Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren vocal bam. Here. You know that ravenously hungry feeling you get after going swimming. It feels like you could go to and 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 defeat it something warm, an entire pizza, perhaps, or two giant bowls of extra brisket please. There could be a lot of reasons why we crave warm foods when we're especially hungry, but what of them probably has to do with the link between smell and taste.
We spoke with Dr Stephen Secker, 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 they or for 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 gaspacho 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 unlocks calories and nutrients we wouldn't be able to get eating the food raw, and since our big brains are very calorie meaty, 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 Rangum, 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 in digestibility. 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, Succor 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 sense create more positive and more emotional senses of nostalgia than other triggers, and scientists think that's because of these close connections amongst 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, are 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 were sick as a child. However, even small changes in temperature can make a big difference in how
satisfaction and food is perceived. It's important to remember that the texture of foods, and especially fats like those in cheese and cheese substitutes, changes drastically within a relatively small temperature range. For example, cold pizza, delight, or horror discuss h Today's episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other savory topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.