Neurogastronomy and its role on improving healthy food choice

Abstract

The multiple forms of food preparation within a society, together with the traditions or beliefs related to it, reflect the gastronomy of a particular place or region. People associate eating with values such as pleasure, well-being, positive emotions and even happiness when eating or celebrating special meals. The focus of gastronomic science is to ensure the quality and values of food, such as flavor, texture, while eating, taking into account traditions, culture, habits, beliefs and associations. In addition, gastronomy recognizes the contribution of the environment and atmosphere during the meal to make eating an enjoyable experience. The appearance of the food provides certain expectations regarding the harmonization of taste, flavor and overall quality. This also affects many other features of human behavior. Flavor perception is an experience that occurs as a result of consuming food and processing it by the brain. This new, multidisciplinary field is called neurogastronomy. The human brain's taste system begins with five senses that receive their stimuli from receptors and convert them into neural representations: smell, taste, sensation in the mouth, image and sound. What is done with this perception, how behavioral reactions are affected is another part.  The odors that dominate the perception of taste arise by decaying between molecules; the brain reflects these differences, combines them with taste and other emotions, creating the smells and flavors that make up the perception of food. Attracting the buyer's sense of smell is more about the quality of the ingredients and their palatability than how the dish looks on the plate. Since smell and taste are connected, pleasant smells can increase appetite. Since the smells make a person think that the food is nice, they allow the decision to be made without tasting the food. When a dish prepared with appropriate cooking techniques is prepared in a way that appeals to the eye, preliminary information about the food is provided by the presentation of the food before the senses of taste, smell, hearing or touch are activated and affect the decision about the food. The appearance of food is shaped by various factors such as color, shape, texture, size, clarity, foaming. The various ways in which the sense of touch can be used to enhance both the daily eating and drinking experience and in the context of experiential eating are also increasingly attracting the interest of professionals in various disciplines. It is stated that everything that is perceived by the sense of touch, from the weight of the menu to the tablecloth, tableware, cutlery and even the dish itself, are factors that affect the eating experience and taste. The hearing system, which contributes to flavor, is also associated with the sounds that food and beverages receive while being consumed. From an evolutionary perspective, it has been assumed that the sounds of food being bitten and chewed gave our ancestors important information about the firmness of a vegetable, the ripeness of a fruit, or the softness of a piece of meat.   In this review, neurogastronomy, the concept of taste and taste, parameters affecting taste perception, visual factors, factors affecting the taste of food on the plate and the role of neurogastronomy on improving healthy food selection were examined. An important area of research in neurogastronomy is the role of the brain in regulating appetite and food intake.

The most important ultimate function of the human brain taste system is to make the right choices in consuming healthy or unhealthy foods. The key to making these choices lies in the brain's decision-making mechanisms, which are only just beginning to be recognized.  The choice of food allows people to fulfill the vital function of nutrition, which forms the deepest connection with the environment and is a factor related to defining human communities. Throughout human evolution, the sense of taste, along with the other chemical senses of smell and chemistry, has played a fundamental role in food selection, ensuring an effective Decoupling between edible food sources and potentially toxic substances.  In addition, food selection is a result of integration with other sensory inputs in the brain and becomes even more complex due to different cultural backgrounds, such as learning, memory and emotion. Todd Hare and his colleagues wanted to solve how we make choices and suggested that the brain has mechanisms for making optimal choices between alternatives. It has been shown that the signal needed to make a choice arises in the ventromedial area of the prefrontal cortex in the frontal lobe. This area has been shown to be involved in various higher functions, including the cognitive control of decision-making, it has been hypothesized that it must be under control by another area called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. They were especially interested in food choices and studied people's brains by conducting experiments on their diets. Tests were conducted to divide the subjects into two groups, those who first showed self-control skills and those who could not. Those who showed self-control skills chose healthy foods, while those who did not showed chose foods that tended to be unhealthy. Taking into account how people value the healthiness and taste of food at both the behavioral and brain levels can help to better understand and address problems related to overweight and obesity, as well as healthy food choices.  Assessments of whether food is healthy or not have important sub-consequences, including food selection and portion size decisions. Given both the importance of food visuals and the ability of marketers to maximize the beauty of food in numerous digital and non-digital ways, understanding how aesthetics guide eating decisions is key to promoting healthy choices. Due to the complexity of food and the abstract nature of its qualities that contribute to its nutritional value, people largely rely on a variety of contextual cues to guide their health-related decisions. Similarly, food names that sound healthy and healthy branding of restaurants increase the perceived healthiness of food presentations. The beautiful aesthetics in a meal can reveal the concepts of pleasure and hedonics. Activating these concepts can lead people to see a food as more indulgent, causing them to rate foods that look nicer as more unhealthy. On the other hand, beautiful aesthetics can bring out spontaneous inferences of naturalness, which in turn can point to health. In essence, this means that science focuses on how to work with the brain to perceive food differently, to think that healthy foods are delicious and worth eating.