Food Theory: Don't Trust Your TASTE! (Mystery Gummy Bear Challenge)

a portion of this video is sponsored by google i think we're all familiar with the phrase you eat with your eyes it's a saying that immediately makes me think of an eyeball lined with rows of teeth but then again i make my living playing indie horror games so my perception might be a bit skewed in reality though it's a saying all about how when we're presented with food the first thing that impacts our taste is the visual presentation this looks a lot tastier than this but just because it looks tastier does that necessarily mean that it is tastier well actually a lot today we're looking at how much sight lies to us about the food that we eat with team theorists putting their tongues on the line for you and for science and if sight truly is that important for flavor have you ever considered how people with visual impairments taste the world around them by the end of today's episode you're not going to believe your eyes or mouths [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the show that tastes as good as it looks previously on food theory we did an episode all about how hearing has a big impact on how fresh we perceive something to be that things that are crunchier or snappier tend to be rated as fresher regardless of whether or not that's true but that episode got me really thinking about our other senses too when someone is told to taste a gross food we tell them to hold their nose because inherently we know that smell and taste are linked and by holding your nose the flavor is gonna be lessened but then what about sight sure we naturally have a preference for food that looks pretty and high-end restaurants often justify their extreme prices by making the food on their plates into small works of art but is that really affecting the flavor all that much can what you see with your eyes actually affect what you're tasting on your tongue we decided to tackle the question in two ways first by doing a blind taste test with the help of team theorists involving some homemade gummy bears i just want you to see this texture okay this gloopy little sleepy globe texture got that giggle jiggle chicka jiggle they're wet they are super duper wet i am lucky to have a team that trusts me enough to eat my sketchy gummy bears listen you work for mr beast you get money you get candy factories premium made chocolate you work for theorists you get boogers you get goop you done got gooped yeah all right i get it i'm not a great cook so that's test number one test number two then is looking at the real life data coming from individuals with visual impairments like congenital blindness how do they taste the world around them and how is their perception of food and flavor different from fully sighted individuals is there a difference spoiler alert there is and it's a big one in fact the results of both these explorations in today's episode will reveal some shocking truths about how sight may actually be preventing you from enjoying your next meal it's just one example of how our senses shape the way that we understand and interact with the world around us which is a big part of why it's important to ensure that those experiences are made accessible to everyone including those with disabilities fortunately technology can do a lot to ensure that everyone has the tools that they need to succeed that's why i'm so excited to announce that my sponsor for this portion of today's episode is google yeah google themselves pretty cool right so as you're well familiar with i've been creating content on youtube for over a decade now i'm the middle aged dad of the platform and for the last 10 years one of the coolest parts of the job has been getting to meet with fans this isn't just a channel and you aren't just viewers this is a community of theorists people united by their shared love of overthinking and a huge part of that means making this channel more accessible so no one ever feels excluded and that commitment translates in both big and small ways in everything that we do stuff like filling out the alternate text on any photo that we upload to social media or writing our scripts in a way so that you never miss out on a joke just because you may have limited vision or are an audio only listener google actually feels the exact same way they like me believe in the importance of accessibility i mean we are living in a digital age after all there's no reason any physical limitation to our body should be holding us back well-designed technology can help everyone accomplish their goals and google has put that motto into practice by creating accessibility tools that everyone can use for example voice access was built from the ground up to help those who might not be able to physically use their phone no one should be deprived of the ability to flip between apps or type texts just because of their physical limitations and google voice access grants that right to everyone by providing a hands-free way to use your phone with a few simple voice commands it's also a tool that can be used by everyone true story you can actually type faster than i can using my fingers it's also great to use while in the kitchen messy hands not a problem it can read or write any email to me when i ask or it can switch to any other app i might need all without having to lift a finger and it's something that you can get started with yourself all you have to do is say hey google voice access there's also voice guidance which was built with blind and low vision pedestrians in mind allowing them to navigate streets confidently even though they might not be able to see the world around them and again even if you have perfect 20 20 vision it's a tool that proves invaluable to anyone having directions read to you in a clear concise way it just beats constantly having to stare at your phone for assistance it's accessibility that improves lives for everyone and i think we've all appreciated the live transcribe feature whether we've realized it or not its primary purpose was for users with hearing impairments so they wouldn't have to miss out on a phone call or one of my video's cringy puns now they could read all of that stuff in real time you could say it's a t-erific tool like i said terrible puns anyway as a feature for everyone i think we're all guilty of watching a video or two with the sound off while working and reading what's being said in the video instead of hearing it well you've got yourself live transcribed to thank for that one in short a more accessible world means a better world for everyone it matters to me and it matters to google so if you want to find out more about everything google is working on to help make this world a more accessible place where everyone can feel like they belong visit belonging dot google or you know the drill by now check out the link right below the video a big thanks to google for all that they're doing to help make this world a more inclusive place and for sponsoring this portion of the video now back to how a lack of sight might just affect your taste dr charles spence professor of experimental psychology at oxford university with the relationship between taste and sight to the test by giving test subjects grape orange apple and lemon beverages in clear glass bottles all of the beverages were clear as well feels kind of like our crystal pepsi episode all over again since there was no coloring to give away the flavor the test subjects actually had to guess based on flavor alone and you know what they did great despite the lack of colors they were highly likely to guess the correct flavor within the drinks but then he mixed it up he added food coloring to mess with people's expectations doing things like making the grape flavored drink orange suddenly people would drink the orange colored beverage and report that it had an orange flavor and here's the craziest part this was true even after people were told that they had been messed with even when people knew that they were supposed to ignore the color it didn't change the fact that simply seeing a yellow liquid in a bottle made them more likely to think that it tasted like lemonade so knowing this i set out to do my own experiment with the help of several members of team theorist dan jerica amy and casey were all brave enough to film themselves on camera the things i do for my job i'm fine i was not forced into doing this at all this is not punishment for forgetting to do something this is totally normal such a normal job we also had a few extra volunteers no you can't have it it's gone the rest chose to remain anonymous for the experiment i created four batches of gummy bears to play with people's sense of taste they are gummies formerly known as bears because as you can see they are no longer a bear they are a blob they're a little melty because it's hot i'm trying to hide my other disgust at basically what feels like eating little bundles of snot all right so some of them may have gotten a little bit malformed on root california some are gonna do what california some are gonna do anyway the four categories were as follows one clear gummies two gummies that were colored to match their flavor three gummies that were colored to not match their flavor it's food theory hard mode and four a regular batch to eat blindfolded or using whatever eye shielding device they had in their vicinity apparently hello and welcome to we didn't have a blindfold in this house so this is gonna have to do high tech blindfold also side note man buns and head straps do not mix for each batch i cook the same five flavors it's also worth noting that i made sure that there was no smell for any of these guys since again smell can drastically affect your flavor perception from there i got our subjects to eat them and report for me whatever flavors they were tasting things that are usually creamy but paired with strawberries i'm gonna go with pear like i like how you can pair your mouse with the subscribe button that shameless plug is not gonna get you a bonus dan oh i heard it i heard i mean i didn't necessarily say that all the flavors were going to be good what was that and the team in true theorist form are doing their best to try and out-think me and the test are we thinking that they have to be fruit because generally candies are flavored as fruit in our breakfast when they're chocolate except when they're chocolate but are we predisposed in our brains to just kind of think that they're fruit flavors and not like grass yeah and so that's why i'm wondering if they're like if they're trying to trick us into thinking that they are going to be fruit flavored and then it ends up being something actually cheesecake flavored candle wax something that's not normal flavors it's moments like that that make me so proud of them anyway once they were done guessing i provided them an answer key to reveal the true flavors [Music] we were so wrong on so many levels the first major surprise came with the clear gummies i figured that clear gummies and the blindfolded test gummies would be pretty similar in result after all it's basically the same thing no colors to either give you a hint or mislead you but boy was i wrong it turns out that seeing clear is actually a lot different from seeing nothing when wearing a blindfold everyone was able to reliably pick out the correct flavors but when confronted with clear gummies something about the color just made the taste experience different here's how the testers reacted when eating a clear gummy with a citrus fruit flavor is it water is the taste of water water with like a teaspoon of sugar it tasted mostly just kind of like liquid everyone reported that the clear gummy tasted like nothing and mind you this is entirely due to the gummy's appearance unless you think it's something off about the flavor here was their reaction later in the test when they were given the exact same flavor of gummy but with red food coloring added blueberry i get strawberry big strawberry vinyl like orange fanta i hope this is uh helpful more helpful than you could imagine head editor dan the clear gummy put people in the mindset of water or a lack of flavor and that's exactly what they perceived something tasteless whereas with a red gummy suddenly they were getting hints of fruit with both casey and dan making incorrect choices of strawberry and watermelon classically red fruits to go along with the red coloring only jericho was able to correctly identify a tart citrus fruit to match the flavor that we had put in i was prepared for the possibility that misleading colors might throw people off but it hadn't even occurred to me that clear could do the same thing but it turned out that this was true for almost all of the clear gummies we were wrong we're so so wrong and when it did come to those mismatched flavor to color gummies the red herring effect was on full display one of our gummies was pineapple and when it was colored yellow people nailed it pineapple banana i got more like pineappley but when that same flavor was presented as a blue gummy haha the responses changed a lot i'm ready i'm ready okay what do you got i say like a sort of mouthwash again i got mouthwash too it started as like blueberry again all that changed here was the color everyone seemed to have the fix on pineapple when it was yellow but by simply taking the pineapple flavor and coloring it blue suddenly people's reactions tended toward things that you would associate with blue blueberry blue raspberry and of course mouthwash which i should mention was not one of the flavors included i would never fudge science but i would much rather be eating fudge than any of these i'm glad i didn't fudge it up those were some of the notable examples that i wanted to pick out but the overall data showed the exact same trend people were at their most accurate when given colored gummies whose color was chosen to match the flavor and they did almost as well when blindfolded but when the gummies became clear accuracy dropped considerably and when the gummies were misleadingly colored it led people to all sorts of wild conclusions in total zero percent of those responses wound up being right are you saying i'm flavor blind no i'm saying that everything in the world is a lie and nothing is real it's all a simulation this is a simulation within the simulation still all of this research to me felt incomplete because it was all coming from the premise that we have expectations about what food is supposed to look like but all of that is based on the assumption that we were able to form those visual expectations in the first place what happens when you do a blind taste test not with sighted people who are blindfolded but with people with congenital blindness the people who have been blind since birth researchers at the university of montreal school of optometry did a study looking at exactly this testing how vision affects the way that we eat and taste food they came back with results that range from the expected to the absolutely shocking first off one thing they discovered is that sighted people tend to respond to external context to decide when and what to eat turns out that all that image-based advertising works on us for sighted people simply seeing food can put us in the mood to eat regardless of how hungry we might actually be people with congenital blindness on the other hand were more likely to rely on internal hunger and satiety clues in other words they were doing the impossible they were basing their meal times on when they were actually hungry it turns out that the method preferred by blind individuals is actually a lot better for their health too in fact sighted people are more prone to maladaptive eating which leads to eating disorders in other words all those external cues that sighted people so often respond to like food ads work in both directions by making us eat when we're not hungry but also by making us not eat when we should be it would seem like eating too many snacks and skipping meals would be opposite problems but they actually both stem from the same fundamental problem which is looking at the external environment and letting the things we see including television ads and social media posts dictate what and when we eat rather than listening to our own body and letting those internal hunger cues decide when meal time should be but that wasn't even the most interesting part one of their hypotheses was that people with congenital blindness would have a sharper sense of taste after all the conventional wisdom is that the less you rely on your vision the more you have to rely on other senses and research has shown that blind individuals have a more nuanced sense of hearing and touch so the researchers thought the same would probably be true for taste as well but in fact it turned out to be the opposite their preliminary data suggested that blind people had a harder time when it came to tests involving taste detection and identification so what gives is this yet another case of sight affecting what we taste or was something else going on the researchers wanted to understand why this discrepancy existed in the data and they found that the blind individuals they studied had under-exposed taste systems in other words blind people had less variety in their diet and having a narrower palate made it harder for them to identify certain flavors now of course this answer wasn't that much of an answer just left the researchers with a different question why the blind individuals they talked to had less variety in their food diets one of the things they considered was food neophobia that is the fear of trying new foods the researchers originally hypothesized that blind individuals would score higher on this test and that hypothesis turned out to be 100 wrong instead in defiance of their expectations the researchers found there was no difference between sighted people and people with congenital blindness when it came to how willing they were to try new foods the more they dug into the results the more it became clear what the real story here was the fact that blind individuals had less variety in their diet had nothing to do with their preferences and it had everything to do with what researchers described as blindness related obstacles when shopping for food cooking and eating out it's not that blind people didn't want to try new food it was that grocery stores and restaurants made it harder for them to try new foods by not accommodating their disability when a restaurant doesn't offer menus in braille it's a lot easier to just say i'll take a hamburger or some other familiar food that you know is going to be on the menu by the way restaurant owners if you're looking for a way to get more business and make the world a more inclusive place to san seemingly small things can make a big difference when it comes to accessibility the good news is that's something we can take steps towards improving changing the world so it's more inclusive for everyone in the end though when it comes to taste sight matters sight can mislead us sight can make us hungry so it can make us skip meals it can make us taste things that aren't there and mistaste things that are there in many ways the ability to see is actually hampering our ability to truly taste so the next time you sit down to a meal try to eat with your mouth first instead of your eyes because the truth is always a little bit sweeter and remember it's all just a theory a food theory bon appetit well there you go science at its finest [Music] science tastes squishy science tastes squishy and hey if you want to see me do a blindfolded taste test of my own check out this video where i try to prove that different breakfast cereals are actually the same product with different colors or check out this video to watch team theorists endure another sweet tasting test where they have to lick their way to the chewy center of a hard candy pop what's the weirdest thing you've had to do for my job i mean i don't know would it be caressing aggressively oh tootsie pop with my tongue

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 3,859,848

Keywords: flavor, taste, taste test, gummy bear, gummy bears, gummy bear taste test, science of flavor, what is flavor, how do you taste, science of taste, food science, food hack, trying every flavor, we tried every flavor, food challenge, challenge, gmm taste test, gmm will it, keith eats everything, eat the menu, food theory, food theorists, matpat, game theory, film theory, Inclusive Culture, Diverse Perspectives, Google Accessibility, Inclusive Workplace, Accessibility for All

Id: B28ebjEdMTw

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022