Sensory interventions to improve food intake
The association between sensory performance and BMI or body weight and the increased risk of a monotonous diet due to decreased sensory-specific satiety in older age highlights the need for appropriate interventions.Flavour enhancement of products (yoghurt-like snack and smoked ham), believed to compensate for age-related chemosensory losses,did not affect intake or resulted in a decreased intake as compared to regular products in 6-day home-use tests.What is more, when the participants’ actual olfactory performance was taken into account, responses to flavourenhancement strategies were inconsistent for the two product types.who evaluated the effects of flavour enhancement of tomato soup using a combination of monosodium glutamate and celery powder,also failed to observe an increased in intake by older persons either with or without olfactory impairment.So, flavour enhancement seems unsuccessful not only in increasing food liking in older people (as discussed in Section 3.1) but also in improving food intake in independently living older people.
The misfit theory postulated by might be able to explain the failure of flavour enhancement to increase either food liking or food intake in older persons.
According to the theory, an odour or a flavour will only lead to spontaneous perception if there is a misfit with the expectation towards it.
In humans,losses in the sensory perception of a food are probably not noticed as a misfit,
whereas any extra flavour addition (e.g. flavor enhancement or enrichment) might well be perceived as a misfit and in turn even disliked.
Consequently, this might at the same time explain why flavour enhancement is not a successful strategy to increase initial food liking or food intake in vital seniors and might even have disruptive effects when it is either too strong or of a slightly different sensory nature.
Another explanation for the failure of flavour enhancement to increase food liking or food intake may come from various neuro-imaging studies,