Gastrophysics in the brain and body

In my view, the new field of gastrophysics should include psychological, psychophysical and neuroscientific considerations in order to truly address fundamental problems related to human consumption of foods, no matter whether these are related to questions of pleasure and satisfaction, or are more concerned with health issues [1-3]. These fields, on the other hand, being mostly phenomenological and with very little predicting power, could greatly benefit from inspiration from theory and simulation of complex physical (and other) systems, as exercised mostly by physicists.At the symposium, The Emerging Science of Gastrophysics (Copenhagen, August 27–28, 2012) Peter Barham suggested that gastronomy relates to gastrophysics in the same way that astronomy relates to astrophysics, the latter explaining the phenomena observed in the former. I fully agree with this view and hope that ‘gastrophysics’ will provide impetus for less phenomenology and more explanation and prediction in the psychological and neuroscientific areas that deal with food behaviour. In this paper, four groups of problems will be briefly described, which are very open and very relevant to ‘gastrophysics’.Even though ‘flavour is in the brain’ [4], many more body and brain processes contribute to hunger, satiety, satisfaction and well-being after a meal [5-7]. A well-known effect, sensory specific satiety (SSS), describes that ‘liking’ of a food drops as intake increases and obviously plays a role in controlling the variety of food intake [8-10]. Despite extensive literature on SSS, any precise theory for prediction of ‘transfer effects’ (from one food to another) or for the number of sensory dimensions necessary to capture the effects has still to be formulated. The same applies to effects of induced sensory specific desire (SSD), which describes the non-random desire for other foods the eating of a given food induces [11]. SSDs might depend entirely on the food culture in which a measurement takes pla