Editorial: Fat chance?

OPINION: Those horror films featuring great pools of blood are so outdated it's almost quaint. They overestimate the scariness of the substance. Modern society is much less squeamish or upset about blood than about fat, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

That's what horror films should be steeped in. If you want to see audiences throwing hands over their eyes, but still squinting through splayed fingers, then forget buckets of blood – give them vats of fat.

That's the stuff of powerful feelings of attraction and repulsion.

By now we've all, surely, been given the nutritional low-down on the problem.

We like fat too much, we scarf down far too much of it and ... well, that's about it, really.

Except now one of those medical stories that has real potential to affect our lives has arisen.

A team from Deakin University in Australia has found that the tongue can detect a fat taste as well as the five already-identified ones (sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savoury).

This newfound sensitivity to the fat taste reportedly varies but it would seem those among us who have it tend to eat less fatty food and be slimmer.

Lucky them. Still, the possibility now presents itself that obesity rates can be reduced by promoting the taste of fat in foods to the point that we're liable to go "eewwww" more readily.

That's a thought with some appeal. Professor Robert Winston – he of the entertaining books and documentaries on our bodies, minds and instincts – would have us remember that our hankering for fatty, often unhealthy food, was formed millions of years ago, because laying down fat was the perfect way to ensure against times when food, in this uncertain world, was scarce.

Our ancestors craved foods high in calories and rich infat. That's why they tended to survive when those whodidn't were more prone to dying and leaving no descend-ants.

Gradually, the craving for calories became instinctive.

You could get really depressed with the thought that you're somehow hard-wired for fatty foods, but here the professor has some better, balancing, news.

He says we also instinctively know what is safe to eat and what is not.

Our tongue, with its thousands of taste buds, lets us know what to swallow and what to spit out. Feelings of disgust have helped keep us safe for hundred of generations.

Cutely, among the ridiculous number of diets out there, there's one called the paleo-diet. That's right. Eat like a caveman.

This is assuming that during the Paleolithic era, which came before our early ancestors had sussed out the benefits of domesticating crops and animals, they ate unprocessed natural foods, lean meats, nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables.

The trouble with that, as others point out, is that the paleo diet rejects dairy and grains, for which many people (not all) believe there's still a good deal to be said.

So roll on the day when it is easier to eschew great quantities of fatty food because our sense of taste springs to our defences. That's the sort of diet some of us could live with.

- © Fairfax NZ News