Effect of Pulsed or Continuous Delivery of Salt on Sensory Perception Over Short Time Intervals

Abstract

Salt in the human diet is a major risk factor for hypertension and many countries have set targets to reduce salt consumption. Technological solutions are being sought to lower the salt content of processed foods without altering their taste. In this study, the approach was to deliver salt solutions in pulses of different concentrations to determine whether a pulsed delivery profile affected sensory perception of salt. Nine different salt profiles were delivered by a Dynataste device and a trained panel assessed their saltiness using Time-Intensity and single score sensory techniques. The profile duration (15 s) was designed to match eating conditions and the effects of intensity and duration of the pulses on sensory perception were investigated. Sensory results from the profiles delivered in either water or in a bouillon base were not statistically different. Maximum perceived salt intensities and the area under the Time-Intensity curves correlated well with the overall perceived saltiness intensity despite the stimulus being delivered as several pulses. The Overall Saltiness Scores for profiles delivering the same overall amount of sodium were statistically not different from one another suggesting that, in this system, pulsed delivery did not enhance salt perception but the overall amount of salt delivered in each profile did affect sensory perception.

Enhancing saltiness in emulsion based foods

“…With respect to saltiness perception, success has been shown to be mixed depending on the time scale of the experiment. Spiking salt concentration within a delivery period of 15 s had no effect on saltiness perception and overall saltiness perception depended on the overall delivered amount of salt [31]. A 30 s long delivery period on the other hand was shown to increase salt perception based on short and intense stimulus delivery periods [30].…”

“…For liquid foods this approach can only be realized by encapsulating the stimulant and facilitating release during oral processing. Whereas design of suitable food microstructures remains a challenge, the hypothesis of increased taste perception by temporal changes of tastant concentration using pulsed delivery systems has been tested for sweetness [29] and saltiness perception [20,30,31]. With respect to saltiness perception, success has been shown to be mixed depending on the time scale of the experiment.…”

Frequency-Amplitude Cross Interaction during Pulsatile Taste Delivery Using Gustometers

“…Dispersion of the data points is due to numerical errors during discretization of time and space. Conditions from different systems available in the literature are plotted in open symbols: Burseg et al (2010) (circles), Meiselman and Halpern (1973) (triangles), and Morris et al (2009) (squares).…”

“…Having validated the scaling behavior with our simulations, we add to the graph simulations based on parameters used in three published studies (Meiselman and Halpern, 1973; Morris et al, 2009; Burseg et al, 2010). Divining exact parameters from such published studies is often difficult since potential modifications in either length L or radius R of the pipes are not always apparent to the reader.…”

“…To establish the parameters of such dynamics, one often uses a liquid delivery system, named gustometer , to deliver dynamically changing concentrations (at a frequency ω) of chemicals to an assessor, rating either dynamically the taste intensity (TI) (Morris et al, 2009, 2010) or giving a global score to the sequence presented. Recently, Le Révérend et al (2013) demonstrated that in mouth mixing of the different pulses was likely to occur, damping those dynamics at the taste cell/receptor level.…”