The pleasantness of foods

Abstract

Food pleasantness is largely based on the palatability of food and is linked to taste. Along with homeostatic and cognitive control, it forms part of the control of food intake (hedonic control), and does not only correspond to the pleasure that can be described of food intake. There are many factors that cause variations in eating pleasantness between individuals, such as age, sex, culture, co-morbidities, treatments, environmental factors or the specific characteristics of foods. The control of food intake is based on four determinants: conditioned satiety, the reward system, sensory specific satiety and alliesthesia. These four determinants follow one another over time, in the per-prandial and inter-prandial periods, and complement one another. There are many cerebral areas involved in the hedonic control of food intake. The most involved brain areas are the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which interact with deep neural structures (amygdala, striatum, substantia nigra) for the reward circuit, with the hippocampi for memorising pleasant foods, and even with the hypothalamus and insula, brain areas more recently involved in the physiology of food pleasantness. Changes in brain activity secondary to modulation of food pleasantness can be measured objectively by recording taste-evoked potentials, an electroencephalography technique with very good temporal resolution.