Umami, The Delicious Flavor That Can Be Addictive

Most of us know that there are foods much healthier than a plate of French fries or a bulky hamburger. Still, these delights are often hard to resist. Why? The answer lies in the so-called fifth flavor or umami. It is a taste that captures us and possibly also generates addiction.

Umami foods are not sweet, salty, bitter, or acidic. They are umami, a Japanese word that literally translates ‘tasty’. It is that I do not know what is present in some foods, which makes them appetizing and very pleasant to the palate.

Umami is naturally present in various products such as ham, Parmesan cheese, some shellfish and fish, certain mushrooms and seaweed, etc.

They have artificially introduced it into hundreds of ultra-processed foods. The industry has understood that this flavor attracts and traps, so it is produced in the laboratory and added as an additive to many unhealthy foods.

Flavors and evolution

Human beings are not naturally drawn to certain flavors simply on a whim. Our evolution as a species has led to a preference for the flavors that best satisfy the  survival instinct. Automatically, we are attracted to what contributes most decisively to effective nutrition.

By nature, we tend to reject bitter flavors , as these are particularly characteristic of poisonous or difficult-to-digest products. Something similar happens with acidic products, which in principle generate an alarm that tells us “stop”. In both cases, these are acquired tastes.

A food is salty because it contains minerals and therefore we find it palatable. Much more sweet foods, which contain glucose and this equates to a high caloric value. Breast milk is sweet for that.

The delicious umami flavor

Industrial umami is monosodium glutamate , a compound that contains calcium, sodium, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. It was discovered by the Japanese professor Kikunae Ikeda in 1908. He found it in a seaweed called kombu, which was used to make soup.

He noted that it was a taste that could not be classified within the four classic flavors: bitter, sour, salty or sweet. That is why he named it “the fifth flavor.”

Ikeda himself teamed up with businessman Saburosuke Suzuki and the two brought the product onto the market in the form of a seasoning. It is currently a large multinational that sells its products in 130 countries and dominates 22% of the seasoning market.

Ikeda’s success was in discovering that umami was basically glutamic acid. This is one of the amino acids that make up proteins. He combined this with sodium and obtained monosodium glutamate, the base of the seasoning.

The point is that when you eat something with umami, specific receptors are activated in the tongue and the brain responds, inducing you to eat more, because the amino acid is essential for life.

However, when it comes to the seasoning itself, the European Food Safety Authority pointed out in 2017 that ingesting more than 30 mg a day can be harmful to health.

The umami and the brain

Neuroscientist Diego Redolar, professor of Psychobiology and researcher at the Cognitive NeuroLab of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), has warned about other effects of umami. It points out that glutamate influences cells in the arcuate nucleus, which is a region of the brain, and causes the mechanisms that inhibit hunger to work poorly.

In other words, what Redolar points out is that, by eating foods with umami, we can continue to feel hunger, instead of satiating it. Likewise, he has pointed out that glutamate activates the reinforcing nervous system, which leads to the need for a behavior to be repeated. In other words, it encourages us to eat more of the same repeatedly.

As we already mentioned, the industry has followed this whole process very closely and, therefore, has introduced monosodium glutamate in thousands of packaged meals and processed foods, such as soups in sachets. In this case the brain is fooled: it thinks it is ingesting the amino acid and protein, but in reality it is only taking its taste.

That’s one of the reasons why some over-processed foods taste great to us and we don’t stop eating them, even though we know they’re not nutritious. The way out is to look for natural umami, which has not been shown to have any contraindication and does involve ingestion of true proteins.