This is the reason why we are so addicted to Tony's caramel sea salt

It seems that nowadays every cookie, jar peanut butter, chocolate bar or tub of ice cream has a variant of the popular flavor caramel-sea salt. Thus, lunch here ends for many colleagues with a rice table topped with Nutella and sea salt, gets Tony just can't seem to knock the orange wrapper off the throne and the first homemade cheesecakes with the sweet-salty combo have already been spotted. Somehow, we are very hooked on the sweet-salty sin. But why is that? Science has an explanation for this.

Tony's Chocolonely was the first to come out with the well-known orange bar, Ben & Jerry's quickly followed, and the well-known ice cream brand Häagen-Dazs also added the popular flavor to its assortment. Yet, the addictive flavor combination is not new at all. The mix of sugar, salt, and fat in the form of salted caramel was first brought together by the French chocolatier Henri Le Roux, more than thirty years ago.

The University of Florida tested the salted caramel flavor on 150 lucky participants (where was I at that moment?) and concluded that both a sweet, salty, and fatty taste separately trigger chemicals in the brain that are similar to a shot of heroin. When you combine those three elements that individually possess this property, fireworks occur in your head.

The phenomenon is also known as ‘hedonic escalation’, which means nothing less than ‘out of control pleasure’. So when we take that first bite of that orange wrapper, our brain will crave more after each bite because you keep discovering new flavors in your taste explosion. With other (that blue wrapper for example, yes yes, here speaks an expert) less explosive flavor bombs, you actually have the opposite: ‘hedonic adaptation’, where you (if you're lucky) get enough of the flavor after a while. “Hedonic escalation occurs most often with complex flavors, where a taster is motivated to taste more of the versatile food with each bite,” the scientists explain. That explains why after one bite of that chocolate bar you unfold the wrapper again to devour it completely. It somewhat blocks the way to that bikini body, but hey hey, that’s okay. At least you now know that it’s not just about your willpower.