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Posts Tagged ‘Food Science’

Add wasabi to your broccoli for a cancer-fighting boost [Food Science]

16 Sep
If you're a spicy food fan, take heart as combining certain piquant foods with broccoli may give the vegetable a much more powerful cancer-fighting kick. More »
 
 

Potato chips — the other natural way to get stoned [Food Science]

05 Jul
Scientists have found out why people can put the brakes on eating sugar, but will go through an entire bag of potato chips, followed by a plate of fries. It turns out that fats get us stoned. More »
 
 

It’s official – most people can’t taste the difference

14 Apr

In a blind taste test, volunteers were unable to distinguish between expensive and cheap wine

An expensive wine may well have a full body, a delicate nose and good legs, but the odds are your brain will never know.

A survey of hundreds of drinkers found that on average people could tell good wine from plonk no more often than if they had simply guessed.

In the blind taste test, 578 people commented on a variety of red and white wines ranging from a £3.49 bottle of Claret to a £29.99 bottle of champagne. The researchers categorised inexpensive wines as costing £5 and less, while expensive bottles were £10 and more.

The study found that people correctly distinguished between cheap and expensive white wines only 53% of the time, and only 47% of the time for red wines. The overall result suggests a 50:50 chance of identifying a wine as expensive or cheap based on taste alone – the same odds as flipping a coin.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at Hertfordshire University, conducted the survey at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

"People just could not tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine," he said. "When you know the answer, you fool yourself into thinking you would be able to tell the difference, but most people simply can't."

All of the drinkers who took part in the survey were attending the science festival, but Wiseman claims the group was unlikely to be any worse at wine tasting than a cross-section of the general public.

"The real surprise is that the more expensive wines were double or three times the price of the cheaper ones. Normally when a product is that much more expensive, you would expect to be able to tell the difference," Wiseman said.

People scored best when deciding between two bottles of Pinot Grigio, with 59% correctly deciding which was which. The Claret, which cost either £3.49 or £15.99, fooled most people with only 39% correctly identifying which they had tasted.

In 2008, a study led by Adrian North, a psychologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, claimed that music helped boost the flavour of certain wines. North, who was commissioned by a Chilean winemaker, reported that Cabernet Sauvignon was most affected by "powerful and heavy" music, while Chardonnay benefited from "zingy and refreshing" sounds.


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"The most delicious fruit known to men" has been bioengineered to be even better [Food Science]

18 Mar
One of the reasons bananas enjoy their rampant popularity is that the kinds you buy in stores are hideously mutated versions of the original, bred to not have the inedible seeds their wild brethren so proudly display. Thanks to new research we may soon be seeing other fruit making the transition to seedlessness, and filling our grocery shelves. Bioengineers have successfully tweaked the custard apple, charimoya (called by Mark Twain "the most delicious fruit known to men") and the sugar apple — all of which are delicious but require nimble teeth if you want to avoid their seeds. These plants could provide new farming opportunities and delights in the produce section - plus, there's a possibility the research could be adapted to even more fruit. Get ready for the delicious, seedless future! More »