Welcome back to Healthy Innovations! 👋
No new issue this week as I am spending time on a small, remote Greek island with very patchy internet. 🏝️
Kalimera from beautiful Alonissos in the Sporades!
So, instead here are 4 issues from the Healthy Innovations archives that you may have missed and a new Weird & Wonderful story.
Weird and wonderful
🎵 Your playlist might season your food. Researchers at the University of Oslo have discovered that music literally changes how food tastes – and the effect shows up in the brain. In a study published in Scientific Reports this month, participants tasted sweet and sour solutions while listening to music composed to evoke matching flavours. Sweet soundtracks featured soft, legato harmonies; sour ones used sharper, more dissonant tones. Brain scans showed that pairing congruent sound and taste produced stronger activity in taste-processing and sensorimotor regions than taste alone – and sweet music made the solutions measurably more pleasant to consume.
The effect on actual intensity – how sweet or sour something tasted – was modest. But pleasantness is no small thing in clinical nutrition, where getting patients to eat enough of the right foods is often the real battle. The next frontier in dietary compliance might not be a new formulation, it might be the playlist.
Image created using Canva AI
Thank you for reading the Healthy Innovations newsletter!
Keep an eye out for next week’s issue, where I will highlight the healthcare innovations you need to know about.
Have a great week!
Alison ✨
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