Hey everybody, I'm Ben.
And today's question is, how to artificial flavors work?
Many of the processed foods that we buy today
come with an ingredient label that lists artificial flavors
as one of the key ingredients.
Artificial flavors are simply chemical mixtures
that mimic a natural flavor in some way.
Anything that we smell has to contain
some sort of volatile chemical.
The chemical that evaporates and enters a person's nose.
The evaporated chemical comes in contact
with the sensory cells in the nose and it activates them.
So in the case of taste, a chemical
has to activate the taste buds.
Taste is actually kind of a crude sense.
It's not the most sophisticated of our abilities.
There are only four values that you can really
register on your tongue.
It's sweet, salty, sour, and bitter.
And the nose however, can sense thousands of different odors.
Therefore, most artificial flavors
have both a taste and a smell component.
Any natural flavor is usually really complex.
It's got dozens or even hundreds of chemicals interacting
to create a unique taste slash smell.
As it turns out, many flavors particularly flavors of fruit,
have just one or maybe a few dominant chemical components
that carry the bulk of this taste, smell signal.
Many of these chemicals are called esters.
For example, the ester called octaacetate
is a fundamental component in orange flavor.
The ester called, isomylacetate is a fundamental component
of the banana flavor.
If you add these esters to a product,
the product will taste to varying degrees like an orange
or like a banana.
To make more realistic flavors, you
add other chemicals in the correct portions
to get closer, and closer, and closer, and closer
to the real thing.
And it's interesting that they normally
mix to create known tastes.
People make artificial grape, cherry, orange, banana,
apple, et cetera.
But it's very rare to mix up something
that no one has ever tasted before.
However, this can and does occasionally happen.
Juicy fruit gum.
If you ever tried juicy fruit gum and you've wondered,
what is that taste?
It's a made up.
There's no like juicy fruit fruit at all.
It's just the gum.
And as a lot of people will probably point out and notice,
these artificial flavors don't always coincide one to one
with the flavor of the actual thing.
A lot of people might love grapes,
but hate grape flavored candy or soda.
And that's it, that's how artificial flavors work.
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