Hot MedFax

I suppose it shouldn't surprise us.  But a new survey has found that we tend to think the food's better when we pay more for it at a restaurant. The study suggests taste perception, as well as feelings of overeating and guilt, can be manipulated by price alone, according to newswise.com. “We were fascinated to find that pricing has little impact on how much one eats, but a huge impact on how you interpret the experience,” the Web site quotes Brian Wansink, Ph.D., a professor at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University who oversaw the research. “Simply cutting the price of food at a restaurant dramatically affects how customers evaluate and appreciate the food.” The study showed that customers who pay more at a restaurant buffet perceive the food as tastier than the same food offered at a lower price. Those in the study who paid $8 for a buffet reported enjoying their food on average 11 percent more than those who paid $4, though the t...

Here's the thing.  Food just tastes better to obese people. Or, putting it a different way: obese people need more sweets to be satisfied.  Which, obviously, make them eat more, right? According to a new study , "Obesity may alter the way we taste at the most fundamental level: by changing how our tongues react to different foods." Research has found that being severely overweight impaired the ability of mice to detect sweets, newswise.com reports. "Compared with slimmer counterparts, the plump mice had fewer taste cells that responded to sweet stimuli. What’s more, the cells that did respond to sweetness reacted relatively weakly." ". . .no one had ever looked at the cells on the tongue that make contact with food,” the Web site quotes lead scientist Kathryn Medler, PhD, UB associate professor of biological sciences. “What we see is that even at this level — at the first step in the taste pathway — the taste receptor cells themselves are affected b...

"The Doctors," that smug-Dr.-Phil show, was on in the background this morning and one of their segments caught my eye. Some woman asked if she plugged her nose while she was eating, would she eat less.  In other words, does your sense of smell affect how much you eat? They did a cute little demo of blindfolding her and clipping her nose, then fed her bits of food and tried to get her to identify them.  She only guessed potato right, but even with her sense of smell cut off, she still knew when the taste was a muffin.   "That's go-ooo-od," she said. So, here's the deal.  Our sense of smell is very important to our eating habits, but probably not in the way you think.  A friend recently lost his sense of smell from using too much nasal spray and now he eats everything he can get his hands on, hoping desperately to get a taste of some thing. But those of us who have noses who work can be thankful that they allow us to savor our food, to pick out the swe...