BrainStuff Classics: Why Does Hot Food Seem More Satisfying?

It feels like you could go to an all you can eat buffet and make them rethink their business strategy. But although a salad, or a granola bar, or even a nice smoothie would probably satisfy you, a voice echoing out of the deepest recesses of your brain commands you to feed it something warm, an entire pizza, perhaps, or two giant bowls of puff extra frisket please. There could be a lot of reasons why we crave warm foods when we're especially hungry, but one of them probably has

to do with the link between smell and taste. We spoke with doctor Stephensecker, an associate professor in the University of Alabama Department of Biological Sciences who studies the physiological design of digestive systems. He said, hot food emanates much more airborne particles than cold foods, and since a large part of our taste sensation also involves smell, hot food

would therefore provide positive reinforcement in its selection. Just consider how quickly the smell of smoke from a barbecue can make you feel hungry, or how no matter how tasty it will be, a cold gospot show simply doesn't stimulate

the senses like a warm chili. So even though we intellectually know that cold soup is going to be good and fill us up, our olfactory apparatus hasn't yet been appraised of the situation, making it hard to get all the parts of the brain on the same gaspacho bandwagon. But smell may not be the only reason we crave a hot meal more than a cold one, or rather

it may signal a deeper reason. Since heating food on locks calories and nutrients, we wouldn't be able to get eating the food raw, and since our big brains are very calorie needy, our preference for hot meals might have something to do with our brains steering us towards the

most potential calories possible in the moment of hunger. According to Richard Wrangum, a biological anthropologist at Harvard and author of Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human, the important comparison is between foods that are cooked and differ only in temperature. He said, hot food very likely yields more net energy gain than cold food, partly because of changes indigestibility.

One example is that starch becomes increasingly refractory after hot bread than cools, which could be one reason why we like hot toast. In the case of lipid rich foods, the closer of fat is to its melting point when eaten, probably the easier it is digested. However, Secker clarifies that chewing and the digestive process are both pretty good at unlocking nutrients. He said that once you've cooked hamburger, for example, eating it hot or cold would provide a negligible difference

in calories consumed and digestion effort. But there's also the nostalgia factor. Smell is the most nostalgia triggering sense. Researchers aren't entirely sure why this is, but they think it has to do with the physical way our brains handle information in the parts known as the limbic system. The limbic system includes the amygdala, which helps us process emotions, the hippocampus, which processes and stores memories, and the olfactory bulb,

which processes scent input from our nasal cavity. There are direct connections among these three brain bits. Studies have shown that since create more positive and more emotional senses of nostalgia than other triggers, and scientists think that's because of these close connections among scent, emotion, and memory in our brains.

While there might be some selected drive hidden in our behavior to crave cooked food for nutritional gains, our cravings and our susceptibility to a rich scent in the air is very likely driven by a nice memory of the taste and smell of food right off the grill, or the chicken soup that comforted you when you.