_Īn average adult taster might have 10,000 taste buds in his or her mouth. As we age, our taste buds stop regenerating, and our sense of smell dulls. Sadly for the rest of us, our physiology is working against us on nearly every front. The bad news? Part of that may be because our sense of taste is slowly dying. The good news is that we won't necessarily be addicted to sugar forever. "And tasting sweet is the evolutionary symbol of calories." "It would stand as a tremendous evolutionary advantage for children to be able to quickly identify sources of calories," says Robin Dando, researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Food Sciences in the Department of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. Sweetness is nature's shorthand for high-energy foods. Until very recently in human history, children needed every bit of energy they could get to grow into adulthood, meaning that their palates are largely geared to energy-efficient foods until they hit adolescence. Which makes for an annoyingly hyperactive evening but actually makes a lot sense in the larger scheme of things. What about kids' notorious sweet tooths? Studies confirm what anyone who's ever babysat already knows, that given free rein with sugar kids will eat the stuff straight from the bowl. Pregnant women also become more sensitive to bitterness (and less sensitive to salt, addressing their increased needs for sodium). Thank evolution, which gifted humans with the enhanced ability to avoid danger while they're most vulnerable. But _some researchers say kids are super-powered when it comes to taste-_particularly bitterness, which is nature's skull-and-crossbones warning label for potential toxins. In fact, children are ultra-sensitive when it comes to their senses, especially to colors and texture. You can say we nearly all start off with superhero powers. Spicy heat, on the other hand, involves a chemical short-circuit in our thermal detectors, and isn't considered a taste.) Our age is a major factor in how our brains read, or misread, all those signals. (There's growing support for the idea that fat is a distinct taste, too other candidates include soapy and metallic. When you bite into a luscious red tomato, you're interpreting a dizzying array of signals-physical, neurochemical, memory-based-that ultimately help you decide whether you like tomatoes, or what combination of the five fundamental tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, or umami) comes through for you. If you've ever introduced an infant to a new flavor of baby food, you've already been caught up in the mystery of why a particular human being likes or hates a specific food. It's a given: Our taste in food changes as we get older. Though we may not all have worshiped so fervently at the altar of sugar, nearly all humans graduate from a childhood love of sweets to more complex flavors as adults, and then again to different palates as seniors. I quickly get overwhelmed."īaldwin's story is probably a familiar one. "I just think the preference for sweets has gone way down. "If given a choice between a sweet and a bag of chips, I'll take the bag of chips every time," she says. "It was definitely a way of life," says Baldwin, now a 31-year-old freelance illustrator in Brooklyn.īut as she grew older, she grew disillusioned with her first love, sugar. Cat's sweet tooth was so notorious her mother had secret spots to hide candy around the house. When Easter came around, she wasn't satisfied with finishing off her own basket of sweets and would raid her brother's. She was the evil mastermind behind the periodic, mysterious disappearances of entire tubs of cake frosting from the kitchen cabinets. When she ate candy bars, she had to have three in one go. She saved up her allowance for Pop-Tarts and soda.
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