For some people, it's a best friend. For some people, it's an only friend. Throughout a person's life, food assumes a personal meaning that reaches far beyond hunger. Food advertisers make sure this relationship is constantly remolded and reinforced. Food is the anchor of social events.
Food makes people feel good.
And fatty foods can make people feel very good. Nearly half the population eats no fruit on a given day. The obvious allure of food is taste. A taste bud is a grouping of 50 to 150 cells that are programmed to react to specific flavors. Yet fat, traditionally considered tasteless, can excite most cells on a taste bud, even when there's no flavor around, said Tim Gilbertson, a taste researcher at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center.