This is an extract from In Defence of Bread by nutrition expert Professor Mike Gibney, who passed away in 2024. The new posthumously published book is about ultra-processed foods and inconsistent public health advice about their role in our diets.

THERE IS NO food in existence on this planet, and no food that will ever be invented, that might be described as “hyper-palatable”. Quite simply, palatability is not an integral or universal property of a food, like the calorie content, or amount of fat. It is the property of the relationship between the food and the eater. Furthermore, if palatability is a measure of the interaction of the eater and the eaten, when does a food or diet switch from being merely palatable to hyper-palatable? What defines this change?

Let’s conjecture a little on the term “hyper-palatability”. Does it make the eater eat more and, if so, how? When eating hyper-palatable foods, do consumers continue eating to a level and rate beyond normal, making the food hyper-palatable for that eater? Do they eat the food at a normal rate and level but do so more frequently throughout the day in the form of snacking? Does it mean constant nibbling leading to over-consumption?

At what point do all these routes of excess intake end, and are these cessation points universally governed by a single mechanism or by diverse control mechanisms? How does this excess consumption stop and why? Does a hyper-palatable food override normal regulation of food intake and what part of the complex regulation of food intake does it disrupt most?

Palatability is, in itself, a psychological construct as I have learned to understand that, for example, the term “handsome” is also such a construct. We get it: Bruce Springsteen would generally be considered more handsome than Donald Trump. But how would you start to measure that? Is there a universal preference for Springsteen’s ears compared to Trump’s? No, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

However, NOVA [a method of food........

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