Bacon-lovers wailed and gnashed their teeth last week when processed meats were declared carcinogenic, but that’s not the half of it. Here are five recent scientific developments that will have an enormous impact on the way people eat.



The WHO v red meat

Eating meat is now murder for all involved, according to the World Health Organisation. Photograph: Denis Doyle/Getty Images

The World Health Organisation announced last week that processed meats were now considered category 1 carcinogens alongside alcohol and cigarettes, but it’s the footnote to that story that will have bigger consequences for the future of our diets. It labelled all red meat a category 2A carcinogen, and from the WHO that is BIG.



All the commercials we grew up with touting the iron content and health benefits of lean red meat aren’t going to be quite the same if they have to add “and will probably give you cancer” at the end. Health-conscious paleo dieters may even want to rethink their obsession with grass-fed beef, or risk prioritising their summer beach bodies over avoiding bowel cancer.

For most of us (myself included), the taste of a good steak or chop is enough to make us not worry too much about ill health effects, but still, after decades of red meat clawing its way into first-world life as an everyday food, the case against it is building faster than ever.

The fat taste

Say hello to oleogustus. That’s the proposed name for the “fat taste” that looks set to be added to salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami to take the number of basic human tastes to six.

The idea that humans can taste fat may seem straightforward, but most of what we associate with fat is its texture or aroma. That most of us can taste it without those other aspects is a big deal. Oleogustus gives us the delicious, morish taste of butter and it helps us tell if oils have turned rancid.

Still not impressed? Well, the last time we added to our list of basic tastes was more than 100 years ago, when Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda discovered umami, the savoury “fifth taste” that revolutionised the food industry from potato chips to stock cubes.

Oleogustus probably won’t be as revolutionary as umami, but it might lead to better-tasting butter, or more convincing natural or artificial flavours. It might give us richer, creamier-tasting milk, or even Willy Wonka-esque pills that taste like a three-course dinner.

Your microbiome

A gutful of good health: a probiotic yoghurt drink, packed with beneficial bacteria. Photograph: Anna Quaglia/Alamy

If you’ve ever felt not quite yourself, it might be because, scientifically speaking, you’re actually not. Everyone carries around billions of bacterial cells in their stomach and intestines – some bad, but many good – and these cells substantially outnumber our own human ones.

Together they are known as our microbiome, and there’s a growing consensus in science that they plays an enormous role in our health. Irrespective of how healthy we try to be, our microbiome may be responsible for whether we are skinny or fat, how prone we are to diabetes, or our food allergies. A course of antibiotics you took as a child to fix a simple lurgy might have inadvertently knocked about your gut bacteria and set you up for a lifetime of weight gain and health problems.

The more important the microbiome becomes, the less we will want bacteria-killing preservatives, and we will probably want to return to more traditional fermented foods common in relatively healthy countries such as Japan and Korea. It may even mean a huge boom in supercharged probiotics. Imagine a daily glass of bacteria-filled milk that could help you lose weight or manage serious illnesses such as diabetes or heart disease.

GMO safety

Since their introduction to our food systems in 1996, genetically modified organisms have been controversial. Most opposition has been around the idea that we don’t know enough about the long terms effects of GMOs to consider them safe.

In late 2014, a study at the University of California, Davis, analysed 29 years of data from more than 100 billion livestock animals eating trillions of meals of GMO feed. It broadly concluded that GMO feed was safe and nutritionally identical to non-GMO feed.

Of course this was not a study on humans, but up to 90% of GMOs produced are used as animal feed, so it is hugely relevant. The study further suggested there were no adverse affects from humans who consumed meat and other products from the GMO-fed animals.

Whether you consider this to be conclusive proof that GMOs are safe or not, it’s a huge step towards eroding the fear that we don’t know enough about them.

This may make it less likely that GMO-containing foods will be subject to mandatory labelling and more likely that we will see more GMO foods for human consumption. And if we get really comfortable with GMOs, who knows? Anyone for glow-in-the-dark fish and chips?

Throwing out the ‘food pyramid’

Many of us grew up being taught some version of the “food pyramid” – a simple visual guide that promoted breads and cereals as the foundation of a healthy diet, with fats at the pointy end. It wasn’t perfect, but was persuasive for generations of people striving for a healthier diet.



Now the 20th century food pyramid is a relic of the past. The US dumped its pyramid for the MyPlate guide in 2011. Australia’s Healthy Eating Pyramid has undergone a drastic revision, with fruit and vegetables replacing carbohydrates as the basis of a balanced meal.

Australia’s Healthy Eating Pyramid has been revised, with fruit and vegetables replacing carbohydrates on the bottom tier. Photograph: Brett Stevens/Cultura/Corbis

In June, Public Health England’s scientific advisory committee on nutrition released the results of its seven-year study into carbohydrates and health. Those results put sugar squarely in the crosshairs, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that rather than fat, the more problematic elements of our diet involve refined sugars and other processed carbohydrates. It has already prompted calls for amendments to the UK’s Eatwell Plate.

The rise of anti-sugar thinking has all but obliterated the influence of low-fat-high-sugar “health” foods of the late 20th century, but our dependence on processed carbohydrates has been much harder to shake. How we end up doing so may well be the most significant impact on the way humans eat that we have seen in a thousand years.

Substituted dishes such as cauliflower “rice”, zucchini “spaghetti” and bunless hamburgers mimic the form, if not the function, of a traditional carbohydrate-based diet. But these stop-gap dishes are unlikely to persist for too long, and as we become more comfortable with reducing the influence of refined carbohydrates in our diet, traditional foods that go back centuries may find themselves out of date.



So much of the way we think about food is with carbohydrates at the base. Pasta, rice, bread and potatoes were the foundation for our idea of health, but also for our culinary culture.



What will modern Italian food look like if pasta is marginalised? What about a packed lunch if sandwiches are considered less than ideal? Reducing refined carbohydrates isn’t just for health nuts any more, and that means big changes are coming to the very core of our cuisine.

