Processed foods or sweets with alluring combinations of fat, sugar, carbohydrates, and sodium are called hyper-palatable. But a research study will change that, offering specific metrics that might qualify foods as hyper-palatable. Finding most foods consumed in the United States meet these criteria. Multiple documentaries have pointed out that food companies have very well-designed formulas for these types of foods to make them palatable and necessarily enhance consumption. But these definitions are virtually unknown to the scientific community. They are using descriptive definitions like 'sweets,' 'desserts' and 'fast foods.'
They also use nutrition software to define criteria for hyper-palatable foods. According to Fazzino, they mostly took all of the descriptive definitions of the foods from the literature. This nutrition software essentially provides in fine-grained detail a data set that specifies how many calories per serving and all sorts of other things. The team looked for items that met criteria established by their literature review as enhancing palatability. They identified these synergies with specific values applied to three "clusters:" combinations of fat and sodium, combinations of fat and simple sugars, and combinations of carbohydrates and sodium. They have to identify foods that appear to cluster together with what appeared to be like similar levels of at least two ingredients because that's the theoretical basis for inducing the synergistic palatability effects. Learn more about this here.
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