whole language of wine tasting that could be applied to food, but we don't do it. No, that's the problem is that people don't do it. Can anybody do this? Yes, they definitely can. It's just a question of practice. 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.

36:28They 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 rich. It's made in the UK. 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.

36:58immediately when you put this in your mouth.

37:03Texturally, it's got some breadcrumbs inside it. That, 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. This is not a milk chocolate. It's a fantastically scrumptious chocolate. But if you can just hold back just for a little bit. I really want to chew it. You really want to chew it. 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. Crunchy bits. It's got these little crunchy bits.

37:31But wait, and 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. I've already swallowed it, but I'll try it. You'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 because it sort of had this like slightly biscuity texture to it. I can imagine it's got like little air pockets or something and it's sort of crunching down.

38:04And you're saying that affects how I want to eat it? Yes. So Tim talked a lot about hyperpalosability, 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 best-selling UK dark chocolates, even though it's mainly sugar, which is a Bourneville.

38:32And what would that be in the US? That would be like a Hershey's. Now, again... Although this is billed as a dark chocolate. This is billed as a dark chocolate here because it's above the 30%. But it does also have milk in it, which is a little bit confusing. But anyway, if you give it a smell, it doesn't quite have the same... It actually doesn't really smell of anything. No, because the chocolate... I'm thinking back to how this is what I expected when I smelled the first chocolate. I didn't expect to smell anything because I think of chocolate. And if you take a little bit of it and you drop it on your tongue, it's just a sweet.

39:02Tastes completely different. And it's just up and down. So you're not getting the wave. I'm not really getting any flavor at all from it. I'm getting some sweetness. Like the texture is very like homogenized as if it's been pulverized more compared to the other ones. And you just get sweetness. It also is dispersing quickly. So coming back to the fact that you can eat it quicker because there's nothing left after a few seconds. It's melted really fast in my mouth. Yep. Very sweet compared to the others because it was, I guess, because it was so fast. And basically none of the flavor that you were talking about, like the things I could smell, like if you told me what to do.

39:35You won't get much flavor. 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. Yeah, I get a little bit of that. There's a bit of a bounty in there, isn't there? Yeah, but there is no coconut added to it. But now that you've learned to be mindful about flavor, you're actually able to use it to drill down and actually identify where this bean is likely to be coming from. So Spencer, 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.

40:10It'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? If you can detect flavor, it is a great sign that the food is going to be healthy for you. Is that only true for something like chocolate, Spencer, where you're giving this example? 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 flavors, because the same is also true when you pick a great strawberry or a great tomato.

40:50You can all tell the difference something from an allotment and something which is the cheapest you can get in a supermarket. So if you want a sort of trick, look for something called blicked, 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 Kraft chocolate. Kraft 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.

41:32So can I take that to maybe it's like, you know, the opposite of extremely good craft problem, hamburgers. So if I had like a bun that was actually somehow made, you know, at home and a burger that I'd 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? Yes, I think you can. 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, fat, bitter, and that immediate hit, and then the flavor wave, you are on your way to being able to eat more mindfully and more healthily.

42:16And the Burger Bon 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. 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?

42:56Am I going to be able to tell the difference with this flavor tool that you've just been teaching us, Spencer? Yes. If you look for Blick, 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. And so if you take an apple from somebody's garden, it will not just be less sweet, it will have much more length of flavor than a supermarket, one which has been shipped halfway across the world, and bread 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.

43:33So 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. So it's sort of cheap and also drives this sort of overeating. Exactly that. But it's also, if you think about what's happened in the food world today, we've commoditized food. We've then learned how to grow it more efficiently with fertilizers and pesticides.

44:11And then we've figured out how to process it more effectively. 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 over 50 % of most chocolate bars sold in the UK, the primary ingredient is sugar, because sugar is extremely cheap, much cheaper than cocoa. And it's subsidized by the taxpayer, which is ridiculous. And it becomes addictive. What Big Food wants to do is to grow food as cheaply as it possibly can, commoditizing it, as fast as it possibly can, and then process it as cheaply as it can, and make us eat as much of it as they can.

44:46And they do that through the bliss point, sensory specific satiety, hyperpalatability. 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. 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? 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.

45:24I think the second one would be to download something like the Flavor Wave, which we've developed, this tool by which it just takes you through step one, think about taste and texture. Step two, think about the flavors. Step three, did you get Blick and did you enjoy? So just get a framework. And 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.

46:01So I think make it social, make it mindful. Yeah. And compare with a cheap, highly processed version as well. that you might have been eating as well to say you can see the difference. Yeah. Taste the difference, to coin a phrase. 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're surrounded by this food being made by big food that is designed to basically take advantage of our inbuilt desire for certain things. It reminds to be a lot of talking about cigarettes and cigarette companies. But in this case, it's not about smoking.

46:39It's about this bliss point, this combination of salt and fat and sugars in just the right combination, Tim. You're talking about like a chemical formula. And if I have that, then suddenly this food becomes hyper palatable. So I just like eat more. It overwhelms my natural sense of feeling full. And that's good for the food companies because 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 because 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.

47:13And then pharmaceutical companies have a new drug to solve this for us. I thought we did this fascinating experiment where you hold your nose and you eat something and suddenly realize that you actually, from my words, can't taste anything. But what you explained to me is actually I can taste because that's just this very limited thing of like, It's spicy or it's sweet. And actually what's happened 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.

47:54And actually, if you can learn to start to really notice what this food tastes like, then you really can tell the difference between that 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 there's like a sort of simple one two three thing that you could do right now so But the first is try this experiment at home.

48:39Try 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 descriptions of mineral and vegetable and so on. And then three, pick something that you would like to try. 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 are supposed to be not highly processed and you'll be able to see the difference in flavor.

49:24And 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. Absolutely. Yes. No, we want everyone to get experimenting and let's change our national palates. When you think of a gut supplement, what comes to mind? Something you swallow and grimace at? I think the aftertaste is so horrible, it must be good for me. Or something you sprinkle, crunch and actually enjoy? Daily 30 is Zoe's gut supplement. Years of scientific research have gone into creating the crunchy and delicious blend that we sell today.

50:05Developed by Zoe's gut health scientists, Daily30 is a gut supplement that's rewriting the rules on supplements by rejecting synthetic chemicals. It's packed with over 30 carefully selected plants and features ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy. And because we're Zoe, we lead with the evidence. When we first developed Daily30, we ran our own randomized controlled trial to check if it worked. The results blew us away and helped us create the formulation that we sell today. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving.

50:42Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. To get your pouch of Zoe's delicious gut supplement, visit zoe.com slash daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.