Artificial flavors are rewiring your palate and making you hate healthy food

Author, Mark Schatzker, has put together a timeline of the artificial food industry and its most powerful ingredient: flavor, in his new book, The Dorito Effect.

"Evolution did not program us to get fat — we've simply tricked ourselves into craving the wrong foods," Schatzker says on his website.

"Synthetic flavors in foods have heightened their desirability at the very same time that whole foods are losing flavor," he says, believing that engineering food to have a longer shelf life or for prettier colors has diminished the taste.  "Now that we’ve broken that connection between flavor and nutrition by creating synthetic flavors, we have created foods that tell a thrilling but deceptive nutritional lie."

Indeed the flavor of food has long been a way for people to indicate its health value.  Back in the day, when all we did was seek out real food, craving certain flavors meant out bodies needed that certain ingredient.  A desire for an orange, for instance, could indicate your body needs vitamin C.  If you have an orange soda, it can trick your body into thinking it's getting the vitamin and the craving persists because you still need it.

Schatzker talks about his journey of learning the dangers of artificial flavor.  "I stopped putting sugar in my coffee, not because I was trying to cut back on sugar but because I felt like it was getting in the way of tasting the coffee. It's like I’ve rewired my palate," he says.

 In fact, the more you expose yourself to natural sugars in fruits and the salts in vegetables, the quicker you will realize just how sweet and salty they actually are.