High Noise Levels Suppress Sweet-craving, Enhance Umami-craving

[lvysaur]

Restaurants have grown irritatingly loud. What has that done to our taste?

The hypothesis was confirmed the following year by a pair of researchers at Cornell, who found that just playing the sound of cabin airplane noises suppressed sweetness while enhancing the flavor of umami

Umami is the taste of glutamate, most famously found in soy sauce and MSG, but also in much lower concentrations in meat and cheese.

First thing I thought of while reading this was locust behavior, where solitary (aka non-noisy) conditions produces a green locust, while social conditions produce a color-morphed aggressive one.

The other thing I thought of was the difference between East Asian cuisines and other ones. East Asians seem to have extremely glutamate-centric tastes (soy sauce, MSG, kombu, to name a few) and very sucrose-averse tastes (IIRC the oreos made for Asia are lower in sugar, and East Asian desserts are basically completely ignored in the west). This is the exact opposite of every other culture, where the desserts are far sweeter, and the entrees have less umami.

 

[LuMonty]

This explains my recent issue consuming sugar. I have an old window AC unit and it's loud as can be (the crappy electrical work doesn't help). In fact, the wife and I were out and about and I had no issue sipping on my Dr Pepper. Now it doesn't seem as appealing.