• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
nutrition health writer

Thinking Nutrition

For the latest nutrition research and controversies

  • Home
  • About
  • Podcast
  • Blog
    • Allergies
    • Cancer
    • Child Health
    • Collagen
    • Diabetes
    • Eating Well
    • Getting Active
    • Gut Health
    • Heart Health
    • Inflammation
    • Managing Weight
    • Mental Health
    • Mythbusting
    • Nutrition Supplements
    • Women?s Health
  • In the Media
  • Services
  • Contact
  • Search
You are here: Home / Managing Weight / Obesity can reshape our sense of taste

Obesity can reshape our sense of taste

February 12, 2014 by Tim Crowe 1 Comment

taste influences obesity risk
Eat this cake! by Earle Hatsumi. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As surprising as it may sound, for some people the problem of weight gain may lie right on the tip of their tongue.

There are many things that can influence a person’s desire for food. When given a choice between foods, the desire to choose one food over another is closely linked to taste and other sensory signals such as smell and the feel of the food in the mouth.

A very simple hypothesis posed by obesity researchers is that as people gain weight, their taste perception changes. This theory is supported by studies in both animals and humans and suggest that obese people may not detect sweet tastes as well as their lean counterparts. This partly could be because of genetic factors, but also from changes in taste sensitivity as people gain weight.

To support the taste-change hypothesis, showing an actual biochemical change in the functioning of taste receptors would be an important piece of evidence. And that’s just what researchers have done with mice who were fed a high-fat diet over 10 weeks to make them obese.

Using special molecular detection techniques, the researchers could isolate taste cells and study how responsive they were to taste stimuli. Fewer taste cells from the obese mice were sensitive to the effects of sweet tastes. What’s more, the cells that were still responsive to sweetness had a blunting in their response. A similar effect was seen in response to recognition of fatty acids and also the taste of bitterness.

What it all means

This research makes a stronger case for taste changes being either a consequence or a partial cause of obesity. If a person is less able to detect tastes such as sweetness, it may mean they will need to eat more to get the same ‘taste sensation’ they had when they were thinner. Understanding how taste cells are affected by weight gain opens the door for research into ways to ‘reset’ taste sensitivity.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit

Filed Under: Managing Weight Tagged With: obesity, taste, weight gain

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Tania Leishman says

    March 28, 2017 at 7:41 am

    Thanks Tim
    Love reading your blogs….another interesting article

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Connect with Me

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Sign up for Updates

Loading

Most Popular Posts

  • Broccoli is bad for you, like, really toxic bad
  • Lemon water: is it worth the squeeze or just sour hype?
  • Arthritis relief: can collagen supplements help?
  • Collagen supplements: a promising aid in tendon repair
  • Creatine loading shows promise in diabetes

Get the book

Now in its fifth edition, Understanding Nutrition is the leading text used in nutrition and dietetics courses in Australia and New Zealand. As one of the coauthors, I step you through core topics such as diet planning, macronutrients, vitamins and minerals and follow this with chapters on diet and health, sports nutrition, lifespan nutrition and food safety.

Footer

Privacy policy

Terms of use

Creative Commons License
All content on Thinking Nutrition by Dr Tim Crowe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and can be reused with attribution.