How Do We Taste Things?
The Physiology of Taste.
When food is taken into the mouth, tiny particles break off the surface of the food and dissolve into the saliva. The saliva washes down openings in small bumps on the tongue (papillae), reaching the microscopic taste buds within.
Inside the taste buds, chemo-receptor cells detect each of the 5 basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. This information is relayed through the cranial nerves to gustation areas in the brain, where they are processed.
The sense of taste (gustation) works closely with the sense of smell (olfaction). The two processes are actually very similar, but take place in different parts of the body.
Taste (gustation) detects and categorizes water soluble molecules (sometimes called tastants) that dissolve in our saliva and interact chemically with our taste buds.
Smell (olfaction) detects and categorizes airborne molecules that have evaporated from the surface of our food, enter our noses, and then dissolve in the mucosa of the olfactory epithelium, and chemically interact with olfactory nerve cells.
The chemical information from the receptors in the mouth and nose, are passed in the form of electrical impulses through cranial nerves into the brain, where they are combined and processed, resulting in the perception of flavor.
Flavor then, is the combination of taste and aroma. This explains why the flavor of food is so hard to detect when we have colds that clog our noses.
What is Taste-Specific Satiety?
Taste-Specific Satiety refers to the phenomenon by which the first few bites of a delicious food are slightly more delectable to us than the second few bites, which in turn give us more pleasure than the third few bites, and so on.
In theory, this process would eventually cause us to reach the point at which an additional bite of the food gives us zero taste enjoyment, a point called Total Taste-Specific Satiety (TTSS).
Beyond the point of TTSS, even our favorite foods completely lose their appeal. Why? Because specific chemo-sensors in our taste buds have become hyper-saturated. Electrical impulses shoot from the taste buds through the cranial nerves to the brain, causing us to lose all desire to eat that particular food, or anything similar.
A TTSS button?
If there was a button we could magically press to put ourselves in TTSS, losing weight would be a breeze. Craving? Hit the TTSS button - craving gone. Temptation? Hit the button - gone.
Unfortunately, in real life, reaching TTSS is a bit more complex.
Crossing into Total Taste-Specific Satiety (TTSS)
In the normal eating process, we rarely reach a state of TTSS. You see, every time you empty your mouth by swallowing, you allow your taste buds to begin to reset. Or worse, you take a drink, which rinses them clean. Or you take a bite of a different food, which introduces a completely different taste, and sends your taste buds back to square one.
Skinny Pods and TTSS
Skinny Pods were developed to help dieters with a sweet tooth reach TTSS quickly and easily. With Skinny Pods, instead of resisting your cravings for sweets, you'll over-indulge them, hyper-saturating your taste buds with chocolate or candy until your cravings melt away (15 to 20 minutes.)
Skinny Pods' exclusive micro-pore matrix floods your taste buds, but not your stomach, allowing you to reach TTSS while ingesting as little as 67 calories of chocolate, or 36 calories of gummi candies.
What are “Wasted Calories?”
Why do we eat dessert? For the vitamins in cupcakes? No.
We eat dessert for the sheer joy of a delicious taste experience.
But what we don't realize is that it is only the surface area of our food gives us this tasty pleasure, by shedding water-soluble molecules called tastants that mix with our saliva. The tastants enter microscopic openings in the papillae (the little bumps on your tongue) which house the taste buds, which then send a signal to your brain.
Simultaneously, in a chemically similar process, the surface of our food sheds tiny amounts of volatile molecules which invisibly vaporize into gas, and enter our noses where they are detected in the olfactory sinus as specific pleasant odors.
The taste and odor signals are processed together in the brain, and a moment later we are smiling and thinking, "Mmmm... chocolate!"
But It is only the surface area of the food in our mouths that provides these pleasures to us.
The rest of the food that we swallow, the internal volume, we never even taste! It is this "internal volume," that we call "wasted calories."
Wasted Calories give us zero taste pleasure, but make up most of the fat, sugar and calories we get from eating desserts.
Wasted Calories make us overeat.
Because wasted calories never touch the taste receptors of the mouth, they don't trigger any of the mechanisms in your brain that say, "okay, I've had enough of that food now," a process known as "Taste-Specific Satiety." That's why when you eat wasted calories, you need to eat so much more in order to feel satisfied.
Skinny Pods' micro-pore matrix eliminates wasted calories.
The Pods' unique patent-pending design increases the surface area of food in your mouth by more than a thousand fold, eliminating wasted calories.
Eating With Skinny Pods Is Easy
Eating with a Skinny Pod is similar to the way you'd eat an ice cream bar. Nibble. Savor. Use your tongue to swirl your dessert around in your mouth. To use, simply place a portion of your dessert in the Skinny Pod, and snap it to its lavender ice cream cone style holder.