#tasteperception

By Rio Aquino

Every after the clock strikes twelve during New Year’s eve, I have always made a promise to myself that this year, I would start regulating my body weight. Apparently, every year, I always fail to make progress. One day, I realized that my pants no longer fit! Have you ever experienced that before? Im telling you, it was horrible. 

However, my mom told me that instead of feeling bad about myself, why shouldn’t I start taking an action. As a person having body weight problems, I know that this is a sensitive topic. If you feel that this article might induce some negativity, then please stop reading now. But if you are curious, then please continue reading until the end, and I assure you that you would learn something.

What makes us eat until our pants don’t fit? Research suggests that there are many factors involved in obesity. Two of the major factors involved seem to be eating habits and physical activity habits. In this article, I gave focus on the food that we eat, specifically on relationships between the body weight, food intake, and taste perception. Does the “actual" taste of the food contribute to weight gain?

According to Donaldson and her coworkers, there is a link between our taste perception and obesity. particularly they reviewed the current studies about the relationship of one’s ability to taste with his/her body mass. But before getting any further, let’s get a little bit technical.

There are five basic taste sensations: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (which is described to be meaty and savory, and is also associated with MSG or monosodium glutamate). A threshold is the minimum amount of stimulus needed for an observer to detect that stimulus. Threshold is related with sensitivity in such a way that if you have a low threshold, you have a high sensitivity.

For example, the minimum amount of sugar needed for you detect that there is indeed a sugar is the sweet threshold. The lower the amount of sugar needed, means that more sensitive you are to sweetness. But if you need more sugar to detect sweetness, it means that you are less sensitive to sweetness.

Obese children reported to have a reduction in sweet and salt threshold, and on the other hand, there was raised sour and bitter threshold. If a person has a low sweet and salt threshold, they are more likely to increase the amount of sugar/ salt in their diet to be able to sense and perceive sweetness and sugar. As well all know, increased food intake leads to weight gain. Instead of ordering a regular sized coke, fries and pizza, they would prefer the super-sized.

Aside from having a low sweet and salty threshold, obese individuals are reported to eat significantly more savory snacks or food that contains MSG than normal-weight children. In addition, obese women were reported to have high intensities of umami perception. However, very little is known about umami, which is why further investigations are required.

Apart from the reported low thresholds that makes them increase to food intake to be able to perceive it well, researches suggest that obese individuals have an increased liking for sweet, salty-and-fatty food. This means that obese individuals may have a higher motivation to eat the food that they like, and has less motivation to stop eating especially when they are paying attention to the taste of the food. In other words, our liking to the food’s taste makes us eat until our pants don’t fit?

But how can we stop over eating? The implications of the researches on taste perception and body weight says that if we alter the taste of a food, it would largely affect the eating behavior of a person. Thus a person’s eating habit is very much involved in weigh gain. Lastly, I hope that you would use this information to improve your eating habit and your attitude towards yourself.

References

Donaldson, L. F., Bennett, L., Baic, S., & Melichar, J. K. (2009). Taste and weight: is there a link?. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 90(3), 800S-803S.