[Dysphagia] artificial throat to spur taste tests

[bonnieh4455 at sbcglobal.net (Bonnie Heintskill)]

http://www.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=49848&cat=Health

An artificial throat which is capable of swallowing, breathing and
salivating could be the latest weapon in food chemistry.

Developing the flavour of a new sports or low-carbohydrate drink is a
lengthy task, involving many tests by panels of human tasters. The
artificial throat has been developed to spare drinks makers the expense and
hassle involved in organising and analysing hundreds of tests by helping to
predict how a drink will taste.

The artificial throat works by mimicking the process of human tasting.

Taste is mostly smell. When drink makers are experimenting with hundreds of
different recipes, they need to work out quickly how different ingredients
will influence flavour. They analyse a drinker's breath using a mass
spectrometer to read the concentration profile of various volatile
compounds.

But using people for these tests yields highly variable results, because
everyone has a slightly different oral physiology, with different mouth
volumes and breath patterns. Yet until now it was the only option because
the act of swallowing is so important to flavour release that is, measuring
a static pool of liquid cannot predict which aromas will make it to the
nose.

The artificial throat is useful for complicated beverages, like sports or
low-carbohydrate drinks, because the proteins and sugars in them can
interfere with other flavours. "You can screen out a lot of mixtures really
quickly. Some ingredients are great for texture, but they just taste awful,"
she says.

Andrew Taylor, a food chemist at the University of Nottingham in the UK,
welcomed the development. The next step, he says, is to understand why that
first breath matters so much and how individual differences in swallowing
physiology contribute to taste perception. (ANI)