Chemical Flavors In Food Make You Fat

What is really driving "the obesity epidemic" today? It's the new artificial flavors and chemicals that we lace our food with, according to mensjournal.

Take tomatoes and chicken. While they look good, their nutritional levels have come down, and they don't taste as good as they did either. Even chicken was rare once, but now, though it's available everywhere, it tastes like cardboard. With synthetic flavour technology, we can be fooled into eating them.

It was in the 1950s that humans created the first flavor technology, adding it to tortilla chips or Doritos, to make them taste like tacos. Adding flavor to potato chips and soft drinks, with some "natural flavour' label makes you reach for it.

The worry is that natural as well as artificial flavoring are chemically identical. For instance, 15 diverse chemical compounds can be taken as "natural" sources , including tree bark, yeast, lawn clippings---which can all be brought together to create a strawberry flavor---without the healthy nutrients that go to make the fruit.

Hence, the chemical flavours have led to the obesity paradox in the modern age. Though carbohydrates and fat have always been part of our food, we did not gain fat so much in the 1960s, before we took to artificial flavours.

"We do not disagree with the commonly held assumption that over-eating is a central cause of obesity and metabolic syndrome," said another study researcher, Andrew Gewirtz, from the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at the Georgia State University in Atlanta, according to techtimes. "Rather, our findings reinforce the concept suggested by earlier work that low-grade inflammation resulting from an altered microbiota can be an underlying cause of excess eating."