The Chemistry of Food & Taste | Dr. Harold McGee

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Harold McGee. Dr. Harold McGee is a professor at Stanford University and world-renowned author on the topic of science and the chemistry of food and cooking.

He has spent more than four decades researching and writing about this topic. His work is unique because it at once teaches us about why foods taste the way they do, as well as how to make essentially any food or drink taste better. I, like presumably most of you,

absolutely love to eat. And for me, that's an understatement. I love food and eating. Today, Harold teaches us about everything from how certain types of cookware the bowls, the pans you use, even the utensils you use can change the taste of those foods, as well as simple things like adding a pinch of salt to anything bitter tasting, including coffee, yes, coffee, changes its chemistry and flavor for the better. and he explains why.

We discussed the preparation of meat and this thing that we call savoriness or the umami taste and how it's brought about by heating proteins in very specific ways and how you can bring out more of those flavors and how to get more of the healthy compounds such as polyphenol. found in chocolate and cacao. And we cover the much debated issue of whether more expensive wines are truly better than less expensive ones in terms of their taste or whether it's all a function of marketing.

So if you're a seasoned cook, or perhaps you only know how to make a few basic dishes, or if your version of cooking is basically a protein shake and some oatmeal, this discussion with Harold McGee will let you understand the essential chemistry of food in cooking and how to prepare food that is far more enjoyable.

As I said before, I love to eat. And this discussion taught me how to make the foods I love so much, meat, cheese, vegetables, fruit, starches, et cetera, all taste far better. And since eating is a big part of life, not just a way to support our health, I'm certain that everyone will glean useful knowledge and practical tools from Dr. McGee.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode. does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Harold McGee. Dr. Harold McGee, welcome. Thank you, Dr. Huberman.

I like most people love to eat. I also love food. I love the look of it. I love the smell of it. I love the anticipation of eating. And you've had a- Truly unique career. We'll talk a little bit more about your background later, but you've had such a unique career focusing on the chemistry of food, food interactions, and I must say...

Even just knowing a little bit about your work, you've changed the way that I think about even like the sorts of metals that I might use to prepare my food because it turns out these things are all impacting one another in not just... But really profound ways that impact our experience of food and taste. So just to kick things off, is there any one wild food interaction? chemistry fact that you just particularly find interesting? When I started writing my...

book about the chemistry of cooking. I didn't know that much about cooking or about chemistry. I was kind of learning on the fly, which was part of the fun. I read when I was writing about eggs that if you're going to make a foam of egg whites to make a meringue or a souffle, so you put the egg whites in a bowl and you whisk them until they essentially— form a solid from that liquid, a solid consisting of air bubbles trapped in the liquid and that makes it act like a solid.

Amazing kind of transformation. And when I was looking at what cooks had said about this process, they said you should use a copper bowl to do that whipping. And so I looked in the chemistry of eggs literature, of which there was a fair amount actually, for some kind of explanation as to why that might be the case and couldn't find one.

And so I decided, well, it's probably an old cook's tale, somebody who had a copper bowl and used that and thought that was better. And so I didn't think anything more about it until I was preparing my book for publication, looking for... cheap illustrations because i couldn't afford good ones and i found an old engraving of a an 18th century french kitchen and there was a boy

acting as though he was whipping something in a bowl. And the bowl kind of looked like our modern copper bowls with a little ring to hang the bowl on the... uh on the wall and there was a key that came along with the illustrations and the key actually said uh whipping eggs in a copper bowl to make pastries so i thought If the French have been doing it for hundreds of years, maybe there's something to this. Maybe I should actually test it, which was a really important lesson for me.

test everything uh i i gulped and bought a copper bowl because they're expensive and um and did a side by side and the difference was tremendous different color different texture different consistency in the mouth, totally different experience. And so it was that realization that a cook's... What I thought might be an old cook's tale could actually have a kernel of scientific chemical truth to it. That to me was a mind-blowing and career-changing experience.

from then on i didn't take anything for granted i always had to give it a try i love it i recently started drinking water out of a copper um reusable bottle mostly because i I needed a water bottle and there was one for sale where I happened to be and it was... Copper. And I rather like the taste. There are all sorts of theories about copper being better for us health-wise, et cetera. I haven't explored those to see if they're actually true or if it's nonsense.

I do like the look of it. Is copper used for... the preparation of any other foods specifically in order to extract the best flavor from those foods or liquids copper is actually used in jam making jelly and jam making and the reason for that is that if you use any other material you end up messing

with actually almost everything in there because the temperatures are pretty high. They're above the boiling point. But in particular, the sugars. And if you break sucrose down to glucose and fructose, then... the behavior of the material changes a lot, not necessarily for the better. And it turns out that copper actually inhibits... the breakdown of sucrose into glucose and fructose. And so again, for generations, cooks

French cooks in particular have used copper bowls to make their preserves. Wow. Copper is used for a variety of things, it sounds like, and people have arrived to this through what sounds like... kind of an unconscious genius combined with experimentation. When scientists got interested in cooking, they sometimes made... claims and suggested changes that in fact were terrible ideas. The traditional way of doing things was actually much better.

They had come up with a partial understanding of what was going on and on the basis of that partial understanding decided that they needed to correct cooks who, of course, weren't as smart as they were. and get them to change. And so you can see in the middle of the 19th century, some cookbooks published in England and the U.S. having a subtitle, you know, back in the day.

long subtitles were enjoyed. And so the subtitle would be, in which the theories of Dr. Liebig have been as much as possible applied in the recipes.

And Liebig, he was a genius biochemist, but on cooking, he kind of took his genius for granted and was wrong. The cooks knew better. Yeah, I love... um this notion of unconscious genius that a field of people who are experimenting without any formal rigorous coursework in a given area like chemistry can can arrive at at truths without understanding them

the mechanistic basis of those truths. Actually, I think a lot of what we face nowadays in the sphere of health and nutrition is about that conflict. There are papers identifying mechanisms, but then they don't play out in clinical trials, which is the... And then there are people in the real world who are doing things for which there's really no peer-reviewed research, but you get the sense that maybe they're onto something. So it's a very interesting intersection of –

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different major food groups as an exploration of the chemistry of food. But I think one of the more interesting ones is the combination of heat and food, right? And- Very often people will ask me, like, is microwaving safe and things like that. And I didn't ask me anything recently where I said, yes, indeed, microwaves are safe. You probably don't want to stand right in front of it in case the mesh protector isn't as effective as it might be. But yeah, it's heating.

things up from the inside. But we have all these different ways to heat up food. And we have ways to heat food and then cool food as a way to enhance the flavor of food. When it comes to The use of heat in food. What do we know about the history of the use of – I imagine it was fire first. But – This is a vast topic, but what are some of the interesting ways in which heat interacts with food at the chemical level to allow us to enjoy that food more?

Yeah, so in the anthropological literature, of course, the focus is on... increasing caloric intake and being able to consume materials that we wouldn't otherwise be able to consume as efficiently. So that's the sort of practical side. But my feeling is that the use of fire wouldn't have caught on if it didn't make foods delicious, more delicious than they'd been in the first place at the same time. And in fact...

Probably people early on learned to associate particular sensory experiences with the nutritional value of what it was they were eating and maybe even the safety. Because, you know, if you kill a mammoth, you've got a lot of leftovers. And what do you do with them so that they don't spoil and make you sick later on?

terrific thing about the application of heat to the foods in general is that they heat kind of takes the materials of which the food is made and rearranges them and in many cases breaks molecules down into smaller molecules that we can actually detect with our senses of taste and smell. So proteins, carbohydrates, fats, that's what we think of as constituting food. But they're all macromolecules. They're way too big for us to...

experience directly. And so one of the things about cooking that's most important is that cooking will take those macromolecules and break down... enough of them to produce small molecules that we can detect with our senses of taste and smell and enjoy. Simply for that reason, you know, we have my feeling is that we have our senses for them to be stimulated. And so in many cases, even if the.

if the stimulation is borderline pleasurable or maybe even slightly unpleasurable, we still enjoy the fact that we're being stimulated, that something is going on with our senses of taste and smell. And cooking does that in spades. It takes these molecules with no taste or smell and turns them into bouquets of various kinds depending on the original material.

Yeah, when I think about a piece of steak and if I were to take a bite of it raw, it would taste very different cold versus room temperature. And then- Raw steak, which to me is not appetizing, cooked even just a bit, especially if it were seared on the outside, now becomes pretty darn good. cook it a little bit more like medium rare with a really nice sear on the outside i think they call it pittsburgh char anyone that likes the outside of the steak really nice uh

Nice and charred and the inside rare. It's Pittsburgh char, if the chef knows what they're doing, is absolutely delicious. So what's happening there? I mean, you know... You said that heat changes the molecular structure. But what about those changes allow us to taste it more, not just differently?

Because as you said, like raw steak is pretty bland. I mean, most of us probably think of that as kind of gross, but it's also kind of bland compared to when it's cooked. What's happening? What's being- released into the steak. Yeah. So what happens is that the materials of the tissue, and in the case of meat, it's mostly protein and fat. those macromolecules, large molecules that are too big for our senses to register, get broken apart. And that's because heat is energy.

Energy agitates things. It agitates molecules at the surface of the food enough to break them apart into much, much smaller... pieces, and it's those pieces that we're experiencing when we take a bite. The pieces are not only much smaller, but they're also reactive so that they can react with each other.

They can react with oxygen in the air surrounding the food. And so we end up with, you know, if you did an analysis of the aroma coming off of... some steak tartare and coming off of a Pittsburgh char, you're going to have very, very little. noticeable even with instrumentation, but off of the stake. a tremendous amount of volatile molecules, which are the ones that our noses detect. And then also molecules that are small enough

to stimulate our taste receptors. So we have a handful, and we think of them as responding to sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami tastes. We encounter those tastes in all kinds of things in everyday life, but when you cook a piece of meat... to a high temperature and do a good amount of damage to that outer molecular surface, you generate molecules that can stimulate those receptors, even though they themselves are not sure. or salts or whatever.

What I like to think of is just the alchemy of heat. You know, you take this material, you add energy, and you transform it in ways that are delightful to us. So if I understand correctly... even though the molecules in meat typically wouldn't stimulate the sweet receptor. When you cook steak. It starts to stimulate the sweet receptors because of the change in those molecules. You've reduced their size and you've changed their configuration, depending on which recipe you use.

Yes, and you're also generating where once you might have had, well, these days. Our enumeration of molecules has gotten so good that who knows exactly how many are in that raw piece of meat. But whatever that number is, it's multiplied many-fold by the application of heat simply because it's...

It's taking those materials, breaking them apart, getting them to react with each other. And the result is just an explosion of sensory... uh information that simply wasn't there before we have to talk about umami i mean not just because the name is fun to say but um this receptor that seems to bind molecules

that give us the sensation, at least in part, of savoriness. I mean, to me, few things are as delicious as the braise that comes off of... meat in a cast iron pan that I would literally scrape that stuff up onto the spatula and eat it if no one's looking. And anyone that thinks that that sounds gross. I mean, it is absolutely delicious. I mean, it is like the pinnacle of like why we eat protein. That's why it feels so darn delicious to me.

And the intensity of flavor per unit of whatever that stuff is, is so high. But then here's the thing. If you were to wait two hours and come back and pick up one of those little black. you know, um, crumbs of braise and put in your mouth, it kind of like punch you in the mouth and it tastes like. kind of awful like you were licking the um the grill of a barbecue from two days before not good so what's going on with with braise and with umami and we could talk about a lot of non-meat

ways to stimulate umami, but such an interesting aspect of food and taste. Yeah, yeah, it is. And something that when I started writing about cooking in the 70s... No one believed it existed except for the Japanese scientists who were living in the country where it was discovered in the first place.

That's right. They were the first to molecularly clone the Umami receptor, as far as I know. And they were also the first to claim that there was a sensation, taste sensation, that was not sweet, sour, salt, or bitter. which is why they were disbelieved in the West for decades and decades. And as I say, when I started writing, that was the standard view. Japanese have this weird idea of something, a basic taste. that's just simply not...

Correct. And I went to a couple of meetings in Boston and remembered this being debated among chemists. First, I'll just say that I know exactly what you mean about that flavor. of something that you apparently feel guilty about enjoying because you said... You would scrape it up when no one was looking. When I was growing up, we had a family of four children. My mother would occasionally make an oven-baked chicken.

cut up into pieces, and the drippings would drip down to the pan and brown. And after the meal, my siblings and I would line up. for a spoonful of the scrapings delicious okay i i can smell it and taste it just a bit Yeah, anyone that's cringing at that, you have not tasted proper braise from meat. Assuming you consume animal proteins, it is absolutely delicious.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can – it just takes me back. It's Proustian to go back to that. So to make a long story short, the Japanese were shown to be correct. by Western standards. They always knew they were correct, but by Western standards, they were proved to be correct when a receptor for glutamate was discovered in the... 2000s, early 2000s. So finally …

Western scientists were on board. Meanwhile, cooks had been on board for a long time because they're always looking for ways to make their food more delicious. And they'd heard about this. Some went to Japan. They came back and so umami is a sensation that's a little bit difficult to – uh to describe compared to sweet sour salt and bitter Savory I think is the word you use and that's sort of the usual nomenclature. When you try to characterize it further, it's a feeling of fullness.

And length, so the flavor, there's just a lot of it there and it sticks with you for a while. That's what we mean by length? Yeah. Got it. I feel like also it... It doesn't occur just in my mouth, you know, and I'm not like very nuanced about food. I mean, I love food, but I'm not somebody who can really, I don't consider myself a food connoisseur. I just. know what i like and what i don't like but i feel like that

The taste of something with a lot of umami flavor actually spreads throughout the body. It's like a whole head experience, maybe even down to the chest. It's not restricted to like a location on the tongue or something like that. Later we'll talk.

about this myth about restricted receptors on the tongue. But yeah, one has to wonder if because the umami... receptor stimulation is so closely tied to savoriness and protein and because protein was presumably scarce in evolutionary history whether or not there's some reward pathways that are like oh this is this is good to because people had to

work really hard under dangerous conditions often to get umami stimulation yes yes yeah that's right and um uh i i would also say that From at least my reading of the literature, we only know a tiny, tiny bit about what's going on when we... smell things and taste things so we know the the initial step there's a receptor on our tongue that responds to glutamate which which is associated with this sensation what happens after that

Who knows? And there's also the fact that glutamate is an important molecule in the body. for signaling. So who knows what kind of, you know, crosstalk there might be between the receptor on the tongue and the rest of the body. And people have also in the last, what, 10 years or so discovered... Uh...

taste receptors for all the tastes in our GI tract. Yeah, that is so interesting. And so important too, because, well, maybe that's the sensation that things are, that the umami taste is much deeper.

Yeah. Is that they're in the esophagus and presumably maybe even into the stomach. Yeah, yeah. Wild. I heard that tigers have something like 10,000- fold more umami receptors than humans but they have no sweet receptors i don't know if that's true usually when you hear something like that it's likely to be Not completely true, but who knows? We look it up and someone will tell us in the comments, which upon hearing made me.

immediately want to try being a tiger for one day like i can't even imagine how good meat tastes to to carnivores that have that density of umami receptors yeah but it raises another question too which is assuming that's true

the absence of the sweet receptor perhaps make meat taste completely different you know in other words is there crosstalk between these receptors so that when you eat something that's like this spoonful of of braise drippings off the the roasted chicken um presumably there's a some stimulation of the sweet receptors. If you only had umami receptors, maybe it wouldn't taste good at all. Is the chemistry of food occurring in the mouth, not just in the food itself?

Wonderful questions. I don't know where to begin exactly, except to say that when you brown a piece of meat or just cook it to a high temperature so that the outside of the meat... changes color. That color change is an indication of a group of reactions called the Maillard reactions. after the guy who actually didn't quite address this, but he got his name associated with it. Anyway, the Maillard reactions are essentially reactions between fragments of proteins.

and fragments of carbohydrates and fats. And the reaction pathways are really complicated. They still haven't been worked out completely. but they generate a bunch of different classes of products. And among those products are sugars. So you don't start out necessarily with sugars, but if you've got proteins and fats, you can make sugars simply with the alchemy of applying heat. So that's part of what's going on.

that, yeah, tigers are missing out because there's an interesting dimension of flavor to meat that has been cooked. There's the chemistry of cooking. And then there's the chemistry of enjoying, of tasting, consuming. And it turns out that that's complicated. in its own right, because first of all, we're presenting our sensory apparatus with the most complex materials that they're going to encounter. Nature does not...

generate this kind of complexity. We're doing it for ourselves and that's part, I think, of the great pleasure that we take from it. But it also turns out that in the mouth...

changes can take place. And this was actually first noticed by experts in wine because they found that when they... put a raw grape in their mouth to taste you know what what what's the characteristics of this particular grape and how does that carry over into the wine what they noticed was that initially there's just the taste of the grape but then as they sit there other flavors begin to

And because they were experts in wine tasting, they were able to figure out which ones they were. And they were, some of them, molecules that you find in the finished wine. and it's just in your mouth. You just chewed it. So it turns out that there are, in all kinds of foods, molecules that are... called conjugates. You know, they're kind of business end of the molecule and then usually attached to a sugar of some kind. And when we put something in our mouth and we have...

enzymes in our mouth. Those enzymes can go to work on things like conjugates and free up the sugar. from the rest of the molecule and the rest of the molecule can be aromatic. And it's known now that the Maillard reactions generate not only sugars but conjugates. and so uh there's there's just a lot going on and it's it's a i think one of the best arguments for enjoying your food slowly because you never know what's going to kind of show up in your mouth after, you know, 20 or 30 seconds.

slow down enjoy every bite and and notice what's happening because it's uh it's often a really dynamic uh experience we're gonna have a hard time convincing many people to slow down their rate of eating however You promise them a richer experience of the food and not just that they're trying to eat less or something, which is the usual reason that people hear they should chew their food, maybe improve digestion as well.

they might be incentivized to do it. I should point out of all the senses, it seems taste and its relationship to food, we have more control over that experience. Like, let me state this differently. I were to do a podcast on, you know, that simply by looking around the world differently, you could start to actually get new visual perceptual abilities. That'd be pretty exciting, but.

I'm sorry, but that's not true. It doesn't work. I mean, you could enhance your, you know, some discrimination of certain things if you were trained to look for them, but that can change your visual perceptual abilities. But with taste, it sounds like we have the ability. So when you say slow down, do you mean... slow down the chewing, take pauses after bites.

All of the above? Yeah, all of the above, because even after you swallow, there are residues in your mouth and at the back of your mouth, and that's what the wine experts... noticed was the change in those residues so it's not that they chewed on a grape and then kept it in their mouth for a minute uh it was just what was left over so the leftovers can be as delicious as the main course

All right, I'm going to start taking pauses between at least food types. I've sometimes had the experience of eating something particularly delicious. For instance, meat.

or fruit or vegetables. I love all the, I'm an omnivore. So I love all these things, but I'm so satisfied with what I just ate that I don't want something sweet. right away because of the collision that occurs between foods am i alone in not liking dessert but liking dessert foods on their own at a separate time? Or am I just like on a desert island of experience here? No, I'm actually completely the same.

I would prefer to have another half glass of wine than dessert, just simply to prolong the experience of the... the main part of the meal and dessert sweet things I enjoy but not after a big meal of other things savory things my wife who's Japanese, says she has a separate mouth and a separate stomach for desserts, and she can go right into it after the main course. But yeah, I prefer not.

to i feel like many people eat dinner just to get to dessert let's actually talk about food order in the meal um many years ago uh i had a girlfriend who was from the south of france from the perigord so she grew up in what is arguably one of the food capitals of the of the planet you know people think french food paris but actually

people in the south of France, are so serious about food that her family would spend most of the day and the night and the meal talking about the next meal or a previous meal. They would search for mushrooms with binoculars. If they spotted one in the neighbor's yard, they were perplexed as to how to... negotiate for that mushroom. You couldn't actually go steal the mushroom. That would be like a cardinal sin. I mean, they are so serious about food.

Every aspect of it, as you know. And we used to get into these intense arguments about the order in which one is supposed to eat food. And in her mind, it was soup first because it actually prepares the gut. And then always salad last. This whole notion of eating salad at the beginning of the meal was like heresy to- I mean, to everything that she had known and conceptualized about food. So I have to believe that whether one likes French food or not, that they're onto something.

that when it comes to digestion, when it comes to being able to really taste the full array of flavors in a food that we probably should be doing soup first. then an appetizer, then an entree, and then salad last. And if we're not consuming an entire meal of that sort, that salad shouldn't be eaten at the beginning of a meal. Are they right?

I'm pretty sure that she was right. She was right about most things. Very good question. And I guess my answer would depend on the audience. And I say that because, of course, if you go to a banquet in China... Everything is... served simultaneously. Really? They just slide it all out in front of you? Yeah. And do people eat everything in kind of mishmash? Or there may be phases, but you're presented with many, many different dishes at each phase.

I would be so overwhelmed. And it is overwhelming. And, you know, it's partly—well, I don't want to generalize. Maybe it has to do with perhaps— emphasizing the abundance and generosity of the meal rather than focusing on the pleasure that you can get from each. stage in it. Maybe the French are more focused on the sensory experience, but there are many, many different ways to to sequence dishes in a meal. And I think it does the French way of doing it.

uh does make a lot of sense my family and i lived in the countryside near toulouse for a year and um ate around with the neighbors and so on and and my daughter my and son went to school where they were given a full hour for lunch and it was a coursed lunch with all those different components. So it does make sense I think because … Having the soup come early helps, among other things, partly fill your stomach.

so that when you then go to the main course, you don't have to eat as much in order to be satisfied. and then the salad you know the salad is coming and it kind of refreshes you because the main course is usually on the heavy and rich side almost always yeah yeah

Goose breast with foie gras was not uncommon in her household. And they were a middle-class home, I should mention. So it wasn't that people there were eating goose breast with foie gras because... they were among the like elite it was that was the uh ham and cheese sandwich of the of the town yeah those are those are the local products And the geese were probably being raised down the road. So, yeah. So I think the salad kind of –

closes out the main part of the meal and refreshes you a little bit. And then if you're going to have dessert, you're ready for it rather than being overwhelmed by yet another rich... So I think it does make a lot of sense for the... for that structure of a meal where you have those different courses. Yeah, this notion of cleansing the palate is kind of an interesting one.

It's been a long time since I've been to a meal where they served a palate cleanser in between dishes. I mean, that's something that I think in the 80s and 90s became a little bit popular in the United States. my family wasn't serving or attending those sorts of meals but i've been to a few it's kind of an interesting idea but um molecularly chemically speaking is that a real thing that you're going to wash out the flavor of what you just ate so that you can prepare for the next

next item on the menu, or is it more for show? I think it's both. I do think that if you're, and again, depending on the details, but... Palate cleansers are usually cold and not too strong in any direction, a little bit tart. Often. So something cold and tart to break up a meal where you've gone from one kind of rich course and you're about to have another rich course because it's a fancy restaurant.

I think that probably does make sense. Yeah. My next question is a bit more of a human physiology question, but I think we're all familiar with the kind of...

taste intensity drift. I can't think of a better phrase where, you know, if you are used to drinking your coffee black and you start putting a little bit of cream in it, maybe a little bit of cream and a little bit of sugar. going back to black coffee feels like a step in the really bitter direction and then if you start adding more sugar or eating sweeter foods it seems like we reset our threshold for what we consider too sweet

There are all sorts of health implications, negative health implications around this. But is that a real thing? Are we actually changing our threshold for what we consider bitter or sweet? I ask this because recently I've developed a, I won't call it an addiction, but a love for cacao beans. And the first time I bit into one of those, I thought, oh, like those are bitter. And now it's one of my favorite parts of my morning where I'm like.

pop five or six of those in my mouth and munch on them. And they taste bitter, but they taste so good. And they're kind of barky. They have kind of like a bark taste to them. And I swear I can taste the polyphenols, although that's all cognitive, right? What I just described is not uncommon for me. What is this whole thing about thresholds for bitterness and sweet? Do they interact? Yeah, yeah. So taste is...

hugely malleable as far as we can tell. And I think this is best documented in the literature trying to find ways to reduce the sodium content. of packaged goods. So manufacturers have been saying long after biomedical people were saying we should … cut back on our sodium intake. We would be happy to do that in our products, but our consumers don't like our products without the level of salt that we have in them.

So people at the Monell Chemical Census Center in Philadelphia did some pretty systematic studies of this. And what they found was that you can, over time... adjust thresholds and preferences for the basic tastes. They were focusing on salt because that was the issue at hand. But there's no reason to think that that's not the case for everything.

That if you become used to a particular level of stimulation, then that becomes your... your new normal and anything below or above that is going to stand out for being not quite enough or too much. So I think we're perfectly capable of training ourselves to adjust our preferences. It does take time. I think lasted maybe a couple of months. It takes time, but it's certainly doable. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.

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Matina makes loose leaf and ready-to-drink yerba mate. I've often discussed yerba mate's benefits, such as regulating blood sugar, its high antioxidant content, and the ways that it can improve digestion. It also may have possible neuroprotective effects. It's for those reasons...

and the fact that yerba mate provides, in my opinion, the most even and steady rise in energy and focus with no crash, the yerba mate has long been my preferred source of caffeine. I also drink yerba mate because I love the taste. And while there are a lot of different yerba mate drinks out there, My absolute favorite is Matina. I'm excited to share that Matina has recently launched a series of new flavors of their cold brew, all zero sugar yerba mate.

There's a raspberry flavor, there's a mango flavor, there's a mint flavor, there's a lemon flavor, and a peach flavor, and they are absolutely incredible. If I had to pick one that's my absolute favorite, it would probably be the mango or the raspberry, but frankly, I cannot pick just one. and I end up having basically one of each every single day. Again, all of these flavors are made with the highest quality ingredients, all organic, and again, all zero sugar.

If you'd like to try Matina, you can go to drinkmatina.com slash Huberman. Again, that's drinkmatina.com slash Huberman. I stopped eating quote-unquote junk food a long time ago, and I've totally lost interest.

In parallel to that, I enjoy strawberries and vegetables and meat and fish and eggs and rice and oatmeal so much more with each successive year. And I think it's in part because of this reshaping of what one considers flavorful.

But I also feel like my experience of food is getting richer and richer as opposed to worse and worse. So it's kind of interesting and kind of counterintuitive. Do we have any evidence that if you eat foods closer to their – let's just say in their unadulterated form, that you get more out of the taste experience than if you are combining lots and lots of flavors, which is essentially what processed foods are.

Yeah. I can't point to chapter and verse in the literature on this, but... I think it just makes common sense that if you're going to start with strawberries and then add a bunch of other things, vanilla extract and... sugars and who knows what else in order to essentially as processed. foods try to do, just kind of wow your mouth with an overwhelming sensation that you then want to repeat. Rather than slowing down and enjoying the nuances, the natural world gives us these amazing ingredients.

strawberries and blueberries and oats and and so on and then to to take those amazing ingredients which you can kind of savor for you know a minute at a time uh and and really enjoy to to take those ingredients and make them ingredients rather than things in themselves and combine them with lots of other things for the purpose of stimulation rather than the purpose of appreciating and enjoying those individual components, then you're kind of giving up

I would say most of the pleasure of eating. You're just fueling yourself with stuff that is going to give you an immediate hit of flavor and then be gone. what was in that food is opaque. It may have been strawberries once upon a time, but it's now been masked by all these other things. And meanwhile, one of the miracles of living on this planet is strawberries and the just vast range of materials that plants.

have gone to the trouble of preparing for the sake of pleasing us. And so to hand that – responsibility or that activity over to manufacturers who are just looking to make things as cheaply and quickly as possible, I think is a mistake. Do you drink coffee?

i do how do you prepare your coffee i uh grind the beans and fresh every time yeah is that important to the taste it can be i mean it depends on where you get your your beans from but um uh and and how long they last uh but uh i i think so yeah so you'll mill the beans each time yeah and then you use a drip filter a machine a french press a drip filter yeah yeah

We have this colleague of ours at Stanford, Adler, who built the AeroPress, which I've used for years, long before they were involved with the podcast. I remember seeing him. uh throwing the aerobee frisbee so he's an inventor right and um i i think that the aero press is an interesting idea because it sort of combines french press and filter drip right it's kind of a um but Yeah, there is actually really interesting data that coffee has some, perhaps, it seems, some powerful...

health promoting effects, but it depends on how you brew it. So how are you brewing it? Not that I'm going to get you to change the way you do anything with food or drink. So I go back and forth between a metal filter and a paper filter. And yeah, I lived near the park where Alan Adler would fly his Aerobees. And so I visited with him and chatted about the... the AeroPress, and I like the idea a lot, and it seems to me you can control the flavor.

with it much more than you can with a with a drip system simply because when it drips it drips but you can hold it into the hold it in the arrow the arrow press as long as you want the temperature of water is so critical with coffee. Do you take it to a boil or no? I know people might think, gosh, they're really getting down to the weeds, but the flavor of coffee is completely different if you take the water to a boil versus just get it near boil or cut off the heat.

a moment after it starts to boil. Completely different beverage, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah. And I actually prefer coffee, drip coffee, with water right off the boil. So I've tried all the different...

stages and that's just my preference. The important thing though is to know that the temperature does make a difference and the pleasure you get from it is going to vary depending on the temperature you... the water that you use so it's worth knowing that and then playing around and seeing what you like best so that's the experience side of it chemically and um what's happening i mean when you when you brew coffee what are some of the interesting uh

coffee chemistry factoids i'm obsessed with this stuff as you can tell yes Well, so first of all, there's the grind size makes a huge difference because what you're essentially doing is extracting extractable materials from the solids. And a typical cup of coffee, you're extracting maybe 20% of the weight of the original weight of the coffee. So it's not that much.

except that it's all the good stuff. And in fact, the longer you extract, the more you extract, the larger the molecules you're able to... And those larger molecules are the ones that tend to be tannic and astringent and bitter. Yes. The longer you let the beans or the ground beans – uh be exposed to the hot water the more large molecules you pull off the large molecules are the ones that give it that kind of punch you back in the mouth yeah um feeling the tannic

Yeah. Interesting. And bitter. In fact, it's kind of a fun experiment. If you love coffee and you're interested in this kind of thing, what you can do is... uh make a a set up a filter with coffee in it and line up four or five different cups and then pour the water in and then every 30 seconds or so move it from cup to cup And you can see what comes out early and middle and late. And what comes out late...

are these larger molecules. And late is kind of synonymous or you can think of using hotter water as the temperature equivalent of... brewing later and later that you're getting more stuff out the word that comes to mind is stale coffee that's been on the coffee pot a long time is that that seems to be the flavor you're describing when you you uh

Pull these large molecules out. Is that right? Well, actually, I would say that – so yeah, the old – unfortunately, not so common anymore. The old coffee urn that you would have at conferences and things like that. where you pump the yeah yeah some people will know what we're talking about yeah and the coffee has been in there for a couple hours probably That to me is stale coffee and that changes in the smaller aromatic molecules as well as the larger ones. But I think the take-home lesson...

is that these little details make a difference. And if you're a stickler for coffee just the way you want it, then doing some of these experiments to see... You know, what's on either side of the coffee that you brew usually is worth knowing about. you know i think everyone could afford to slow down their experience of consuming food for a variety of reasons some of which uh you mentioning uh like just straight up better taste and taste experience um

And also with beverages, I consume an ungodly amount of caffeine each day. I'm very caffeine tolerant. I actually can't drink coffee in the morning. But in the afternoon, I absolutely love it. It tastes aversive to me early in the day. I don't know why. I drink yerba mate early in the day and throughout the morning. And then in the afternoon, I like it.

cup of coffee in the same cup of coffee tastes absolutely delightful in the afternoon i don't know what it is yeah that's that's mysterious to me too can't claim pregnancy either so um you know because uh that people who are pregnant uh report feeling kind of nauseous to certain tastes at one time a day versus another um

Is there anything else we can do with our coffee and tea? You know, so the tannic flavor or the experience of a tea being too tannic is awful. It tastes metallic. But when tea's done right... It's very smooth. What is this tannic smooth thing in the context of tea? Is it the same thing, large molecules, small molecules? Yeah, it's basically the same thing. It also depends on, you know, what's left in the tea leaf. So some teas are just by definition.

going to be more tannic than others because they have been treated differently in order to make the dried tea. I have three or four tea bushes in my backyard, and so I make tea every year. Whenever the new growth comes out, that's what you make tea with. What kind of tea? Do you make? That's the fun thing about having the bushes. I make all kinds, and I play around with them and see what happens if I just pluck a leaf and brew that.

or pluck a leaf, let it wither in the sun and then brew that, or do the various processing techniques that give you oolong, which is kind of medium. manipulated, and then black tea is very heavily manipulated. But it's a whole spectrum, and it's a lot of fun to play with. And you're just putting these directly into hot water? You put it in a metal tea strainer? For most of them, what you have to do first is dry them. But then when I make tea, yeah, it's just leaves into a pot and then...

Pouring the tea out. I make small pots so that I can try lots of different things. How do you dry them? That's another variable. So you can let them air dry. Just out on the counter? Yeah. takes um i live in san francisco so it's not very warm so it takes a while for them to dry on the counter But you can also – I put them in the toaster oven. I'll dry them. A lot of Chinese green teas even are dried in a wok. So I will do that. You heat them up in the wok. Yeah, yeah. Toastroven, yeah.

Somebody who's obsessed with yerba mate, since I was a kid, I've been drinking yerba mate. I love, love, love it, as people know. Fascinated by this. So how much space does one of these plants take up? Well, so it totally depends. I bought mine originally as a quarter meter tall. Not exactly seedling because they are bushes and so they get lignified pretty quickly. They're more solid. What's lignified? Sorry. Like a tree. So, yeah, a solid base. Oh, like ligand. Okay, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So, one of the cool things about... being alive these days is that it used to be really hard to get your hands on these plants, but now it's very easy. You go online, you can find many, many different sources at many different maturities. But the thing about making tea from tea plants is that what you're doing is plucking off the new growth.

That's what you make tea from. It's not the older leaves. It's the very newest ones, which are the most metabolically active and have the most interesting stuff in them. interesting for us when we play with them. So you actually don't want to make tea from small plants. You want to let them grow bigger. And you can control the size from then on up. They're often grown in the shade.

for flavor purposes, and so growing them in the shade is actually fine. You don't have to have a sunny spot on your windowsill, although it'll grow faster in the sun. But shade-grown tea is actually preferred. And then they're a species of camellia. So they're, you know, not that demanding. They need acidic soil, but apart from that, very easy to grow. I've had mine now for almost 20 years.

Making tea from them is actually a great way to keep them in check. Otherwise, they would take over the yard. Amazing. Is it called tessiography? Do you do that too? The reading of tea leaves? I'm just joking. Tea leave reading is probably never going to make it onto this podcast. And I'll probably upset some people.

by saying that I'm not convinced that reading tea leaves is indicative of much. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm glad we're in agreement about that. As long as we're, you know, exploring whether longstanding lore within kitchens. is reflective of some real chemistry, as was the case with umami or the French with eating salads last. There's this idea that you shouldn't have tea at the end of a meal.

Is that true? Or is it like that it somehow hardens the food in your stomach? Or is this just complete like a- is this complete nonsense sounds to me in the direction of complete nonsense great because i like tea at the end of a meal I like chamomile tea after a meal. Well, and herbal teas especially because, I mean, I could make a just-so story about the phenolic compounds in tea.

cross-linking things in your stomach or something like that because polyphenols do that, but I can't imagine that it makes a difference. So polyphenols cross-link proteins?

yeah yeah i for those aren't familiar cross-linking proteins is a way of changing their configuration and making generally makes them more rigid when we in laboratories when we use fixative light formaldehyde or paraformaldehyde you're taking a tissue usually a slice of brain tissue which is very floppy and you need to be less floppy so you can work with it and so you put it into paraformaldehyde or formaldehyde or glutaraldehyde all these things create what are called shift

basis do i have that right yeah okay my remembering my chemistry and they cross-link the proteins so that then you can pick that thing up like a uh-huh well it's a very thin slab i would not want to do that to the food in my gut right But nowadays we hear that polyphenols are like the greatest thing. So what's the deal with polyphenols? Should we consume them separately from proteins?

Yeah, no, I don't think so because the thing about polyphenols, the reason that they do this cross-linking is the fact that they're reactive. And what that means is you... You put them in with almost anything else and they're going to get bound. And then you're going to swallow them and they're going to make it down to your... lower GI tract, and then there they may be freed up because whatever they're bound to gets to be digested and so on.

But there it's not a bad thing necessarily. In fact, it's probably a good thing. But the thing about polyphenols early on in the process, if you think about what would happen if, for example, you take milk. and add some wine to it and let it sit, it'll curdle. And that's because the polyphenols are cross-linking the milk proteins. And so that's basically the kind of thing that's happening inside us.

Years ago, there was a semi-popular diet, this was in the early 90s, that argued that you shouldn't combine carbohydrates and proteins, that you should actually eat them separately. And I've also heard it... said that you want to eat fruit before a meal or away from a meal, but not after a meal because it can give you digestive issues. I'm sure people differ tremendously in terms of what they can consume. I'm actually one of these people.

If I have a stomachache, it means something is seriously wrong. I mean, I can eat everything except metal shavings and my stomach doesn't hurt. I don't get headaches or stomachaches. I get other things, but I don't get those. Some people are very sensitive to food combinations. They get stomachaches really easily.

regardless of one's sensitivity to different foods, are there certain foods that it would make sense to keep them separate if you have digestive issues, you know, bloating or just like... gurgling stomach this kind of thing or worse yeah so um my understanding is well first of all i know for a fact that We have cycled through every possible permutation of these theories over the course of the last 150 years with no one of them. actually being touted now as the answer.

So to me, what that says is there is no the answer for this kind of question and that it really does depend on individual physiology and what people can tolerate. for their own particular reasons. I don't think there are any... principles by which you can choose to combine or not combine foods that would make a difference to your health. Also, we're eating so many different things, so many...

times a day that I think would be really hard to kind of tease out any particular relationships like this. And even if they do exist, they probably exist only for subpopulations and not for... the world at large so translated what i'm hearing is you have to figure out what works for you doesn't sound like you believe in one particular um nutrition plan or diet

according to any particular science but it does sound like you leaning toward the idea that certain diets for lack of a better word will work better for different people Yeah, I guess I would certainly say that it would depend on the individual. And I'm not sure that I would buy in necessarily to the idea of an optimal diet in the first place because unless... optimal included tremendously varied, which is kind of in a way the opposite of optimal. It's making sure to try.

a lot of different things all the time rather than hewing to one particular approach. So, yeah, I think we just don't know enough to say anything definitive.

We talk about the ever problematic onions and garlic. There's a lot of chemistry around onions and garlic, most notably the crying caused by... What is the basis of the crying caused by onions and how do we mitigate it? So plants in that family, the allium family, so onions and garlic, are close relatives. They – the way that they defend themselves from animals that might want to eat them and they're not fruits. They're actually roots or root-like.

structures that are meant to give rise to the next generation. So to the plant they're very important. They're defended with these sulfur molecules that in the intact... root are inactive but then the moment the tissues are disrupted enzymes get to work and generate from those precursors, kind of chemical warfare cylinders. The cylinders are opened and we end up with these molecules that can fly through the air.

We don't have to actually touch the onion. They come to us, these molecules. And they're meant to do exactly what they do, which is make us miserable. So the fact that they're volatile means that you can protect yourself by doing a couple of different things. You can wear goggles. which prevents volatile molecules from getting to your eyes. You can do the cutting interspersed with just a rinse and water.

because the molecules are being generated at the surface that you're generating by doing the cutting. So if occasionally you just rinse those surfaces, then the volatiles go away and they don't. don't bother you as much. You can also get non-pungent varieties of onions which exist. Maui onions are the best known of those. And they just don't make those sulfur molecules so that they don't irritate us. I'm reminded that our colleague at Stanford...

Dr. Sean Mackey, who runs the pain division, when he was on this podcast, he said that despite many years of traditional training in medicine and thinking that a lot of people's reported gut issues were.

perhaps psychosomatic and all this stuff. He himself had the experience of getting a lot of gut pain at one point in his life, just and not knowing what the origin was. And it seemed like it was after certain meals and not others. And he- did all the necessary self experimentation to pinpoint that it was onions that were causing this.

very, what sounded like pretty severe gastric issues and pain. And it was the histamines caused by ingesting onions, right? These little packets of molecules that cause inflammation. And so- That in part converted into this idea that, you know, when people talk about their negative experiences with certain foods, that they're not making this stuff up, that it's very likely that they have some sort of food sensitivity. And I think now the landscape of...

quote unquote, traditional medicine is starting to become more open to this. But in hearing what you just described, like these warfare molecules coming out of onions, stimulating a- They're designed to create an aversive reaction in animals that would eat them. And here we are eating these things. And then the idea that it would be bad for certain people at first seemed like shocking to the standard.

medical community, but now one of the leading experts in the world of pain medicine is like, hey, listen, histamines from onions are a problem for people with gut issues. Sometimes, not always. So I think there's an interesting kind of intersection of food chemistry. individual experience and where medicine is headed. It's not crazy. These are chemicals coming out of food. Makes sense.

Yeah, exactly. And maybe the most prominent example of an aversive chemical being generated in foods that we love is capsaicin in peppers. Hot peppers, the ones that are spicy, are spicy. because they contain a particular molecule that is designed to be aversive to animals so that animals won't chew up those fruits before the seeds can be dispersed. And interestingly... The animals that the plant depends on for dispersal are birds, and birds don't respond to capsaicin. Really? Yeah, yeah.

So this is a molecule that's designed specifically for mammals like us to get us to leave those fruits alone. And some people can handle tremendously noxious, shall we say. levels of capsaicin. And other people are very, very sensitive and can't handle hardly any. So, yeah, it's all part of this.

This larger picture of the world giving us these materials to feed ourselves and our working out our... uh negotiations with those materials so that we can enjoy them and be nourished by them i want to explore spiciness a bit more in a moment but are there any data that there are genetic differences among people

in terms of the density of, I think the capsaicin receptor is a substance P receptor or something like that, or sweet receptors or umami receptors that would perhaps not predict, but partially explain why some people. are really averse to spice. Other people pursue spice and why some foods perhaps just like don't taste good to certain people or even give them a gut issues or this sort of thing.

So the best studied aspect of this is taste rather than smell. Smell is difficult because there are so many different receptors and thousands and thousands of smells, but taste is relatively... confined subject and there are what are called super tasters and this has to do eventually I'm sure with genetics but the way this

category of people was first defined was by simply counting taste buds on the tongue. So they had a particular area in which they could look and they stained the... the taste buds and then simply counted them, enumerated them. on thousands of different people. And what they found was, as you might expect, there are some people with very, very few in a given area and others where they're so crowded together you can barely count them. Wow.

So high pixel density, low pixel density. Some people have the iPhone 1. Some people have the iPhone whatever we're on now of 16 or something or 13 density. Wow. Yeah, yeah. So clearly that's going to affect the way you experience whatever you put in your mouth. The investigators gave the name supertaster to the people who had the highest density of receptors.

It's unfortunate because the term does have connotations that really don't belong. It's just some people have lots of taste receptors and other people don't have very many. Well, I guess the question is... Do the people who have higher density of taste receptors have better taste discrimination? Can they tell two foods apart or beverages apart on a dimension of, say, sweetness that somebody with lower density receptors can't?

So that's a really good question. And I don't know exactly the answer to that. But what I do know is that...

You would think that supertaster sounds great. That's what I want is to be able to taste more. In fact, supertasters are especially sensitive to... bitterness and to acidity to the point that foods that other people enjoy just fine they find aversive simply because the the sensation is overwhelming so i used to teach a course at the french Culinary Institute no longer with us in New York and we would often have chefs in the course along with just ordinary people.

We would do a taste test, a proxy for counting the number of taste buds. You can give people a very bitter substance. known level on a little piece of filter paper and then ask people to rate does this taste extremely bitter kind of bitter or what what bitter And the chefs would always be upset if they did not score as super tasters because super means you're a really good taster. But talk to them and you find out that...

It's often difficult for chefs to kind of match the flavor preferences of their customers. And one of the reasons for that can be that if you're a supertaster, Chef, you're going to dial down all kinds of things that to an ordinary taster may leave the food tasting bland. So it's something that...

There is no right thing to be, but if you're a professional in the food world, you need to know what you are and how to compensate for it if you need to. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function.

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A few years ago, there was this like a trend of salting fruit. Remember that? I tried it. I love fruit. I love salt. Wasn't such a fan of salting fruit, but I don't want to. dismiss it right off the bat does it do anything interesting to fruit in a way that should have me return to that yeah no i think it's it's a completely individual thing my grandmother would salt her grapefruit oh yeah

Oh, no, we would put sugar on our grapefruit when we were kids. Sucrose, okay. She would salt her grapefruit. She would salt her grapefruit, and it turns out, we know now, that in fact... Salt and bitter are kind of opposing sensations, and you can actually diminish the sensation of bitterness by upping the salt. So she was... making it less bitter without adding sugar, which to her was important. She used the artificial sweetener of the day in her tea in the morning. That's interesting.

I know people who put a tiny, tiny bit of salt in their coffee to, according to them, take the edge off, meaning to take the bitterness out. It makes sense. Based on the chemistry, this push-pull of bitter and salty taste. Pretty much everything in the nervous system is push-pull. Yeah, and that goes by the way for things like beer. Some people will add a pinch of salt to their beer. The only place in the world where I enjoy beer is in Munich.

Where they serve beer – well, maybe it's the schnitzel that they're – I love that stuff. But they'll come around with a heater and they'll heat your beer. So that it's room temperature. And it completely changes the taste. The bubbles are small in those beers. They taste to me just a little bit sweeter. And...

I asked them about this, and the idea that you would drink a cold beer to them was like, what are you talking about? I mean, you might as well tell an American that they should have their apple pie with... with spaghetti on top or something. It's crazy. Let's talk about alcohol, even though I'm not a drinker. I know people enjoy a little bit of wine or spirits or beer, and I'm...

I suppose as long as people aren't alcoholics and they're of age, small amounts of consumption are probably okay. Zero is better. So let's talk about wine and beer. What's the brief history on this? When did people start fermenting fruit and hops and this whole business of creating poison to ingest?

um because it tastes good and gets them a little bit inebriated what what is this So this is actually an area where we're learning more every year because people are – especially archaeological sites are pushing dates back and so on and finding evidence for this kind of thing. the ability to detect residues in pots is just amazing these days. But my guess is and it's been argued that we have been enjoying alcohol since before we were homo sapiens.

Really? Yes. That primates, in fact, when you observe them, will go after fermenting fruit and enjoy it. Seek out and pick those fruits and not... not others. And I bet it's not a literature I keep up with, but I bet that there are some behavioral studies as well to suggest whether or not... the ingestion of the fruit is actually having an effect on their coordination, for example. I bet there are studies like that. So we've been enjoying...

alcohol before we were homo sapiens. And in the archaeological record, the dates have been pushed back now to the very beginnings of agriculture. And in many different places, so China, the Middle East, it's just an attractive possibility. which probably did simply start with, you know, collecting a bunch of fruit, not getting around to eating it right away and, you know, it beginning to smell interesting and you try it.

It does things. Humans daring other humans to try things. Which I think is also, by the way, how chocolate was discovered or the possibilities for chocolate. cacao beans are the seeds in a fruit. And the current thinking is that the fruits were gathered for the fruit. and the seeds, which are large, were simply thrown in a pile near the fire.

And there were enough residues of the fruit on the seeds for those residues to ferment. And that's the first step in making chocolate. So with respect to alcohol.

I mean, alcohol is, as you mentioned, a long history. I've heard it said that despite so much fascination and money spent on different wines, depending on... uh the make and the label and the year in particular and how the grapes were that year depending on how the weather was that year and the soil and you know so much goes into this in a huge industry um but every once in a while

there'll be a study published where they'll do a blind taste test and some of the most experienced aka expert wine drinkers won't be able to discern the finest wine or near finest wine from a far more trivial inexpensive wine and that always seems to send everyone into disarray for a couple of weeks and then everyone goes right back to um distributing their wine consumption according to their income and

what they perceive to be the better wine. It's kind of a wild foray into human psychology. Like if this is true, that- These expert wine drinkers can't discern like a $20 bottle of wine from a $2,000 bottle of wine. And yet they insist on returning to the practice of preferentially buying and consuming more expensive wines if they have the means.

I mean, that says all sorts of things about humans and the way we place value on things. But I want to know, are the more expensive wines actually truly better from the perspective of taste? And through the lens of, let's just say, a novice and an expert wine drinker, what's the deal? Yeah, yeah. So this, I think, is... really complicated in all kinds of interesting ways. And I think to begin with, it's true that people have done things like serve red wines.

expensive red wines alongside white wines that had been dyed red and asked people asked experts to to judge them and comment on them and the experts being fooled by the by the food coloring. So I think it's in large part, to begin with, a matter of what we're expecting to happen when we taste something. And if we have expectations, then those expectations are going to influence our perception. And there are a couple of wonderful books.

by a neurobiologist named Gordon Shepard on exactly these subjects. So it's a... a complicated loop. We have expectations, we taste something, the expectations play into what we think we experience and our conclusions from that experience. which is no knock on the lines. It's just the fact of our imperfect nature as sensory beings. Then when it comes to the wines themselves and the kind of variation that you find from different kinds of wine makers.

locations, weather, treatment during the winemaking process, all those different things. If you work at it, you can train yourself to notice minute differences, just as you can train yourself to notice minute differences in all kinds of other things that we care about. Art connoisseurship, for example, you know, is knowing something about the history of art and about the materials and that kind of thing. They all play into our judgment.

We're talking about when we're talking about whether a wine is better than another. It's a judgment. And I think the more you know about if you care to know. the more you know about a particular material, the better you're able to either appreciate it or depreciate it, depending. Wine is just fascinating material. I mean it's made every year. from all kinds of different grapes in all kinds of different parts of the world, by all kinds of different people. And they all...

taste kind of different depending on all those different factors. And if you're interested in those kinds of... distinctions. And if you get pleasure from taking a sip and saying, ah, yeah, that was a warm year in that vineyard and tastes a little riper than the other bottle that I have in my cellar. That's great. That means you're using your human capacities to the utmost. If you're just drinking to drink.

Not so much. So I think it depends on not only the product but the consumer. Like so many domains of life, it sounds like curiosity lends itself to a... deeper and better relationship with something. A guest on this podcast who himself was a comedian said exactly what you said. He said, which is only to say that you agree. that the more you learn about something, the way a movie was made or visual art or a song, the more you come to appreciate it, with one exception.

comedy you either think something's funny or not you can learn you can learn about the process that comedian went through you can learn about the context and if it's not funny to you it's not going to become funny. So it seems to be like one exception in the universe of experiences. But even though we weren't talking about food, I think he would totally agree with you on this point, which is a perfect segue for...

my next question which is about cheese when you walk into a cheese shop in say denmark or in northern europe do you like it or do you feel overwhelmed because For those who have, they know. It's intense. Yeah, it's one of my favorite things, actually. Something that I learned to like when our family lived in France for a year.

And I decided, you know, the French make a lot of cheese. I should learn something about that. And I went to a little... trailer at one of the farmer farmer's markets in the little village we were living in and in my broken french set i was

I would like to learn about cheese. I got like a 10-minute lecture on how Americans could never appreciate cheese properly. But then, okay, I'll... tutor you and so and i had a wonderful year-long Just every week, a session with this cheesemaker who was bringing—she herself did not make—

uh most of the cheeses she sold but she would sell what was proper seasonally for that um for that place Anyway, I learned a tremendous amount, fell in love with the diversity, starting with basically the same material, maybe two or three different animals. kinds of milks, but starting with the same bland material and ending up with this tremendous range of flavors is, I think, a tribute to human ingenuity to be able to come up with that kind of diversity.

How long has cheese been made and consumed by humans? Since apparently very early in the domestication of animals, maybe even... before animals were fully domesticated. So again, we're talking 7,000, 8,000 years. In the case of dairy products, that's pretty much in the Central Asian area. Can we talk about the chemistry of cheese and fermentation?

Sure. Yeah. First, a question about a specific cheese. If one looks online, which is always a dangerous thing to do, if you're in search of real information, you have to be very discerning. There's this idea that certain cheeses, in particular Parmesan cheeses, are so rich with the amino acid tyrosine that they create, because tyrosine is the amino acid precursor to dopamine.

that they create a mild high of sorts. Now, this, of course, could also be that people just really enjoy the taste or both. Yeah. But it makes sense at some level. What's known about the chemistry of cheeses and the experience of cheeses? Yeah. Well, so the thing that makes cheese much more interesting than milk... is the fact that microbes have been living in it and on it.

for weeks or months or years and slowly breaking down the proteins and the fats and generating these small molecules that we were talking about before that have flavor.

that give us the sensations of taste and smell. The longer that process goes on... for the most part the more of those breakdown products there are and the richer and more more varied the flavor is now you can sometimes get very strong flavored cheeses very quickly Camembert is an example of cheese like that where you, in the cheese making process, essentially encourage the changes to happen very rapidly.

But if you dial back on the process and let it take longer, you end up with a much more diverse array of molecules. And in the case of Parmesan and those crystals that you end up with in cheeses that are two, three years old, which are crunchy and kind of the sign of authenticity, you know, that this cheese is actually that old and it's worth paying double the price that you would pay for a young version.

Those are usually tyrosine or other amino acid derivatives that are... uh that have been broken off of the protein chains and then because the cheese has slowly been dehydrating they become insoluble and begin to crystallize out. And so that's why they're a sign of the process of aging and also the time of aging. The thing about it though, and for me the question mark, is that tyrosine was there already in the proteins. And so is...

having it crystallize out, somehow making it more immediately available to have an effect on us. You know, we don't have to digest the protein anymore now. It just, you know, pops right into us. the moment we put it in our mouths. Maybe that has something to do with the effect that people are reporting. When smoke flavors are added to cheese, is it through actual smoking process? Yes. If it's authentic? Yeah. If it's authentic, yeah, the cheeses have been kept in a room.

with something smoldering, and that was often in the old, old days and still to some extent these days, kind of like curing hams. Bugs are going to want to enjoy. that really rich, nutritious material. And so you have to ward them off and smoke is a good way to do it. Ah, that makes sense. So to keep bugs away, you fill the room with smoke and then you end up with food that tastes smoky. Yeah. And then you tell people that it tastes good.

I'm not a fan of smoke. I don't know why. Maybe it's because most smoky flavors seem to come from a kind of a... It tastes chemical to me. It doesn't taste like smoke. It tastes like smoke generated from... drywall mixed with some styrofoam. It's not like a nice organic, in the real sense of the word, natural flavor to me. It tastes chemical.

Yeah, yeah. No, I know exactly what you mean. And I also think that most smoked foods are over smoked. You know, that ends up being the only flavor that the food has. And instead of being a kind of in the background.

uh flavor so and what about in bourbons and things like that where people get really excited about a smoky bourbon is that um why would you do that because i can't imagine that the bugs we're going to get into well bugs like ferment right is that right yeah actually what a great way to attract bugs to your picnic is to have vinegar there they love yes the smell of vinegar yeah yeah so in the case of um

uh barrels for distilled beverages that's a uh as far as i can tell just a completely cultural thing you know that in order to make barrels you have to heat them in order to make the wood pliable. And probably someone in the process of making barrels discovered that if it burns out of control for a few seconds... that may be not such a bad thing 10 years down the line. So it's certainly not essential to the flavor of alcohols. And a lot of, for example,

Whiskies may be marketed as having been aged in used sherry casks. So you don't get the toasting that you get if you're making fresh perils. So I think it's a matter of taste and also just the skill with which that flavor has been incorporated into whatever the food or drink is. On the topic of fermentation.

Our colleague, I assume you mentioned a lot of our colleagues, but we've got a lot of spectacular colleagues at Stanford at Justin Sonnenberg. And to be fair, his wife, Erica, has also contributed critically to this work, have made discoveries essentially that consuming... Low-sugar fermented foods on a daily basis can lower inflammation, markers of inflammation. Even more so than...

increasing one's fiber intake, which is itself interesting. What have you learned about fermentation, chemistry, fermentation as a human practice? for health benefit sure for taste but just as a thing fermentation is a pretty pretty wild thing we would do this yeah yeah yeah well so i uh my sense is that it began um we were talking earlier about uh about alcohol began with just observation

You have fruits that are overripe and they're sitting on the forest floor and they sit long enough and they begin to smell different and look different and fizz and all kinds of things. And that's interesting. My sense is that fermentation has been discovered essentially by every population on the Earth, including the Arctic where you think it might—

take a while for things to go on. But in fact, products that are translated into English as stink fish are among the most prized of the foods in the Inuit. um regions of the of the pole how do they prepare this stink fish uh essentially by uh letting it sit So that's one of the appeals of fermentation is you don't have to do a whole lot. You just catch the food, whatever it is.

put it in a container of some kind. Some sting fish are made simply by digging a pit and burying it and covering it over. And then there's a connoisseurship of of these foods it's a lot of fun actually to go back and read the accounts of explorers to these regions. And the locals are trying to show the greatest hospitality by serving them foods that they can't bear even to get near.

uh salmon eggs another example highly prized uh but after they'd been fermented so this is caviar yeah yeah one of the most expensive foods on the planet exactly exactly and not just for um kind of for show reasons i mean the the omega-3 content of caviar is like off the charts and the um There are other micronutrients in caviar that make it – these are the sturgeon eggs typically, right? Yes. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Which – production of which almost disappeared.

20 years ago and now is booming because people are now farming these fish, the fish were endangered. They're now farming them all over the place and trying caviar from different species that had never been tried before. That's actually part of what I would say about fermentation these days as well is that once … The formerly isolated populations on the earth began communicating with each other and sharing expertise and sharing knowledge of these materials.

which has happened of course hugely in the last 20 years or so. Local, traditional ways of doing things have now not only spread to other parts of the world, but gotten people to ask the question, well, if you can do this kind of fermentation with this... raw material, what about doing it with a different raw material? So, you know, miso was traditionally made with soybeans. Now it's being made with peas in northern Europe and just on and on and on.

which I think is both tremendously difficult to keep up with, but also tremendously exciting because it means that we're now seeing how... traditional food materials can be transformed by the action of microbes that we've...

kind of know about, but only know about in very specific contexts. And so I think the next couple of decades are going to bring forth just all kinds of new foods that will be initially strange and maybe off-putting because they're new, but also they're going to be, you know, this era's... versions of miso and soy sauce and beer and wine and so on. So exciting times ahead. Yeah, we forget that we're still evolving.

You know, especially when we hear about all the problems of the world, we forget that we're still evolving and that some of the technologies around food and drink are not just creating less healthy versions, but as you pointed out, are creating new. New hybrids of information, new hybrids of actual foods. It's not all about returning to ancient ways. You know, the conversations like this of slowing down and one's intake of food and chewing and appreciating and thinking about.

preparation of food not just eating out of packages one hopes people i think if there's one thing that the vegans the vegetarians the omnivores and the carnivores all agree on is that eating fewer processed foods is better That's the one thing they all seem to agree on. Yeah. I have a question about you. Actually, I have several questions about you, which is what motivated this exploration into food and chemistry? I mean, you're...

Taking a very different approach to all of this, I should point out that your original training... at caltech was in astronomy then you shifted to another field and then you ended up in this field of food science slash chemistry um you know a lot about poetry so um

I don't think I've ever met anyone with that background. You are clearly an N of one, as we say. What got you into this whole thing? And more importantly, perhaps, what motivates you? Like, where's the... that the texture of interest yeah is it like to taste as many things as possible or is it to link levels of analysis what what is it

That last question is a really good one. I'll have to – I'll think about that as I answer the first parts. So I started out in love with science and with astronomy in particular and built a telescope. I still look up at Orion every time it's in the sky, and the skies are clear. Went to Caltech to do astronomy, decided after a couple of years there that... The physics was just not enough of a motivator for me to keep going. The physics at that point had gotten pretty...

hairy for me. And so I decided, you know, I still love to look at the stars, but maybe I'm not going to do astronomy. I then looked around for other things, and the people, I had always loved the humanities, poetry and novels in particular. I was going to transfer to Stanford, actually. My literature professors at Caltech, and there were a few, convinced me to stay. And they said, what you can do is you can stay with us, cherry-pick the science. because you don't have to take as much anymore.

And we'll get you a desk at the Huntington Library, the research library, and we'll give you tutorials, and we'll take care of you. And that's exactly what happened. It was fantastic. education that still included plenty of science but it was on my terms and not the discipline's terms. And then I went off to graduate school in literature. having been inspired by my teachers at Caltech, did a degree there on the poetry of John Keats and then couldn't get a job teaching.

And so my mentors back at Caltech and also in graduate school said, well, you know, you have the science in your background. You should do something with that. Long story short, conversations with friends over the dinner table and drinking wine and so on, a question came up, why is it that beans give you gas? And we all laughed. I laughed. And then I went to the library. And I found out why.

And I came back and told my friends and we had a good laugh. And then I thought maybe, I mean, people are interested in food. And this is kind of a fun fact about food that most people don't know. Maybe I can do this kind of thing.

So I began to look a little more into it and then in the meantime, a scout for one of the publishing houses in New York had … girlfriend who was in the same group and she reported to him he reported to the publisher publisher called up out of the blue and said we hear you're writing a book about the science of food

And so from that moment on, I was writing a book about the science of food. You said, yes, I am. Yes. Why do we get gas from beans? And is it true that soaking them in water prior to cooking them can remove some of that?

untoward effect. So it turns out that the answer was discovered by scientists working for NASA. And if you think about... NASA and their missions back in the 70s, you can understand why they would want to control something like this. So it turns out that beans contain, in addition to starch and sugars, kind of intermediate-sized

carbohydrates that our bodies do not have the enzymes to break down into sugars. So we can take care of starch, but not these intermediate size molecules. And so they pass into our gut. and then we have plenty of microbes who are happy to see those and digest them and in the process they produce CO2 and hydrogen gas. That's what we end up experiencing. So the way to deal with that is to soaking the beans.

will work that leaches out some of these molecules which are small and so soluble in water. Even more effective is to actually bring that water after it's been soaking to a boil, and then pour that water off. That will get rid of more. But the other point I would make about these so-called oligosaccharides is these days we value... the life in our lower tract. And these are the creatures that those molecules are in fact feeding. And it has been shown that you can...

You can – or your system can kind of adapt. So yeah, the first few times you have – beans or lentils or whatever it might be, you may have some discomfort. But the more frequently you eat it, the better you're able to... tolerate it or your system is able to tolerate it without generating the discomfort. It seems to be a repeating theme, which is that the more we eat certain foods, the more our...

gut microbiome adapts to those foods. I think that we're just at the beginning of understanding the gut microbiome, but it's such a key player. So do you make it a point to eat fermented foods?

Given what you know about the microbiome, what are your favorite fermented foods or drinks? Yeah. I have learned to like kimchi. So that was not initially a food that I sought out but I've really come to like it. You know, that may really be the only... unusual fermented food that I seek out. I mean, I love fruits and vegetables and legumes and eat lots of those and kind of figure that, you know.

And things will take care of themselves down there for the most part. But kimchi is something I've come to love. Yeah, I haven't quite gotten to the kimchi thing. I think it's because a few years ago I brought it into my lab when I was in San Diego and my entire lab. I've complained except one person, my Korean student who absolutely loved it. So I think some of these things are acquired.

Early in life. And that's a question I was going to ask earlier. Do you think that when young kids in particular, like don't want broccoli or they don't want certain foods that it's reflecting an actual real. a version that's based on something important about their chemistry. Yeah, yeah. So my, again, I don't think the literature is clear, but my sense based on having had a couple of kids go through this and just thinking it through.

I think what's going on is that kids have a heightened sense of taste and smell. And very early in development, they're... um omnivorous though they're they'll put anything in their mouths then at a certain point they become much more conservative and um and i think also much more sensitive to nuances, you know, the sulfurousness of broccoli and that kind of thing. But I think it's also both temporary and you can work with it. So in the case of our kids...

We just made our regular dinners every day. And we would say to our kids, you're welcome to eat as much or as little of what we have as you want, but this is what we have. And there was one food that neither my son nor daughter could tolerate. And we ended up just deciding, OK, that's literally off the table. You don't have to worry about this one. And it was amaranth leaves. Whoa.

which I was growing in the garden because, you know, I'm trying to learn about everything, and they're interesting. But they have a very particular texture, and it was the texture that they just... you know it made them gag and i didn't want to put them through that so fair so it wasn't just saying i don't like this it was they were trying if nothing else one can still thrive

in life without having eaten amaranth leaves. Is it true that some people like and some people loathe cilantro because they taste different things in the cilantro?

Like the experience of cilantro is fundamentally different for some people than others. I like it. My father, he hates it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So cilantro is a really interesting case and the subject of a series of studies at the Monell Chemical Census Center. They were – they, in addition to all kinds of other things, would go to local county fairs and ask people – ask first of all for twins.

If they saw twins on the grounds, they would bring them over to the booth and ask them both to taste cilantro and say what they thought. Bottom line is... Cilantro has molecules that kind of, I was going to say cross-react. That's not exactly it. They're also found in soaps. And so for a lot of people, depending on whether they've been acculturated to cilantro early in their lives or not,

If they're only encountering it as an adult, the first thing they're going to think is, that tastes like soap. I don't want to put that in my mouth. You're in company where it's important to go along with the gang. So there's a good basis. for this kind of divergent set of reactions, but it has more to do with the cultural appearance of those same flavor molecules than with the material itself. I see.

So for those of you that don't like cilantro, you can cite this discussion. I have a colleague at Harvard, Catherine Duloc, who studies the olfactory system. You're probably familiar with Catherine's work. And she's French, as the last name suggests. And she would tell this story about different students and postdocs in her lab who come from a variety of different countries. being split down the middle in terms of their experience of microwave popcorn that some people in her lab like

love the smell of microwave popcorn, but then there's a separate population of people in her lab that experienced the smell of microwave popcorn as exactly the same as pungent vomit. And she claims it's on the basis of a... variant in one of these olfactory receptors, which also speaks to the relationship between smell and taste.

You know, like nobody wants to eat something that smells putrid. Yeah, yeah. Generally, one would hope. What are some other examples of foods where people tend to diverge on the basis of something known to be or almost certainly biological as opposed to just... I wasn't raised eating that or that seems weird. So one thing that comes to mind that isn't quite that is Parmesan cheese, which –

has as one of its primary flavor components butyric acid, which is also the main thing that makes vomit smell like vomit. And some people just can't eat. Parmesan cheese for that reason. Others don't notice it. Others kind of notice it, but it's okay. It's part of being Parmesan cheese. So a lot depends on... Not only the sort of the individual apparatus experiencing a food, but then also what's kind of normal for that food to contain. And because...

Cow's milk is especially rich in butyric acid as one of the components of the fats. That's what you get when the breakdown takes place. I like the example of Parmesan cheese. More for me. Yes. More for me. My last question is not in the domain of food or chemistry, but it's about poetry.

This is a science health podcast, but you're here and you have the expertise. So I'm going to ask you, I love poetry. What is something that you learned about Keats that most people don't know? at least to you particularly interesting and then i'll ask you to suggest uh a key starter pack

Maybe name one Keats poem that everyone should go read. We'll put a link to it. But first question is, you spent a considerable amount of time researching Keats and learning about him and his work. So what's something that...

We're not going to learn elsewhere. Yeah, yeah. I think one of the most important things about his development and the reason that he wrote the kind of poetry he did, which was often... concerned with death eventually, ultimately, is that he started out life as a medical student. He was a medical student at Guy's Hospital in London, which still exists and has a long, amazing history.

He was a medical student. He had a mother and a brother who both died of TB, and he attended them in their illnesses. And so to know that and then to read a poem like To Autumn, which is the poem that I would suggest people read. I think just adds a dimension of appreciation. to that poem, because there's nothing about death in the poem. It's just a description of a natural scene in the autumn, but those experiences are there.

And knowing that and reading not only that poem, but many others. I'm sure it was, well, I think he wrote poetry both to... comfort people and to kind of work through what it is that life is all about that he needs to come to terms with in order to have lived that life. Thank you for that. We will go read to Autumn and we'll look for those experiences inside of that.

A couple of things I want to say. First of all, thank you so much for coming here and sharing your knowledge with us. I'm certain that it's going to change the way that people experience food. and drink, and if nothing else, we'll get them chewing their food and pausing between bites here and there to get deeper into the experience of food. It's also nice, in fact, it's very refreshing to...

be able to talk about food on this podcast, not within the context of just fueling the body and health benefits. Those are critically important, but obviously food has cultural aspects and it has... taste aspects and is one of the great sources of pleasure in life. So you've taught us how to get more pleasure from food and also its links to history and human evolution. I mean, there's so much there and we'll put links to your books that explore.

chemistry of food and other aspects. I also just, I want to thank you because whether you intended to or not, you're a wonderful example of how somebody follows their interests and blends them. how talking about your interests with people can help you get opportunities to get paid to do what you do. You know, people often wonder, you know, how do I take my varied interests and put them into something and they'll try and...

like thread the needle from this to that. And I'm not going to make up a story here, but what I gathered was...

that just by being you and being open-minded and answering questions when people ask, that you've been able to braid together your interests in a way that's allowed you to have a very unique career that's very impactful. Your books have been read by... so many people and this conversation will be heard by so many people so thank you for that it's a reminder to just be oneself and things generally work out and that you're continuing to do the the great work that you're doing so

Once again, thanks for taking the time to come down here and talk to us. I'm going to try some new foods. I think I'm going to do this tea thing. I need some greenery in my place. And I think I'm going to do that. So I have questions for you about that. And yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate the work you're doing. Well, thank you very much, Andrew. If I can just say a word about how rare it is to talk with people who are broadly interested in...

Sort of the details of life, but also the meaning of life and, you know, what's possible and what's not. That makes me especially happy to be here. And I was just going to say that... I looked at this book about food as being, you know, a one-off and then I would write about gardening or, you know, something else. And I just got... captured by the subject you know there's it's hard to think of something that's more central to you know just sustaining human life but also getting pleasure from it

And so I went down the rabbit hole and I'm still down there. We're grateful you are. So thank you. And thanks for putting the knowledge you collect in that rabbit hole out into the world. Thank you.

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