Taste buds are really important as a study has revealed that people with a diminished ability to taste, prefer more sugar than they wanted in their food, which may put them at risk to gain weight.
The results suggested that for a regular sugary 16-ounce soft drink, a person with a 20 per cent reduction in the ability to taste sweet, crave an extra teaspoon of sugar to reach an optimal level of sweetness as compared to someone with unaltered taste response. lead study author Robin Dando from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York said they found that the more people lost sensitivity to sweetness, the more sugar they wanted in their foods.
The findings indicated that those participants with their taste receptors blocked began to prefer higher concentrations of sugar. This can influence their eating habits to compensate for a lower taste response. The gustatory system may serve as an important nexus in understanding the development of obesity.
