Photo: Matthew Musgove/flickr.com

“You are what you eat!” How true is this saying? The choices we make on food affect not just our waistline and health, but also our brain, behaviour, mood and susceptibility to mental disease. Studies are showing that people who eat a healthy diet (lots of fresh, unprocessed and nutrient-dense foods) are more likely to have better mental health compared to those that have a diet high in sugar and fat. Diets high in refined sugars are harmful to the brain as they promote inflammation and oxidative stress. A healthy diet helps protect our brain from depression and dementia, yet despite this knowledge it is still very hard to change eating habits. Neurogastronomy is a new field in neuroscience focused on unravelling why we eat what we eat. It links neuroscience to gastronomy.

Flavour is an intense research area. It affects our brains and behaviour. Flavour is created in our brains and not by the food we eat. The food just triggers our brain to taste that delicious creamy ice cream or sour lemon. Understanding how our brain tastes could allow us to change our biologically ingrained preference for sweet instead of bitter tastes.

Take the example of steak. When biting into it some of its molecules bind to taste receptors on the tongue, which give the basic sensations of sweet, salty, sour, bitter or savoury umami.

Other more volatile odour molecules travel up the back of your mouth into your nose, giving that smoky flavour. This smell signal combines with taste signals triggered in a brain region to give steak its complete taste.

Our brain still works in the same way as that of our ancestors; sweet food implies energy and calories, while bitter food (like vegetables) are a warning sign of potentially poisonous plants. Modern lifestyles do not need the huge intake of calories now easily accessible to us.

These inborn taste inclinations can be rewired. With age, high salt and sugar preferences decrease, plus people can decrease their desire for salty and fatty food by eating less of it over a long period. Shifting sweet preferences to bitter is trickier, but current research is trying to do just that.

Neurogastronomy may finally provide a nutritional intervention that works. One day we might crave broccoli more than Nutella!

To know more, come take part in the special Malta Café Scientifique talk by eminent neuroscientist Fiorenzo Conti tomorrow at 6.30pm, launching the second Malta Brain Awareness Week (MBAW) at the Italian Institute of Culture, St George’s Square, Valletta. For more MBAW events, follow @BAW2017 on Facebook. MBAW is organised by Malta Neuroscience Network Programme (University of Malta) between tomorrow and March 19.

Did you know!

• Hot or spicy are not a taste; they are just pain signals sent by nerves.

• Your brain cannot feel pain because it lacks the receptors. Headaches are thought to be due to pain receptors in your head and neck.

• The Eiffel Tower can grow up to 15cm taller in the summer (as the metal expands due to heat).

• After his death in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was preserved and today can be visited in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.

• In their lifetime the average person walks the equivalent of five times round the earth’s equator (approx. 110,000 miles in 216,262,500 steps).

For more trivia see: www.um.edu.mt/think

Sound bites

• The data storage capacity of DNA and its four base nucleotides has been exploited to store a computer operating system and a short movie. The pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Centre also demonstrated the ultra-compacted storage medium could be copied virtually infinitely using common and easy techniques in molecular biology.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170302143947.htm

• A national analysis led by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists showed that feelings of social isolation in young adults increased with both the frequency and the amount of time they spend using social media.

www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/uops-msc022817.php

• The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) scheduled to launch in October 2018 will be able to search for signs of life on the newly discovered TRAPPIST-1 system. As the most powerful space telescope ever built, JWST will be able to analyse the atmospheres of all seven planets in the system for the tell-tale signs of living organisms.

www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/nsfc-psw030217.php

• In Quebec, Canada, an international team led by UCL researchers has discovered the remains of micro-organisms at least 3,770 million years old. Finding these tiny filaments and tubes formed by bacteria provides direct evidence of the oldest living life forms on the planet and “supports the idea that life emerged from hot, seafloor vents shortly after planet Earth formed”.

www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/ucl-wof022817.php

• For more soundbites, listen to Radio Mocha on Radju Malta 2 every Monday at 1pm, Friday at 6pm www.facebook.com/RadioMochaMalta/