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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff front House, stuff works dot Com

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Speaker 1: where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question,

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Speaker 1: how do artificial flavors work? Many of the processed foods

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Speaker 1: that you buy today come with an ingredient label that

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Speaker 1: lists artificial flavors as one of the key ingredients. Artificial

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Speaker 1: flavors are simply chemical mixtures that mimic a natural flavor

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Speaker 1: in some way. Anything that we smell has to contain

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Speaker 1: some sort of volatile chemical, a chemical that evaporates and

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Speaker 1: enters a person's nose. The evaporated chemical comes in contact

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Speaker 1: with sensory cells in the nose and activates them. In

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Speaker 1: the case of taste, a chemical has to activate the

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Speaker 1: taste buds. Taste is a fairly crude sense. There are

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Speaker 1: only four values that your tongue can register sweet, salty, sour,

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Speaker 1: and bitter, while the nose consense thousands of different odors. Therefore,

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Speaker 1: most artificial flavors have both a taste and a smell component.

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Speaker 1: Any natural flavor is normally quite complex, with dozens or

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Speaker 1: hundreds of chemicals interacting to create the taste slash smell.

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Speaker 1: But it turns out that many flavors, particularly fruit, flavors

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Speaker 1: have just one or a few dominant chemical components that

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Speaker 1: carry the bulk of the taste slash smell signal. Many

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Speaker 1: of these chemicals are called ester's. For example, the esther

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Speaker 1: called octal acetate is a fundamental component in orange flavor.

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Speaker 1: The esther called isa amyl acetate is a fundamental component

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Speaker 1: of banana flavor. If you add these esters to a product,

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Speaker 1: the product will taste to some degree like an orange

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Speaker 1: or a banana. To make more realistic flavors, you add

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Speaker 1: other chemicals in the correct proportions to get closer and

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Speaker 1: closer to the real thing. You can do that by

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Speaker 1: trial and error or by chemical analysis of the real thing.

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Speaker 1: There are hundreds of chemicals known to be flavoring agents.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting that they are normally mixed to create known taste.

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Speaker 1: People make artificial grape, cherry, orange, banana, apple, et cetera flavors,

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Speaker 1: but it is very rare to mix up something that

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Speaker 1: no one has ever tasted before. But it can and

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Speaker 1: does happen occasionally. For example, juicy fruit gum is an

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Speaker 1: example that's a made up flavor. For more on this

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Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works?

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Speaker 1: Dot com