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Strategies & Market Trends : Ask Vendit Off-Topic Questions -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jill who wrote (6771)	3/20/2005 1:40:57 PM
From: Vendit™	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8752

QQQQ Analysis moving into week of March 21, 2005 themarketwind.com

To: Jill who wrote (6771)	3/20/2005 3:25:20 PM
From: Walkingshadow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8752

I can't see that what they are doing is anything earthshaking. They are barking up the wrong tree, if you ask me. The major public health problems arise not because of any problems with sweet, salty, or bitter flavors, but because fats taste so good to most people. A very prominent geneticist/genomics expert gave a presentation not long ago that I attended. Genomic data mining is fraught with difficulties that tend to compound errors, with the result being that you produce a lot of false positives and false negatives. So they developed a reiterative analytical model that refines potential candidates with increasing stringency. One of the questions they asked had to do with the genetic determinants of cardiovascular disease. In contrast to the hundreds of genes that have been reported to be associated with cardiovascular disease (atherosclerosis), only a small number of genes survived the modelling. Surprisingly---or maybe not so surprisingly----one was a gene encoding a taste receptor, another an olfactory receptor. Hmmmm...... If you ask me, THAT is where the money is. Nobody cares about making bitter medicine taste sweet, or another salt substitute--there are much better ways to control hypertension than sodium restriction. That's why these companies have been around for a while but have not really taken off, IMHO. They are playing to a niche market, ancillary to an industry that is well established with no chance of explosive growth. But if somebody could make fat-free foods that taste like a large order of fries or a big piece of cheesecake, and smell like a juicy steak being barbecued---NOW you're talkin'. T