Shrink Your Gut With Gastrophysics

How one meal can change everything you think you know about eating – and overeating.

- Sushma Subramanian

You’re sitting in a booth at a fast-food chicken joint. You unwrap the crunchy paper to unveil a squishy bun hugging a warm breast of fried chicken. Pop music plays above. The aroma of crisped fat intensifies. You take a bite. It’s not nearly as juicy as the ad made it look. But you eat. And probably eat more than you should, as if compelled by outside forces.

The truth is, those forces – from the texture of the wrapping to the lightness of the bun to the blaring music – are intentional. Scientists have long known that much of what you “taste” when you’re eating isn’t about your palate. A new branch of research is proving the assumption that all of your senses are at play when you eat.

To experience these findings first-hand, I paid a visit to Dr Charles Spence, director of the University of Oxford’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory in London.

Spence has popularised the term “gastrophysics” to refer to the science behind brain-belly communication. He guided me through a meal with each course designed to manipulate one of my senses.

Here’s what I learned.

How Sight Makes You Fat My first course was entirely white. Four appetisers sat atop an ivory platter: a snowy ball, cloudlike cotton candy, colourless globules and a triangular chip. With Spence looking on, I was told to eat them in order from sour to salty to bitter to sweet. I went for the chip. Spence asked why.

I told him the topping looked like it was pickled, so it might be sour. Spence suggested that there could be something else going on. Sweetness is typically associated with round shapes (think chocolate chip cookies). Hard, angled edges (lemon wedges) communicate sourness and bitterness. Spence explained that there’s truth to the adage “we eat with our eyes”. When our food loses colour, our brain loses context.

1/ Shut Off the Neon