Unveiling health attitudes and creating good-for-you foods: the genomics metaphor, consumer innovative web-based technologies.

This article presents an integrated analysis of three emerging knowledge bases in the nutrition and consumer products industries, and how they may effect the food industry. These knowledge bases produce new vistas for corporate product development, especially with respect to those foods that are positioned as 'good for you.' Couched within the current thinking of state-of-the-art knowledge and information, this article highlights how today's thinking about accelerated product development can be introduced into the food and health industries to complement these three research areas. The 3 knowledge bases are: the genomics revolution, which has opened new insights into understanding the interactions of personal needs of individual consumers with nutritionally relevant components of the foods; the investigation of food choice by scientific studies; the development of large scale databases (mega-studies) about the consumer mind. These knowledge bases, combined with new methods to understand the consumer through research, make possible a more focused development. The confluence of trends outlined in this article provides the corporation with the beginnings of a new path to a knowledge-based, principles-grounded product-development system. The approaches hold the potential to create foods based upon people's nutritional requirements combined with their individual preferences. Integrating these emerging knowledge areas with new consumer research techniques may well reshape how the food industry develops new products to satisfy consumer needs and wants.

Sensory characteristics of foods: new evaluation techniques.

New product development requires the integration of sensory attributes including product taste, texture, and appearance with consumer attitudes and health biases. Both sensory and attitudinal variables determine food preferences, product purchase and food consumption. This review paper describes novel mathematical procedures that allow for study of real foods rather than model systems. Application of the Response Surface Method (RSM) to sensory evaluation of salted snacks is described.

Taste and olfaction in human obesity.

Earlier studies have shown differences between normal weight and obese humans in responsivity to external and internal stimuli. This study shows that normal weight and obese subjects do not differ in hedonic response to sucrose (taste) and benzaldehyde (odor). However, a perceptual typing of individuals based upon hedonic response is possible for both gustatory and olfactory processes. Ratings of pleasantness for the sweet taste of sucrose appear to generalize to the food-related odor of bitter almonds. The method of magnitude estimation as applied to the study of taste and olfaction in man may reveal relationship between changes in internal state and hedonic behavior.

Profiling of odor components and their mixtures.

Observers evaluated five odors and their 26 mixtures (two, three, four, and five components) by magnitude estimation. Estimates revealed that in mixtures there is moderate suppression of perceived intensity; a vector model proposed by Berglund (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1974, 237, 35-51) provides a good prediction of the intensity of binary mixtures, but overpredicts the intensity of three, four, and five component mixtures. Hedonic tones of mixtures were difficult to predict from hedonic tones of components. Qualities of mixtures were difficult to predict from quality of components. Intermediacy, of quality and hedonic values, was often observed.

Psychophysical and psychometric approaches to sensory evaluation.

Sensory evaluation has recently utilized the methods developed by psychophysicists and psychometricians, who week to represent data in terms of various scales and mathematical formulations. This review covers the development of ratio scaling to develop relations between sensory and instrumental measures of food, the use of multivariate psychophysical procedures which relate a variety of physical variables to a single sensory response, and the use of multidimensional scaling to relate different sensory percepts to each other. Each of these approaches is nascent in applications to sensory evaluation, although the mathematics and formulations are very developed. Each approach gives the experimenter insights into subjective and objective correlations and the manner in which the panelist perceives relations among stimuli. The treatment of the reported literature for each approach follows the same course: necessary conditions for its application to sensory evaluation, experiences with model systems and real foods, and potential uses and limitations in sensory evaluation.

Effects of body weight and food intake on pleasantness ratings for a sweet stimulus.

A physiological role for pleasure has been suggested from observations that glucose loads reduced pleasantness ratings for sweet stimuli in normal weight but not in weight-reduced subjects. This hypothesis was reexamined in fasting and food-loaded, lean and obese subjects. Magnitude estimates of sweetness and pleasantness were obtained for seven sucrose concentrations. Indices of obesity including percent overweight, percent body fat, and body mass index were calculated. Pleasantness ratings of fasting subjects either increased up to a moderate concentration and then declined (type I hedonic response) or increased monotonically with concentration (type II hedonic response). Both types of response were found in lean and obese subjects. Within each weight group there appeared a negative correlation between pleasantness response and indices of obesity. Caloric loads reduced hedonic ratings of type II lean and obese subjects, but did not affect pleasantness response of type I lean and obese subjects. These findings indicate the presence of an hedonic monitor biased by body weight and caloric intake. The data suggest a physiological role for pleasure in regulating body weight at different set points in lean and obese subjects.

Sugar sweetness and pleasantness: evidence for different psychological laws.

Sweetness and the pleasantness of sweetness of sucrose solutions and sweetened food conform to different functions. Sweetness rises with concentration, whereas pleasantness first rises and then decreases. The breakpoint appears to occur at a constant sweetness (that is, constant sensory) level.