Modelling the human response to saltiness

Abstract

Eating is a complex process with a range of phenomena occurring simultaneously, including fracture, temperature changes, mixing with saliva, flavour and aroma release. Sensory perception as experienced in the oral cavity has a strong effect on the overall acceptability of the food. Thus in an engineering sense one would want to be able to understand and predict phenomena for different food matrices in order to design more palatable foods through understanding food oral processing without the health concerns of adding salt, fat and sugar. In this work we seek to obtain such an understanding for salt release from food matrices and perception viewing the oral processing as a physical/chemical reactor. A set of equations was developed to account for mass balance and transfer. Data required for the model such as effective diffusivity and mixing times were obtained from the chemical engineering literature. The model predictions compared favourably with published TI data, managing to capture key phenomena including response to pulsed salt release. The model was used to predict response to a range of food matrices and indicated that for solids and thickened liquid food products there is the potential to modulate consumer response by pulsing the release of sodium.