How might neuroscience help to change producers’ practices and consumers’ choices for more sustainable food? Janina Seubert is an expert in affective neuroscience and human chemosensation at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and a recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) grant. She was one of the ERC-funded researchers who discussed consumer behaviour at a workshop on sustainable food organised by the ERC and the European Parliament’s Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA).
First of all, you were part of the Member of the European Parliament-scientist pairing scheme, a regular STOA collaboration bringing scientists together with policy makers in order to stimulate constructive exchange. What is your experience with this?
As for the science, we reflected on how accepting new flavours might relate to accepting differences or new experiences in general and how this may ultimately also be a question of democracy, which is a way of looking at it that I had not yet considered and found very inspiring.
Scientific evidence shows that food-related behaviours are dominated by habits and emotional processes. As an expert in affective neuroscience and human chemosensation (the perception of chemical stimuli mostly through smell and taste), how is your research related to these processes?
Janina Seubert: The way that I approach food consumption is that I see it as a motivational process, as a fundamental biological process that predisposes us to consume calories to maintain our energy balance while trying to avoid being poisoned.
Both of these things are important and need to be decided on. So if we accidentally eat something harmful, when we put it in our mouth, we can taste that it is unpleasant and we have a very short time to spit it out before we get contaminated.
That is why I think affective neuroscience, the science of emotions, is a very important angle to our food choices: all of our systems are developed to make these decisions accurately and quickly. Usually when things need to be done accurately and quickly, we and our bodies react as if we were running away from a wild animal – these things are usually not solved by cognition. They are solved by emotion. And I think it’s the same with food to a large extent as well.
How can science help in shifting consumers’ behaviour in choosing sustainable food?
Janina Seubert: The way that we are trying to help is by trying to take a more holistic approach to what sensory pleasure is, because, as I explained, when we decide on whether we like something or not by using our emotions, this decision is based on sensory pleasure – does this give us pleasure or does it cause disgust? But actually we don’t yet have a clear understanding of how things actually stimulate pleasure or disgust. I think that by better understanding which elements need to come together for us to feel disgust or pleasure, we can help develop products that perhaps deliver the same amount of pleasure with fewer negative effects for the environment or the body.
We can also communicate evidence-based strategies to people about how they can approach the problem of learning to like something new. Because many people are actually quite well informed, they want to be healthy, they want to help save the planet, but they’re having a very hard time managing the emotional component of whether they want to eat things that they know give them a sense of pleasure or something else that they don’t think gives them a sense of pleasure. We want to help people, give them tools to resolve this.
So the neuroscience, the field of cognitive, affective neuroscience in which I work, is at the intersection of biology and psychology. I think it’s Important to integrate these components.
Can scientists assist in policy interventions and actions concerning food providers, producers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers, and if so, how?
Janina Seubert: Yes, I think that understanding better how, for example, smell and taste work together in a food, enhance knowledge of that I think could actually help the food industry to create better products as well. We always think that people respond, people like sweet things and salty things because we’re evolutionarily primed to do that. But what we see in our research is that people are sometimes actually not very good at knowing whether a sensation comes from the sense of smell or whether it actually comes from taste.
For example, if you eat a cinnamon bun, you know it has sugar in it. If you just smell cinnamon, most people will say it’s a sweet smell. Or if you put cinnamon powder into water and you drink it, people will still say it’s sweet just because they’re so used to cinnamon meaning something sweet.
So it’s almost automatic that your brain fills in the gaps, which means your brain thinks it is receiving sugar, even if it’s not, simply because usually when you receive cinnamon, you also receive sugar. In a way, I think that these kinds of insights can really help to create clever products that reduce the sugar content by filling in the gaps.
You are a scientist but a consumer too – what is the tactic that works for you? Do you have any advice on how dietary changes can be promoted?
Janina Seubert: I think people differ in how open they are to trying new things. I personally am quite open to trying new things. I’m curious about foods and that’s probably why I’ve chosen this line of work as well. I think it’s a very fascinating field.
I’m interested in trying to develop strategies to make people try something just once because I think that very often when It comes to disgust, the biggest challenge is persuading people to try something new just once, and then they usually realise it’s not as bad as they think. Usually to really get to like something, however, you need to try it a few more times.
So I’m trying to work both with people who work more with these cognitive communication skills and to see how we can communicate with people in a way that makes them overcome their disgust and are willing to try something once. And then at my end, I try to identify the context that allows people to learn to accept things by trying them a few more times.
So I try to figure out whether we can, for example, give people concrete advice that they should perhaps try a food when they’re full and not when they are hungry. Or maybe they should try to start by mixing in a little bit of a new disgusting food with food that they already know they like and then gradually increase the amount of the food they are not so keen on. I think it is very important to communicate to people that it’s also OK to not like something, but if you simply eat it several times, it will probably grow on you and these are some strategies that might make it easier for you to give it a go.
What is the most fascinating discovery that you’ve made while studying sensory impressions?
Janina Seubert: My main interest is in the brain. How we actually smell and taste – these different sensory impressions when we perceive food are integrated into the brain.
I don’t know if this will be particularly interesting to other people, but I find it really fascinating to see how the brain automatically integrates different things that it’s familiar with, so if we have a coherent object that has a specific look and it has a specific smell and a specific taste, and all of this goes together, then the basic areas of the brain immediately communicate with each other. But whenever there’s a small difference, or when the object becomes different from what we expect, our brain then automatically links more cognitive areas into the equation.
When people have to decide whether they want to eat something, it depends on whether it is food that they know really well and really like. In this case, the brain automatically puts it all together. When confronted with a food that they’ve never seen before, and they find it very unpleasant, then the brain can make that decision really quickly. But when it’s something they don’t actually know, then you can really see that a whole different set of brain areas are involved. This creates an opportunity as well, because I think this is where, if we shift the context, we can make those processes go either way – it can become a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.
We’re really trying to delve into this area, this grey zone, where you don’t know whether it is a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. And if we can understand how the brain decides in these situations, I think we’ve more or less solved the puzzle.
We always think that we’re rational beings and we understand everything that we do, but in reality there’s a lot happening in the background, so we don’t always know why we make a particular decision, especially with things that happen automatically or more emotionally.
If you need to explain to someone why your mother cooks the best soup, what is so good about that soup, it’s really difficult because you feel like you just know, your brain just knows.
And I think it’s super fascinating to develop models and to think about how these problems are solved by the brain.