Harvard professor markets new chocolate inhalant
by Sarah Jacobs of Verde
Published June 9, 2010
What if you could devour as much luscious, rich chocolate as your heart desires without gaining a pound or feeling guilty about your health? Well, now you can; or at least that is the premise behind the new chocolate inhalant from the French company, Le Whif.
The organic chocolate-flavored powder is housed in a biodegradable tube, and comes into the mouth and throat when the user breathes in. The idea is to mimic the feeling of eating real chocolate.
The lip-stick sized tube was designed by David Edwards, a Harvard professor of biomedical engineering, with some of his students through ArtScience Labs, an international network of art and design labs. “It’s kind of like smoking chocolate,” Edwards said in an interview with the Cambridge Chronicle.
“Whiffers,” or those who use the inhalent, can experience the taste of chocolate without consuming any fat. Le Whif also contains minimal calories — “less than one per whiff”, according to the Le Whif web site.
This lack of calories and fat make Le Whif ideal for chocolate-loving dieters, who crave the taste but do not want to deal with the adverse health effects of real chocolate.
Le Whif says the company uses particle engineering to ensure the particles are small enough to become airborne but not small enough to be taken into the lungs, so theoretically there are no adverse health effects. Doctor Norman Rizk, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist at Stanford University, says that aerosols like these tend to have a wide distribution of particle sizes and would therefore tend to be deposited in the lung.
“The question is, would that be harmful,” Rizk says. “It depends on the pH, the mass, the structure… On the other hand, particles that truly are more than five microns in size generally will not be deposited in the lung. They will end up in the upper respiratory system — the nose and mouth — and aren’t harmful.”
There, the particles land on the tongue and the epithelium of the nose, where sensors carry the taste and smell to the brain. Rizk says that only a small proportion of the food you put in your mouth actually touches the taste buds. This allows even the tiny amount of chocolate in the Le Whifs to do a fairly good job stimulating your sense of taste in the same way taking a bite of chocolate would.
The inhalants, which were first announced in April of 2009, each cost 1.50 British pounds (about $2.50) and contain enough chocolate powder for around four puffs. They are not widely sold in the United States yet, except over the internet; Americans can buy them online at www.lewhif.com. They are also available at Le LaboShop, Galeries Lafayette and Colette in Paris. The demand for Le Whif is so great that customers trying to buy them online have encountered delays and backorders.
However, some Palo Alto High School students are dubious about the idea. “I think it [inhalable chocolate] is a bad idea,” Paly senior Ruhi Sikri says. “They should keep things the way they are, though it does combine two things I love doing — eating chocolate and breathing. But on the other hand, I like real chocolate. I like eating it; I like holding it. I don’t want to inhale it, period.”
Besides plain chocolate, Le Whif also comes in raspberry, mint, and mango flavors. Recently, the company also came out with a coffee counterpart to their chocolate inhaler. The coffee inhaler also has no fat content, and is almost calorie free just like the plain chocolate Le Whif, but packs a punch of about 100 milligrams of caffeine per puff. This is somewhere between the amount of caffeine in a cup of instant and a double espresso. The news is music to the ears of stressed-out students — anyone looking for a quick caffeine fix for a boost before a test or an extra kick to make it through an all-nighter may decide to make use of Le Whif’s new product.
“On those late nights when you just can’t keep awake to finish all the work, caffeine is always your best friend,” junior Pierre Bourbonnais says.
Le Whif says they will be coming out with more types of inhalable foods in the future, perhaps even full meals. Le Whif’s invention is the “first commercial step toward breathable food” according to ArtScience Labs, and revolutionizes the idea of eating. The implications are enormous. According to Edwards, in the future it may be possible to “eat” three-course meals simply by inhaling.
