How Taste & Flavor Trigger Overconsumption

craving react trigger Jul 22, 2022

Why is it so hard to take one bite and stop? It's not you. It's the food. Processed foods are designed and formulated to keep you eating and wanting more. They’re manufactured to deliver unstoppable taste, flavor, and variety, all designed to stimulate you so you can't stop eating. Here I’ll cover taste and flavor, in a future article, I’ll tell you how variety stimulates overconsumption.

Tasty Tricks

Taste is the first place our brain registers stimulation and flavor. So that's why food manufacturers know to develop substances that will not only stimulate the tongue, but also stimulate the brain.

Manufacturers are constantly formulating ways to amplify the taste and keep that stimulation adhered to the tongue. Sweet is the one “taste” that humans will instantly accept, like and approve of every time. And that’s because we all have sweet-receptor portions on our tongue. Designed to activate the brain’s dopamine or pleasure center.

Sticky Flavor

Stimulating substances like sugar, monosodium glutamate (MSG) and yeasts are commonly dusted on the exterior of crackers and potato chips in the form of a powered coating. Why? Sugar is sticky and transferable. By design the substance is made to stick to your tongue, lips and fingers too. Which allows the flavor and stimulation to linger and that is what drives you to keep eating.

Salt used to be the only coating used to enhance flavor. Now, that sticky powdery coating is a big component of the product’s flavor. Doritos are a corn chip and the primary source of flavor is delivered by the powder coating, it’s what activates, taste and other senses too, including sight. Cheese Puffs are an obvious culprit. Pringles, even this brand’s “plain” chips have a powerful powdered coating.

Solutions

Avoid these flavor triggers all together by reading the list of ingredients and remember sugar uses more than 70 different aliases!

When you do decide to “taste just one”, remember by design once you touch or taste just one bite of these powdered, processed food products, you won’t be able to stop at just one. You can't lick it off your fingers or just wipe it off your teeth and tongue. The flavor coating need to be washed off your lips and fingers and brushed off your teeth and tongue. Which proves just how determined food manufacturers are to get you to stick with it and keep eating!

What I Buy

“What to Buy” Potato Chips, Tortilla Chips and Pre-Popped Popcorn are all available to Ovvia Members in the Member’s Resource Guide.

Learn More

Listen to my podcast episode “Why You Can’t Stop Eating”, is available to everyone for free! Also read all prior blog posts here. Read "Constantly Hungry & Fighting Cravings".

Ovvia Members can learn more in the Video Library, suggest watching all three videos I recorded for you in the “Sugar Sabotage” section.

In the “Cravings” section of the Video Library, Ovvia Members can learn all about starch and sugar cravings, what causes them and how to overcome cravings.