Have you noticed some things you used to like don’t taste as good anymore or viceversa? We bring you everything we know about the psychology behind taste. Yes, your mind plays a big part, not just your palate.
Close your eyes and think through the whole process of anticipating, picking up, biting down, chewing, tasting and swallowing your food. Pretty awesome, right? Now think about your favorite food from childhood. Is it the same? If not, how is it different from your current favorite? Is it entirely different? Is it kind of similar?
Now think of your least favorite food. Something you can’t even smell or stand to bring near your lips because it’s so repulsive. Has that changed since childhood? Any chance your current favorite was your least favorite when you were small?
Taste is such an intricate sensory experience, one we perhaps don’t pay enough attention to, considering how much it can transform over a lifetime and how instinctive the action of eating is. If you’ve recently converted to the beets club (after hating them most of your life) or suddenly find yourself enjoying snails and have no idea why, keep reading for a possible explanation.
Taste, while experienced most pronouncedly in the mouth, is the product of activity happening in the sensors and cells of the physical body, neurochemical activation and memory, and it depends greatly on our sense of smell, hence why when we are sick or with a stuffy nose you can barely taste anything.
There are five basic categories of taste: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami (otherwise known as savory). Taste buds are the hardworking receptors that communicate to our brain what we’ve just placed on our tongues. They identify specific chemicals in foods, then analyze the overall profile, and send signals to the brain that are translated as “sweet,” “salty,” etc.
It’s important to clarify that flavor and taste are not the same thing. Sugar, a taste, and cherry, a flavor, are detected using different sensory systems. Taste is experienced via the gustatory (“taste”) receptors, the taste buds; meanwhile, flavor is experienced through the olfactory “smell” receptors. Having a compromised sense of smell can impact your experience of a food. You may still experience sweetness when drinking the juice from the cherry, but you might find it more difficult to identify that it came from a cherry.
While the majority of our taste buds are located in the bumps on our tongues, there are also receptors on the roof of the mouth, on the epiglottis and in the throat. They all work as a team to send signals to the digestive system to help the body use ingested nutrients most effectively.
The body has evolved to identify each of these to ensure adequate ingestion of a range of foods and nutrients. For example, recent studies of the biochemistry of taste have revealed that a separate receptor exists to identify glutamate, an amino acid present in proteins, which gives food a strong umami taste. The study suggests that this receptor may have evolved to ensure humans seek out and ingest enough protein. Similarly, salty foods signal the body that they contain sodium, an essential nutrient for survival that can be difficult to find in nature.
The average person has 10,000 taste buds at birth, which are gathered in the papillae (little bumps) on the tongue. Each papilla can have 1 to 700 taste buds, with each bud containing 50-80 specialized cells that work in concert to identify tastes.
A supertaster, or someone who is extra sensitive to subtle tastes and chemical combinations, might have twice as many taste buds, while below-average tasters may have just 5,000. The combination and activation of taste buds and their individual specialized cells also varies from person to person, and affects the intensity of taste you experience.
Think again on your preferences from childhood. Did you tend to gravitate towards sugary, creamy, salty or generally non-vegetable foods? You’re not the only one. As children, we are super sensitive to taste for two reasons: it helps us avoid potential toxins, which is why dark green leafy veggies taste extra bitter, and it helps us be finely attuned to sugar, which we’ll express a strong preference for. As in fruit, sweetness signals the body that a food is likely to be high in nutrients and energy, which the human child is evolved to seek out to increase their chances of survival. For the same reasons, children also have a heightened sense of smell.
The experience
The shaping of taste preferences begins in the womb and continues throughout the rest of our lives, based largely on what we’re exposed to and how we associate with those early food experiences.
Think of the young kids you know and how they are fed at home. The kids eating broccoli and tofu like broccoli and tofu; those being fed sugary cereal and Doritos will prefer those. The same goes for culturally specific spices like coriander, cumin and Chinese Five Spice.
For almost any new food, especially those with unique or complex combinations of tastes, there is a window of waiting before the body learns to accept it. There is a biological imperative that explains this “waiting period of acquisition.” Basically, this is your chance to assess a food and rule out intolerance, allergy or toxins. When coupled with emotional acceptability (the food makes us feel good), situational acceptability (the food is experienced in a situation that feels enjoyable or safe) and physiological acceptability (the food did not cause digestive upset or an allergic reaction), we can learn to appreciate a food.
Perhaps during no other time of life than pregnancy are changes in taste preference most notable, and we don’t just mean pickles and ice cream. Studies have shown that pregnant women have a decreased ability to taste salt in food. In fact, they preferred foods with a significantly higher salt content than non-pregnant women. These studies suggested that the body has a specific mechanism to increase salt intake during pregnancy. If this is the case, other hormonal fluctuations or changes in the body’s balance might change taste, too.
Basal cells develop into new taste receptor cells every week or two (10 days on average). Our taste buds decrease as we age, which means that your perception of taste changes at different stages of life. The foods you love as an adult may differ from those you love as a child. That’s why if you stick to what you hated and loved as a kid you’re just going with what your taste was years ago and what you got used to eat; maybe you try what you disliked then and now you like it, we need to update that list too every now and then.
Registered dietitian Katie Jordanhazy explained that every cell in the body regenerates every seven to 10 years, but taste buds change every two weeks. That doesn’t mean your favorite meal will taste totally different two weeks from now.
“There are many factors that play a part in how we perceive taste, like how food is presented, its smell, its texture, who we eat with, how familiar that food is to us, etc. Along those lines, the more we are exposed to a food, the duller the flavors can get and going without for a while can reset that.”
She said that’s why going without sweets for a while can make them taste more enjoyable when you indulge again.
But as far as food preferences? Don’t give your taste buds all the credit. It’s your brain doing the talking.
“The taste buds are receptors to send signals to our brains, but, ultimately, our brains make the decision on whether or not we like a food. Luckily for our bodies, the brain can always be trained.”
In conclusion, taste buds don’t change every seven years. They change every two weeks, but there are factors other than taste buds that decide whether you like or not a certain food. It’s possible to retrain your palate; this is good news for those trying to add more vegetables and healthy foods you usually don’t eat or like to your diet for health reasons, maybe soon it won’t taste that bad!
What we prefer early on and what we come to prefer later in life will vary by person, experience and palate. But we won’t know how we’ve changed if we don’t try new foods. The good news is that we can train our palate to like what we would like it to, especially if we have an external motivator to try it, like the cute person from the gym who keeps asking you to go for sushi even though you can’t stand raw fish, or the ones trying to add beets and greens they don’t like but know they’re good for you.
As we age, we’re more likely to consciously try new foods with the intention of enjoying them, as food and enjoyment become more a matter of mind and memory than physiological experience (which might explain your childlike friend who still refuses to eat salad). According to the Monell Chemical Senses Center, the biggest predictor of liking something is not so much sensitivity to taste than motivation to like it.
For instance, think back to being eight years old and hating coffee. The smell, the flavor, the very sound of the can of grounds being opened—pretty gross, right? This is one of those flavors, not dissimilar to bitter leafy greens or pungent red onions, that is only liked with repeated consumption. Usually, to begin enjoying these, we need to temper them with milk and sugar (or brown sugar and butter or salsa and guacamole, as the case may be with the latter two). This is how they become “acquired” tastes. Combining them with other familiar tastes, or with situations that are in themselves enjoyable, reinforces the enjoyment factor.
You can train your taste buds to prefer different flavors, including those you didn’t like as a younger person, with those five to 10 repeated exposures. Plus, with age comes information and education. That kale-touting, Brussels sprouts-loving holistic food coach you know could easily have been a potato chip, Ring Ding junkie 10 years ago, but through education and an active process of learning to like more nutritious things, may have adjusted her preferences. When we start to learn which foods feel best in our bodies and which are unhealthy for us, we begin to base our food decisions on these qualifiers, rather than strictly on taste. As we shift away from high-sugar, high-salt foods of our younger years, our tastes will adapt to what’s most consistent. When the body isn’t flooded with fructose and artificial sweeteners, things like carrots and beets can start to taste extra sweet.
We can encourage the body to prefer these more natural tastes—with their built-in nutritional benefits—by shifting our diet to simpler but still delicious foods. We can also use repeated exposure and motivators like good health and a varied diet to retrain our buds and, ultimately, our eating habits.
This is why we always encourage people to be more adventurous when it comes to food, broader horizons make way to a bigger list of things you like hence more nutrients and tolerance for more foods. Maybe you tried it years ago and didn’t like it, the way it was cooked may have to do with that, the flavors complementing didn’t work for you, so many reasons could explain why you didn’t like it.
In my case I despise beets with all my guts but I’m aware how good they are for you so I’m always trying to train myself to like it, I’ve been trying my whole life. I had tried them in so many different ways and never got to like them, that’s until I tried the chips a few years ago, with a good dip I can sit and eat a whole bucket of beet chips. I can’t even believe it myself how good they taste to me that way, any other way to me is like eating a handful of dirt. For now, that’s the only way I enjoy eating beets, hopefully in a near future I can stand it in a more healthy way like in a salad instead of fried. You can train yourself towards the side you wish to go, it might take time and many attempts but you can get there only by experiencing and trying new things in different ways more than one time. If you got healthy kids with no sensory issues and such — I know it can be really difficult— start them young so they’re not afraid of trying new foods and don’t grow old only eating chicken nuggets because they were afraid to try anything new. Life it’s all about experiences.