Most replayed moment: Why appreciating flavour could stop you overeating | Spencer Hyman & Professor Tim Spector

Why is it so hard to stop eating certain foods? Most of us assume it comes down to willpower. But according to today’s guests, the answer may actually lie in the difference between taste and flavour. Because while those two words sound interchangeable, they describe very different experiences. Taste is often engineered - carefully designed by big food companies to keep us craving more. Flavour, on the other hand, is something deeper. It’s the rich, complex experience that comes from high-quality produce. Today, Spencer Hyman and Professor Tim Spector explain how ultra-processed foods manipulate our brains and why rediscovering flavour could help us eat less without feeling deprived. They’ll reveal practical ways that you can retrain your palate and reconnect with real food. 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30 🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks Better Breakfast Guide Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Why is it so hard to stop eating certain foods? Most of us assume it comes down to willpower. But according to today's guess, the answer may actually lie in the difference between taste and flavour. Because while those two words sound the same, they describe very different experiences. Taste is often engineered, carefully designed by big food companies to keep us craving more. Flavour, on the other hand, is something deeper. It's the rich, complex experience that comes from high quality produce. Today, Spencer Hyman and Professor Tim Spector explain how ultra-processed foods manipulate our brains and why rediscovering flavour could help us to eat less without feeling deprived.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  They'll reveal practical ways that you can retrain your palate and reconnect with real food.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  The first food we all encounter is breast milk. And that's sweet. The sugars in there, lactose, is something that all humans have to like and have to seek out, otherwise they would die. So that's, I think, something that stays with us the rest of our life, really. This life-giving food that we all need, so we're driven for it. And we have various sweet receptors, not just in our mouth, but in other bits of our intestine as well, which, which drive us for that. And we know that fats are also really crucial for our survival as well. We do need fats to get our brains to work and other essential parts of our bodies. Salt is the other one. If we're salt deprived, then really our body doesn't work well either.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  So these are all hardwired, really from birth. But this is manipulated by the food industry to take it to excess, where we didn't actually need it, that much excess of it. We just wanted needed enough to, to survive.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  And Spencer, how have food manufacturers sort of capitalized on this, like innate desires that Tim was talking about for these properties?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  So I think there's a, there's a wonderful history here, which goes by the name of the bliss point, which is that back in the 1960s, a food scientist called Howard Moskowitz articulated this concept, which Tim has just been explaining about, if you combine sugar, salt and fat in optimum amounts for different foods, people just don't know how to stop wolfing the food down without any thought. And that is generally taken as being the start of the junk food epidemic. But actually, ironically, you can really argue that 100 years earlier, in the world of chocolate, this was discovered when Daniel Peter and Nestle worked out how to make milk chocolate, because that is the ultimate bliss point food.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  So big food really uses a number of tricks based around our tastes as opposed to our flavours. One of them is this bliss point, the one that Tim was just talking about, sugar, salt and fat. The other is this wonderfully named sensory-specific satiety, which talks about different textures. And again, it's all designed to help us identify different foods because we need a variety of foods to survive. So if you get different textures as well as sugar, salt and fat, it really becomes pretty much game over.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Did the first chocolate have salt in it as well, do you know?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  It did have a little bit because it was made, the very, very first milk chocolates were made with condensed milk, as opposed to making with just straight milk powder. But now a lot of chocolates, milk chocolates have a tiny bit of salt added to them, just to sort of give it that twist. And lots of texture in mass market chocolate too, to try and sort of get you just to keep on wolfing it down as fast as you can.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  So Spencer, could you help us understand a bit more about how those products encourage us to eat them so quickly? Because I think about it as like, I want that because it's high in fat and sugar. But it's not clear to me why that would mean I would want to eat it faster or eat more of it.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  So there's one other dimension which they add to, which is they make it hyper palatable. So you don't really notice the calories. So if you take lots of junk crisps, when you put them in their mouth, they almost immediately dissolve. So you haven't got anything of that. And that's one of the problems with sodas too. But basically, humans are programmed to love sugar, salt, fat, because that's what we needed energy wise. We're also programmed to like diversity, sensory-specific satiety. And food companies, I don't think they've done this maliciously, but they've noticed that if you want to get people to eat more, that's one way of doing it. The other advantage for food companies is it lends into the other aspects of food production, like commoditisation, and also like the manufacturing.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  So it's much cheaper for them to actually make foods where they just can add stuff like sugar, salt and fat and a bit of texture, rather than taking wonderful fruits or vegetables or cocoa and crafting that carefully so that you bring out the flavours which are very different to tastes.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Spencer, could you explain a little bit more about what this bliss point is?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, the bliss point appeals to your taste senses. So humans, as Tim was explaining, from birth, the first food we have is mother's milk, which has got sugar, a little bit of fat, a little bit of salt in it too. We are programmed to seek out foods which are high in those areas. If you design foods which have got that in them, and chocolate is arguably the first, you can argue it's biscuits, but it's probably chocolate. Plus, they have a texture which literally melts in the mouth. Again, think of chocolate, hyper palatability. Plus then you can add different bits and pieces. You basically create this environment where people just want to wolf it down because they want more and more of that sensation. Humans really should eat much more slowly because that brings out the flavour.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And that also, as Tim will explain, helps you get the nutrients out of it. But you can basically play off our innate tastes, the things that we detect with our tongue, our esophagus and our upper intestine, to get people to basically just wolf food down as if there's no tomorrow.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  I would say the bliss point is this precise chemical formula that food companies have come up with, that is the exact proportions of the fat, the sugar and the salt that create in the mind the ability to overcome your normal fullness signals and overeat. That's basically what the industry has done and how they've taken something that sounds really cool, nice, oh bliss, perfect, and actually created a monster that artificially they can tweak the food so that you eat much more than your body really wants it to. That's how I view this, whereas Spencer's often looking at it from a nice taste and, you know, the other way of bliss, really tasty.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  I'm looking at it from a health point of view and it's overriding our normal fullness signals. That's what the companies are doing all the time with these foods.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  And Tim, when I hear that, it immediately makes me think about all of these GLP-1s, like the Ozempics and Wegovy and everything, which are treating us because we're constantly hungry, like we're not able to feel full in the way that obviously our ancestors were. Is that related in any way to food manufacturers and this bliss point food?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're working in opposite directions. And actually, the consumer is stuck between, you know, the Ozempic-like drugs and the food companies. And, you know, one are making us fat and the other are giving us a drug to stop us being fat. And the mechanism is the same. They are really, both of them focusing on these hunger signals. So the foods we eat are overriding the hunger signals and the drugs we're taking are actually blocking that so that we do feel full much earlier than we would be otherwise. So it's really two sides of the same coin, really. And this is why all the research is pointing towards appetite and satiety as being the crucial factor in, in weight gain and health.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  If you feel like you're drawn to wanting to wolf down another piece, rather than enjoying it, letting it slowly savour and melt and just talk about it, the odds are that they're just playing with taste. So sugar, salt, fat, maybe a bit of umami in there too. What they're not doing is trying to get you just to savour the wave of flavours that you will be getting from any great fruit, any great chocolate, any great olive oil. And it's this taking your time to step back too. And it has sort of two benefits, one of which is, as you eat more slowly, as Tim will explain, that is healthier for you. But also it is nature's way of telling you that this food is still packed full of macronutrients, micronutrients, phytonutrients, because that's what gives you the flavour.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  So the more flavour you have, the more likelihood it is that it's also going to be good for you. It's definitely true for tea, which I have here. It's definitely true for wine. It's definitely true for coffee. It's definitely true for olive oil. I think what's interesting about all those examples though, is that they're all what I would call sort of complex flavours. Because the same is also true when you pick a great strawberry or a great tomato. You can all tell the difference, something from an allotment and something which is, you know, the cheapest you can get in a supermarket. So if you want a sort of trick, look for something called Blich, balance, length, intensity, complexity and depth. If you have something which takes you on a wave, the odds are that that food,

• 9:11Speaker 02

  whether it be processed or even if it just be a natural one, actually is going to be much healthier for you. And it runs across everything from your sandwiches to your burgers, to your apples, anything.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  So if I had like a bun that was actually somehow made, you know, at home and a burger that I had cooked myself with condiments versus, you know, going to like a McDonald's or a Burger King, can I tell a difference in flavour there?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yes, I think you can. Just, just basically look for complexity. There are two ways I think you can learn to eat mindfully. One is by learning to cook and the other is by learning to eat mindfully itself. Any food, if you can learn the difference between taste, sugar, salt, fat, bitter, and those, that immediate hit, and then the flavour wave, you are on your way to being able to eat more mindfully and more healthily.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  And the burger bun is a great example because what they do is they add a lot of sugar and salt to it. Nothing else, there's no flavours in it at all. And it's designed to be eaten super fast, so it just goes straight into you. And you're ready for the next one, which you wouldn't get if you made the bread yourself or you've got a really good loaf.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  And so if I go back to the sort of the bliss point, highly processed food that we were talking about at the beginning, am I similarly going to see a difference in the flavour between, I don't know, eating an apple, which often has a lot of sugar in it, and crisps, chips or, or whatever? Am I going to be able to tell a difference with this flavour tool that you've just been teaching us, Spencer?

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yes, if you look for Blich, you will definitely, I mean, Tim, I think said this and, and wrote about this in, in one of the earlier books, is that- To develop flavour, you need time. And so if you take a, you know, an apple from somebody's, you know, garden, it will not just be less sweet, it will have much more length of flavour than a supermarket, one which has been shipped halfway across the world and bred just to be consistent and to be sweet and not necessarily have complexity of flavour. And, and you, you can definitely learn with any food to basically appreciate flavour.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  So it sounds like we've somehow been educated by all of these fast food manufacturers and big food companies to really focus on what you're calling taste, this thing that I get in the first few seconds, which is like sweet and salt, rather than to focus on flavour, because that's really expensive and hard to put into your food. But taste is really easy. You don't even need to use your nose for it. And so it's sort of cheap and also drives this sort of overeating.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  And exactly that, but it's also, if you think about what's happened in the food world today, we've commoditized food, we've then learned how to grow it more efficiently with fertilizers and pesticides. And then we've figured out how to process it more effectively. And then we figured out how to put some marketing sizzle. The easy way to get you to wolf it down, gobble it down as fast as you can, is by using sugar, salt and fat. And they're very, very cheap, very, very simple additives. It's not accidental that, you know, over 50% of most chocolate bars sold in the UK, the primary ingredient is sugar, because sugar is extremely cheap, much cheaper than cocaine.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  And it's subsidized by the taxpayer.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Which is ridiculous.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  And it becomes addictive. What big food wants to do is to grow food as cheaply as it possibly can, commoditizing it as fast as it possibly can, and then process it as cheaply as it can and make us eat as much of it as they can. And they do that through the bliss point, sensory specific satiety, hyper palatability. And the defence to it, in addition to taking pictures of your food, is to also learn to talk about food and learn the language of flavour.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  If someone's been listening to this and they want to start savoring their food today and start this journey of understanding what flavour is, could you suggest three things that they could do to start this journey?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  I think the first thing is, as you sort of suggested, is to go to your fridge, go to your herb garden, try the holding your nose trick, just to appreciate the difference between taste and flavour. I think the second one would be to download something like the flavour wave, which we've developed, this tool by which it just takes you through step one, think about taste and texture, step two, think about the flavours, step three, did you get blick and did you enjoy? So just get a framework and, you know, there are apps which will do this too. And then thirdly, pick something that you really enjoy, whether it be olive oil, whether it be wine, whether it be tea, whether it be coffee, hopefully it'll be craft chocolate.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Either go to one of the tastings or just at home, get three or four of the bars and just basically taste them with other people and discuss them using this framework. So I think make it social, make it mindful.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and compare with a cheap, uh, highly processed version as well, that you might have been eating as well, to say you can, you can see the difference.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Taste the difference.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  To coin a phrase.

• 14:02Speaker 00

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• 14:44Speaker 00

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