Back in the three hundred and fiftieth year BC Democritus, the philosopher of Ancient Greece, it was written that the human body is able to distinguish taste shades in the range of only four main ones. The base is made up of combinations of bitter, sour, salty and sweet tastes, and all other flavors will be just a combination of them. As it turned out, through the centuries one can argue with this, today there are already five basic tastes.
Our senses now deceive us and cannot distinguish a natural product from an artificial one. Chinese clandestine manufacturers have learned to counterfeit various natural products. For example, fake rice is created in the Celestial Empire with the help of starch and food additives, and natural chicken eggs are replaced with various chemical components that create protein, yolk and eggshells.
More than twenty million tons of food additives are produced worldwide every year. Modern food can hardly be imagined without the addition of dyes, various sweeteners, stabilizers, flavorings, flavor enhancers, glutamates, preservatives that are created artificially in a chemical laboratory. Almost all food additives are highly toxic toxic substances. According to the conclusions of scientists, forty-five percent of all diseases occur precisely because of poor-quality nutrition and lack of natural food, which reduces the duration of human life by fifteen years. In addition, a certain chemical composition of artificial products causes gene mutations and is reflected in subsequent generations.
A discovery along this path was the white powder monosodium glutamate, which was synthesized for the first time in 1908 by the Japanese scientist Ikeda Kikunae, and is also called the flavor enhancer E621. Note that basically all food additives were developed in Europe, so it was decided that all of them will be designated starting with the letter "E".
Simple dried algae prompted a scientist from Japan Kikunae to conduct research in this direction. They were used in the Land of the Rising Sun as a condiment in the traditional Japanese dashi broth. The food containing them was not sweet, neither bitter, nor sour, but nevertheless it became, for some reason, more appetizing and much tastier. As it turned out, the reason for this was contained in glutamic acid, which is part of the algae, which acts in a special way on the sensory organs. The Japanese Ikeda began to call her umami, which means appetizing in translation, and declared the existence of a fifth taste in humans.
Today, natural vegetables from the garden, and not from the supermarket, seem completely tasteless. The taste buds of a metropolitan inhabitant are so adapted to all the chemistry and food additives in food products that they perceive ordinary natural food as not tasty. Modern people are literally addicted to glutamate consumption.
The ability of glutamates to enhance taste is harmful to the human body. Getting used to food with a certain addition of glutamates, people are no longer normally able to perceive natural food, which becomes tasteless and completely insipid for them. As a result, a persistent habit is developed for food with a flavoring enhancer, and a person begins to consume it in more and more quantities, and hence general obesity.
The reason is hidden in the anatomy of the human body, equipped with special receptors that respond specifically to protein, since the human body needs it to build muscle tissue. Glutamate is essentially an amino acid, and the human central nervous system sends impulses to the brain, signaling the importance and necessity of the product. In addition, glutamate eliminates the rotting smell of products when the product is expired or spoiled. In large quantities, glutamates added to foods have a neurostimulant effect that generates some excitement and emotional uplift as a result of the release of endorphins. Hence, the industrialists came up with such a concept as gustatory ecstasy.
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In the twentieth century, research activities began in a new direction of science, which was called food chemistry. Manufacturers need preservatives, food additives (now there are more than 500 of them), dyes and flavors (there are more than 4,000 of them today) in order to extend the shelf life of the products sold and give it a beautiful presentation for a long time. As a result, every person in the world eats at least three kilograms of nutritional supplements per year. But many of the flavor enhancers, not only are not neutral, but even harmful to health. For example, before the loud scandal that erupted recently, manufacturers added the deadly poisonous formaldehyde E240 to chocolate bars.
In addition to using all kinds of additives and flavor enhancers in products, frankly falsified products reach the buyer from store shelves, for example, instead of cheese, a cheese product is offered, instead of natural cottage cheese, a curd product, and instead of butter, a vegetable-fat spread is presented. The main thing with such a purchase is not to make a mistake and not to choose products with toxic preservatives, such as propylene glycol, the designations of which start from E200 to E299 inclusive. They are toxins that impair blood formation, and also cause the growth of oncological tumors and at the same time kill the normal cells of a living organism.
Nutritional supplements are natural and synthetic. The former are created on the basis of microorganisms and plants. Others are formed from refinery waste and coal tar. The second type of additives is almost 90% of the total world number of flavor enhancers produced.
New high-tech possibilities have allowed the emergence of a new molecular cuisine with an unusual presentation of each dish. At the same time, the chef considers each dish not as a composition of whole food ingredients, but as a set of molecules that can be changed using chemical processes.
Molecular cuisine is more of a culinary show for hobbyists than food. Now catering has new tasks - to quickly prepare a dish and reduce the cost of production as much as possible, and for this, instead of natural products, food additives are used. And this applies not only to various small-scale wholesale pastfood chains, such as cheburek, snack bars and the like. Food additives are also intensively used in food shops in the production of semi-finished products, where, as a rule, stale and poor-quality goods go. Be vigilant, I would like to paraphrase: the salvation of the consumer is in the choice of quality products by the consumer himself.