The Nuances of Food Choice

The influences that make up who we are as human beings determine our preferences, unconsciously guiding our choices and often individuals have little understanding of why they choose what they consume. Due to the large number and variety of such influences it can be difficult to narrow the field of determinate factors involved in food choice. While food is integral to our being, we have often seem to have little knowledge of why we choose the foods we consume. Apparent motives such as diets, heredity, ethnicity, or availability only tell part of the story, we have to search deeper for the subliminal data that determines our preferences. Fantastic variation in diet can be seen across cultures throughout the globe, and yet parallels, consistencies and commonalities abound. We all love sweets, man and beast alike. But how do we get our sugar? In what form and how do we consume it? If we melt a little sugar in a pan and smell the aroma of burnt sugar what memories flood our mind? We are interconnected with the substances we consume, bound together through shared social interaction, memories that guide our emotional connection to food. It is the social nature of consuming food that makes it such a strong force in our culture, the life and death dance of searching for, finding and killing our subsistence is impressed in our DNA and we recreate this at every Sunday barbecue.

Psychological research and Neuro-science are beginning to increase the understanding behind food choice.There seems to exist an interesting link between Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and food choice. A 2014 study by Tufts University compared the selectivity of food selection between children with diagnosed ASD, and children without the syndrome. The results showed that parent-reported food refusal based on food characteristics (texture, consistency, taste, smell etc.) was almost twice that in children with ASD as those children without. Many studies show a link between this selectivity and nutritional deficits. In reading of this I was reminded of a podcast on "This American Life " on National Public Radio about testosterone in which a man recounted his experience when he suffered a medical condition which left his body unable to produce the hormone. According to this individual he lost the ability to be selective about what he ate to the point where he would eat nothing but a loaf of white bread with mayonnaise. Are these types of selectivity of preference related?

Further research is needed before we can fully understand the links that may or may not exist between these disparate conditions, but the idea is tantalizing nonetheless. Below is a link to the podcast.

https://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/220/testosterone/