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When it comes to hot and spicy, my father-in-law can't get much past table pepper. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, thinks everything, even eggs, taste better with a dash of Tabasco. My wife won't eat movie popcorn. It's too salty to be edible, she says. But my friend, Bill, rains the salt shaker over absolutely everything. Even if he hasn't tasted it first! What accounts for these variations in taste? And what gives some people such a high demand, or at least a tolerance, for tastes that others simply can't abide? New research out of Berlin may provide an important clue. The new study, published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, seems to indicate that obese children and adolescents, as compared to their lean counterparts, have taste buds that are far less sensitive. Obese children in the study had a significantly more difficult time identifying the different tastes and taste intensity. The researchers suggest that this difference in taste sensitivity may be an explanation for the development of obesity. Now, this small study does not conclusively prove a cause and effect relationship between the diminished sensitivity to taste and obesity. But the implication that dulled taste buds might lead to overeating is hard to miss. And as to how that dulling, or desensitization, might happen, we need look no farther than our own experience to see that our taste buds can be adapted to eating patterns and to particular foods and tastes. Think about that first cup of coffee you ever had. The very first beer you ever drank! That first bite of sauerkraut? Or your first surprise experience with a jalapeño pepper? Odds are you didn't instantly "like" that new food. If you consume any of these today, it's because you persevered, trying them again and again, until your taste buds became habituated, growing eventually to enjoy a now familiar food. While there may be some genetic basis for the variations in human taste sensitivity, there's no question that we can dull our taste buds, and, like the obese participants in the taste study, become poor judges of how sweet, salty, sour, etc., foods actually are. The lack of sensitivity not only leads to eating more, but to requiring more sweetness, for example, for our taste buds to even register "sweet." The fast food and processed food industries are happy to oblige us in perpetuating this cycle of saltier, fatter, and sweeter. . Dr. David Katz, Director of the Yale Prevention Research Center, has taken away the same message from the German study of taste sensitivity that I have, but Katz has more than anecdotal evidence of the malleability of taste preferences. In an article for Huffington Post, he notes that women in the long-running Iowa Women's Health Study acquired aversions to the processed and fast foods they once liked after transitioning to a lower fat, plant-based diet. He describes the easy transitions of his own patients to skim milk, and his own personal experience of finding a commercial Smoothie too sweet to swallow. Most of us can relate. We know vegetarians who report being repulsed by the taste, not just the idea, of meat. We know a converted diet cola drinker who now finds the regular, sweetened beverages intolerable. We've often observed our own, or our children's, gradual evolution from hating a new food to liking it once we'd become familiar with it. But ay, there's the rub! That business of familiarity. "In our own culture," says Katz, we have simply grown familiar with ever more-processed, ever sweeter, ever saltier foods." That familiarity may not be breeding contempt. But it may be breeding obesity. In making our taste buds dull and stupid, we're also making our bodies fat. The good news, though, is that if our taste buds are so impressionable, we can put them in rehab. We can engage in our own deliberate, reverse engineering. There's not much to lose, except pounds, and a lot of health to gain. As Dr. Katz observes, "shifting steadily to more wholesome foods inevitably means reducing the time taste buds spend each day bathing in sugar, salt, and food chemicals." I love the idea of idea of creating smarter, more alert and sensitive taste buds. This is a Food Fight battle I can begin winning today. There's no reason that the foods that are good for me, shouldn't be the ones that taste best, too. Even if it will take a little un-training. Dr. Baldasare lives in Orlando, FL with his beautiful wife and three children. Over the last fifteen years he has helped over 12,000 people get healthy by educating and motivating them to make better choices. He is a frequent guest speaker at the University of Central Florida and Wellness seminars. He is the author of the The Great American Food Fight.
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