Personalized foods and beverages could be the next big thing

It’s no secret that flavor individualizes food and beverage items. It brings distinction and sometimes uniqueness to what we eat. Flavor includes an array of things like aroma, taste, and texture. It influences our diet selection, nutrition, and health because it’s a determinant of our food choices. Usually, without considering nutrition, we tend to eat things that we like and avoid those we dislike.

Flavor alone isn’t the only contributing factor to our food preferences and avoidances. Sensory receptors play a critical part in our food palatability. The flavor of food and beverages never change but sensory receptors vary from person to person. They’re influenced by metabolic changes, lifestyle factors, and genetic variation.

Unfortunately, there are many disease states that change our perception of food. Endocrine disorders cause taste disruptions because of the limited function of the salivary glands. A study in France revealed that obese mice who were fed a high fat diet had an extreme preference for sucrose and other simple sugars. Our lifestyle and daily choices also influence our sensory receptors. People who regularly consume caffeine were found to have a different process for activating part of the brain involved in reward, memory, and information processing when it comes to sweet and bitter taste compared to people who don’t consume caffeine. Chronic smokers tend to have a higher liking for the sweet taste than non-smokers. Like smoking, habitual physical activity seems to also specifically alter the sweet taste perception. A study found that highly active men are more sensitive to the intensity of the sweet taste.

Here’s the most surprising factor: Genes influence sensory receptors in two major ways. There are genetic variations that cause people to either like or dislike sweet taste. Genetic variations are also responsible for the strength of association between fat taste and reward/memory. So, knowing your sensory receptors and their role in diet selection, do you think you could put your preferences aside and eat what is nutritionally

best for you?

Take grapefruits, for example. Grapefruits are rich in vitamins and antioxidants and they have anti-inflammatory components, which pretty much makes them a super fruit. So why isn’t the amount of grapefruit consumed as high as the amount of other fruits like apples and strawberries? If you’re like me, and do everything in your power to avoid grapefruit, you are not alone. Grapefruit is bitter and most people simply just don’t like bitter taste. Researchers at the University of Pretoria developed 36 different models of grapefruit juice varying in color, aroma, flavor, intensities, sweet taste, and bitter taste. However, all models had the same nutritional content. They discovered positive drivers for liking particular grapefruit models were sweet taste, flavor intensities, and aroma, while negative drivers were bitter aftertaste and sour taste.

The bottom line is that no two people eat alike and this is because of our sensory receptors. Its extremely difficult to pick up food we don’t like, no matter the nutritional content. Yet, if we can change the flavor profiles –taste, aroma, color, texture, intensity – of products to cater to the different activity of sensory receptors of every individual, we can maximize every individual’s nutritional status. Would you eat your most hated food if its flavor profile was changed? Let us know below!

Interested in reading more about this topic? Here’s where:

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/1/155