How the way we chew food is uniquely human<\/h3>\n
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Eat, drink, but be wary \u2014 4 foods that interact with medications<\/h3>\n
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Misophonia: When a crunch, chew, or a sniffle triggers hot rage<\/h3>\n
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Deep dive into diets shows just how much processed food Americans eat<\/h3>\n
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It isn\u2019t your everyday scientific conference. It\u2019s the kind of conference where invited neuroscientists and neurologists experience the flavor wheel of bourbon, sampling Woodford Reserve along with hazelnuts and then orange flesh to see how the liquor migrates into different parts of the palate. The kind of conference where a panel discussion on the science of taste includes a hip New York chef telling a roomful of dietitians that those with binge eating problems should \u201chave sex! It will take your mind away from food.\u201d The kind of conference where attendees suck lollipops designed to evoke the 1812 Overture.<\/p>\n
You know, that kind of conference.<\/p>\n
But behind the foodie fun is hard science and a real clinical conundrum. Killing cancer cells means killing healthy cells along with them. The poisons of chemo<\/a> and the waves of radiation<\/a> are especially good at taking apart the DNA of fast-dividing cells. That can help stop the out-of-control expansion of tumors. But the nerve cells in the nose and mouth replenish themselves quickly, and so they die, too.<\/p>\n
Read more:<\/em> How the way we chew food is uniquely human<\/a><\/p>\n The resulting changes in taste and smell might seem like a small price to pay for a lifesaving treatment. Yet one\u2019s desire to get up in the morning can be intimately connected to one\u2019s ability to enjoy food. Lose your ability to taste properly and your mental and physical health \u2014 which, for cancer patients, is already fragile \u2014 can suffer<\/a> even more.<\/p>\n \u201cMany people stop eating,\u201d said Gary Beauchamp, a sensory perception researcher at the nonprofit Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. \u201cIt is a potentially lethal effect.\u201d<\/p>\n The loss of taste and smell is among the most common<\/a> complaints of cancer patients. But those don\u2019t necessarily bounce back even if you\u2019re lucky enough to transition from patient to survivor.<\/p>\n \u201cThe hope is that some of those taste abilities will come back. We\u2019re all different. Some regain it very quickly; others \u2014 like myself \u2014 might not at all,\u201d said Barry Warner, a 59-year old who was treated for throat cancer seven years ago, and one of the cook-off\u2019s taste-testers. \u201cThe bottom line is, if after a period of time, it doesn\u2019t come back, it\u2019s something you\u2019ll have to adapt to. There isn\u2019t going to be anything the same as it was.\u201d<\/p>\n Most doctors hardly ask about this side effect, and when they do, they don\u2019t have much to offer besides apologies and explanations. Their focus is keeping you alive.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have no resources to help you deal with the taste aspect,\u201d Morin said in an interview with STAT about a week before he flew to the conference, as he drove to visit a friend with late-stage metastatic cancer. \u201cWho is the next specialist you talk to? It\u2019s the nutritionist: an accountant of nutrition, a bookkeeper of calories. They don\u2019t become nutritionists because they relish the smell and taste of the skin of a roast chicken.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Camerino does a lot more than \u201crelish\u201d smells and tastes. By her own account, she lives through her sense of taste.<\/p>\n \u201cI taste everything \u2014 like, everything,\u201d she told STAT. \u201cI taste colors, people, emotions, music \u2026 I can\u2019t remember songs or movies, but I know what everything tastes like.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s not just because she\u2019s a celebrated pastry chef, who has devoted decades of her life to subtle differences in food. It\u2019s also because she\u2019s synesthetic. The unusual wiring<\/a> of her brain makes her experience the world through her tongue. Sights and sounds conjure up complex flavors, allowing her to become a kind of mystical Willy Wonka, with top hat<\/a> and plum velvet jacket swapped out in favor of big round glasses and snaking blue tattoos.<\/p>\n Camerino talks about the flavors she perceives the way some saints talk about God \u2014 as an experience accessible only through metaphor. And just as monks might interpret their visions through the lens of scripture, she uses her training in French patisserie, Japanese confectionery, and coastal Italian cooking to pinpoint what exactly it is she\u2019s tasting at that moment \u2014 and, in some cases, to reproduce it.<\/p>\n Read more:<\/em> Eat, drink, but be wary \u2014 4 foods that interact with medications<\/a><\/p>\n When she was tasked with \u201cprofiling\u201d the chef and television personality Andrew Zimmern in a cake, she was startled that the first thing to appear on her palate was prawn shell. \u201cI was like, \u2018Are you kidding?\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do I take a prawn shell and put it into a cake? You toast it. I toasted it low, for a long time, so it never burned and it didn\u2019t become overly sharp, and then I ground it into a powder and I folded it into the cake batter, so all you got was the essence, nothing overwhelming.\u201d The other flavors she had felt \u2014 green Szechuan peppercorns, bay leaves, miso, Asian pear \u2014 became accompanying syrups and jellies, until she was confident her cake perfectly embodied Zimmern\u2019s spirit.<\/p>\n Sometimes, she\u2019ll get flavors she\u2019s never had before, and only through extensive research can she identify them. A band she was taste-profiling a few years ago conjured up a tang that turned out to be a Southeast Asian fruit called calamansi. A man she met around 2001 evoked a taste that turned out to be mare\u2019s milk, as used in Tibetan and Mongolian cuisine. She is sure of it, even though she\u2019s never tasted horse milk of any kind.<\/p>\n When Han, the neuropsychologist at the University of Kentucky, emailed to invite Camerino to the conference, she thought it was a joke. Like most people, she had never heard the term \u201cneurogastronomy.\u201d After all, it was only coined in 2011, in the title of a Yale neuroscientist\u2019s book<\/a>. She wasn\u2019t sure that such a conference existed.<\/p>\n But after a back-and-forth by phone and email, she agreed. The arrangement had a fairy-tale ring to it: The woman for whom taste is everything would concoct a special dish that could rekindle patients\u2019 pleasure in food.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Barry Warner\u2019s first hint of flavor began at least as early as 1957, in the months before he was born. His mother had grown up on a farm southeast of Louisville, where dinner came from the pigpen, the cowshed, and the vegetable patch. That kind of country cooking was what she learned and continued making into her adult years, and during her pregnancy, its fragrant particles filtered down though her digestive system and into her amniotic fluid, shaping<\/a> what Warner would like once he was born.<\/p>\n He was raised among the rolling corn and tobacco farms of Nelson County, in a small town with a single stoplight. His parents weren\u2019t farmers, but starting at 11 or 12, he helped neighbors to bale hay, loading it into trucks and stacking it in barns for the winter. He loved his mother\u2019s cooking: cornbread sticks made in a cast-iron skillet, cooked cabbage, pork chops soft enough to cut with your fork.<\/p>\n But in 2009, eating became painful. \u201cEvery time I tried to extend my mouth wide enough to take a bite out of a sandwich or a hamburger, I had a burning sensation in my tongue,\u201d he said. He went to see a friend, an oral surgeon who\u2019d removed his wisdom teeth years before, and asked him to take a look.<\/p>\n \u201cHe thought it was cancer, but he didn\u2019t tell me that and he didn\u2019t tell my wife until he got confirmation,\u201d Warner said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know about it until then.\u201d<\/p>\n Throat cancer was one assault on his body and his ability to eat, but the treatment brought about many more. Five days a week, for seven weeks, he would be immobilized onto a steel table and inserted into a machine for radiation. He also got periodic rounds of chemo.<\/p>\n Those didn\u2019t just dampen his ability to taste; they also left him without saliva and made him taste flavors that weren\u2019t there.<\/p>\n \u201cIt really starts out when you\u2019re undergoing chemotherapy, that metal taste you get,\u201d said Warner. \u201cIt seems like no matter what you eat, the taste isn\u2019t right.\u201d<\/p>\n He could have been tasting the drugs<\/a> in his bloodstream \u2014 but he could also have been experiencing what some call phantom flavors. Those phantoms<\/a>, some scientists say, can be the product of a taste system that is no longer in control, like a trained horse gone crazy, bucking off its rider and reverting to a frenzy of kicks and twists.<\/p>\n \u201cTaste has an interesting function beyond what you experience when you eat,\u201d said Linda Bartoshuk, a taste perception expert at the University of Florida. \u201cNature wants you to eat, so the taste system can be used to turn off sensations that might interfere with your eating. Taste input actually turns down pain. How does taste do that? It does that by sending a lot if inhibitory messages in the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n Take away those inhibitory messages, Bartoshuk said, and those unwanted sensations come roaring in.<\/p>\n Read more:<\/em> Misophonia: When a crunch, chew, or a sniffle triggers hot rage<\/a><\/p>\n Warner no longer tastes those stomach-turning flavors\u00a0\u2014 but he can\u2019t taste anything else either. He might be able to identify mashed potatoes, say, by the texture, and maybe a little by the smell. But beyond that, he wouldn\u2019t be sure what he is eating.<\/p>\n Now, at the lunch before the cook-off, Warner took tiny bites of the squash-and-goat-cheese appetizer that was in front of him. Partially he was saving room for the two different regimens that were on their way to try to rekindle some of those lost gastronomic pleasures for him and a fellow survivor. But that is also just how he\u2019s had to eat since treatment: slowly, mostly without talking, and with little enjoyment, forcing himself to take one small bite after another.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t really get hungry,\u201d he said. \u201cYou might sit down at your meal thinking about how good it tastes. Instead, I\u2019m counting how many bites it will take me to get through it. And you never think about how much eating is part of your social life. That changes dramatically.\u201d<\/p>\n Warner has kept some of his habits anyway. He still drinks bourbon socially \u2014 a taste wired into him as a Kentuckian \u2014 and he can smell it, and feel the burn of the first sip. And he still drinks a cup of coffee every morning. But he can\u2019t taste either one.<\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t complain about these long-term side effects. \u201cI am so grateful and indebted to the doctors that saved my life, I consider my hearing loss and my loss of taste just \u2026 collateral damage,\u201d he said. \u201cSeven years ago, when I was getting my diagnosis, the odds of me having this conversation were less than a flip of a coin.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, part of him wishes that he could experience what he remembers of food and drink. He hopes he\u2019ll wake up one day and be able to taste his coffee.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Camerino has devoted herself to sweets, studying chocolate-making and practicing the way to twist a pastry bag so a spritz cookie has the perfect swirl. But suffering, loss, illness, pain \u2014 those, too, have distinct flavors for her.<\/p>\n She grew up in a poor, abusive household in Gainesville, Fla., with a heroin-addicted father. \u201cEverything tasted like too-salty water, the kind that you gargle when you\u2019re sick and you\u2019re not supposed to drink,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She remembers a year when they ate little but white rice and packaged brown gravy. She remembers struggling through eating disorders without ever seeing a doctor. She remembers the smell of the Miller High Life her father drank. Yet she also remembers her mother getting a job at the African and Asian languages department at the University of Florida, being invited over and presented with foods she had never imagined. Those visits pushed her into studying linguistics.<\/p>\n It was only a chance encounter with a pastry magazine that made her switch course: \u201cI was like, \u2018That\u2019s what I want to do. I want to create something that\u2019s bite-sized that can change your perspective on life.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The invitation to the Neurogastronomy Symposium seemed like a perfect opportunity. And as with many of her concoctions, she would be guided by both her synesthesia and her culinary education. This time, though, the food would be a kind of medicine. \u201cI\u2019ve wanted to do something meaningful with this superpower,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She had been told next to nothing about the patients she would be cooking for. Instead, she both did external research \u2014 and turned inward. She began conjuring up the flavors evoked by cancer, by chemotherapy, by terrible pain. They were not so different from what she tasted during the long recovery from a motorcycle accident she had this summer: something acidic, a bit like blood, with an astringent metallic edge. She wasn\u2019t surprised that this was the same taste that many cancer patients got when undergoing treatment.<\/p>\n \u201cThe first thing I wanted to do was dim that down. If I can gain control of the taste in their mouth, if I can get rid of it, I can give them some relief,\u201d she said. \u201cBlood or metal, the best way to compete with that would be citrus. I\u2019m not using a really strong citrus: Clementines are sweet, they have a little more of a delicate flavor. The clementine will cut through \u2014 it will literally cut through \u2014 the blood and metallic taste, so now I have a pathway through into their experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet she also knew that some patients didn\u2019t have much sense of taste left at all, so she wanted flavors that, to her, produce vibrations felt beyond the mouth: basil and pistachio. \u201cBy using the basil, now I\u2019m opening up from the top of the mouth to the top of the forehead, that\u2019s where basil affects you, now I have their whole attention. And pistachio, it has a floral quality, it\u2019s reminiscent of the Mediterranean, of the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n She wasn\u2019t completely giving up on the mouth, though. She thought of how fat can fall soothingly on the palate, another sensation beyond taste. Butter was too heavy, too overpowering, she said. Instead she went with olive oil.<\/p>\n The medication she came up with would be delicate, fragrant, and not too sweet: a clementine upside-down cake with a dab of basil and pistachio pesto, crowned with a scoop of olive oil gelato.<\/p>\n She wasn\u2019t sure how well it would work. She had never made it before, and had no plans to try it out before she arrived at the event. She knew nothing about these particular patients. Yet as she was preparing for the symposium, she became so excited about the idea of helping patients with taste loss that she even began to dream up a lozenge with the same goal.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve made people experience emotions by combining particular flavors,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I\u2019ve made them experience disappointment, satisfaction, joy, then it may be possible to activate certain parts of the brain and make them experience all of that even without their sense of taste.\u201d<\/p>\n The day of the challenge began snowy and gray. Two days before, fatty jowl bacon had been fetched from a long-bearded breeder of Red Wattle hogs, and driven 60 miles back to Lexington, for whatever taste-saving concoction Morin, the Montreal chef, had in mind. Now, the University of Kentucky chef-in-residence Bob Perry was picking up last-minute ingredients from the research farm where the Ubatuba peppers grow.<\/p>\n Morin, it turns out, hadn\u2019t really planned his dish out in advance. He\u2019d asked for some vegetables, wine, bacon, spices. He\u2019d figure something out. Camerino, on the other hand, arrived at the university\u2019s demo kitchen with her own ice cream maker and a duffel bag of tools \u2014 infrared thermometers, weird tweezers, Q-tips, an offset spatula, an elaborate assortment of spoons. She was going to bring her own olive oil, too, but thought that might be overkill.<\/p>\n Before they headed into the kitchen, the clinicians and scientists and chefs and sommeliers gathered around Warner and another cancer survivor named Erica Radhakrishnan like overeager medical students crowding around a rare and fascinating case. They peppered the two with questions. What was their most memorable meal? Are there textures you find comforting? Did you eat processed foods before? What about the savory taste, which the Japanese call umami?<\/p>\n Then, with whatever intel they could gather, the chefs began to cook. Morin peeled potatoes and fried bacon. Camerino cracked eggs with a single hit on the side of the bowl, a quick squeeze and a pull.<\/p>\n Camerino adjusted her recipe slightly, making room for local ingredients. She incorporated a sprinkle of Ubatuba paprika into a syrup for the cake; she used molasses boiled down from the green juice of sorghum grass instead of cane sugar.<\/p>\n She had been nervous when she arrived, but now she was in her element. She needs no timer to know exactly when something should come out of the oven, perfectly brown. She tasted a spoonful of the basil-pistachio pesto. \u201cThis is a trip to Sicily,\u201d she said. \u201cYour marriage is struggling, it\u2019s winter, you\u2019ve lost the ability to communicate \u2026 and you go to Sicily with your partner. That\u2019s what this is.\u201d<\/p>\n Read more:<\/em> Deep dive into diets shows just how much processed food Americans eat<\/a><\/p>\n On the other side of the kitchen, Morin was breaking up the fractal patterns of Romanesco broccoli into tiny bits of chartreuse, as a topping for his potato soup. \u201cIf he does not taste anything, I also have a bottle of bourbon,\u201d he muttered in Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois French.<\/p>\n The kitchen began to fill with the smells of bacon and basil, a hint of curry, and the sweetness of cake. The dishes were ready. At the last second, Camerino spooned a glistening white ball of gelato onto the two desserts.<\/p>\n The chefs each came forward to introduce their dish. Then they pulled back toward the kitchen. And with everyone watching, Warner and Radhakrishnan\u00a0took careful bites, rolling around first the soup and then the cake in their mouths. The chefs looked on, tense, as Warner primly wiped his moustache.<\/p>\n Both tasters\u00a0complimented the moisture of the cake and the aromas of the soup, the way the spices enlivened the pur\u00e9e, the way the ice cream made it easier to swallow the cake. They would not reveal the winner until the next day, at the end of the conference, in an auditorium full of academics and clinicians.<\/p>\n But a few minutes later, when the room\u2019s attention had moved elsewhere, Radhakrishnan, whose sense of taste has largely come back after two battles with breast cancer, turned to Warner.<\/p>\n \u201cBarry, are you able to taste anything?\u201d she asked, gesturing toward the cake.<\/p>\n There was a pause. Warner looked serious, like he was concentrating on a math problem. \u201cNo,\u201d he said quietly.<\/p>\n It might have worked for Warner while he was undergoing chemo and tasting its metallic tang. Or it might have worked for someone else. Just as Warner\u2019s pleasure in food had been shaped in complex ways \u2014 by his genes, by the country cooking he\u2019d sampled in the womb and as a child, and then by those foods he\u2019d grown to appreciate as an adult \u2014 his preferences were equally unique after he\u2019d lost his sense of taste. After all, a loss is only a loss in relation to what came before.<\/p>\n To Camerino, the challenge was at once amazing and humbling. \u201cI could have cried a lot \u2014 I cry really easily,\u201d she said. The experiment only heightened her zeal: She is now working with a molecular sommelier<\/a> to dream up four different lozenges for people with taste loss, and, for those without saliva, two aromatic sprays. She isn\u2019t sure about the exact ingredients, but she is thinking citrus, basil, barley malt as a sweetener, and something reminiscent of anise.<\/p>\n Han hopes that these events for chefs and scientists can move from \u201cfun preclinical challenges\u201d to more rigorous research about what can actually help these patients and survivors. Morin is working on an app for cancer patients to share what helps\u00a0for which kinds of taste loss, and there are other ideas in the works. \u201cWe\u2019re doing very early studies to take stem cells to see if we could regrow the system,\u201d said Beauchamp, the researcher from the Monell Center. \u201cBut we\u2019re a long way from that.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, Warner keeps to the regimen he\u2019s turned to for seven years. He uses whomever he\u2019s eating with as a timer for when he can stop making himself take bites. He smells coffee in the morning, sipping it as he heads into his sunroom to listen for birds. He feels that first burn of bourbon, and notices how it falls away with each subsequent sip.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LEXINGTON, Ky. \u2014 The medicines were rich and strange, their active ingredients so particular they sounded fictional. One regimen involved jowl bits from Red Wattle hogs; the pigs were bred from sows named Fart Blossom and Hildegard, and had spent the end of their lives gorging on acorns, hickory nuts, apples, and black walnuts. Another Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}