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Contrary to belief, taste buds don't diminish with age
By JUDY CREIGHTON -- The Canadian Press
If you want your finicky children to eat brussels sprouts, wait 50 years
and they will.
Nutrition Focus
Canada's Food
Guide
 How the guide
works
The widely held belief that taste buds diminish as we get older is a myth,  The Food Guide
and in fact taste is "very robust even into extreme old age," says Adam
 Food Guide Info
Drewnowski, program director of nutritional sciences in the departments  Eating Scorecard
of epidemiology and medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.  Vitamins, Minerals
 Health Chat
That's because as they age, they'll lose their dislike for more bitter
tastes, says a professor of epidemiology.
"The only things that change is the perception of bitter flavours, which
starts declining some time after the age of 50," he says.
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He adds that sweet sour and salt tastes aren't affected by age but it is
bitter flavours that alter the choices older people can make in the food
they eat.
Drewnowski, was in Canada recently to demonstrate a new product from Uncle Ben's Rice. A
technological process infuses flavour into rice by adding seasoning and raising the taste profile.
"Latest studies show that we have at least 50 different type of bitter taste receptors which is
amazing because some of the researchers were expecting three or four, not 50," he says.
This explains the compounds that taste bitter to us are very diverse," Drewnowski adds.
Bitter compounds containing toxins and alkaloids can be found in meat and plants but by the
very nature of the bitter, sometimes nasty tastes "they give us a single warning system to stay
away," he says.
His research into sensitivity to bitter tastes has implications for a dietary approach to cancer
prevention andweight control.
"Because of the decline in sensitivity, older people have a growing acceptance to certain
vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts and bitter green salads."
All have been shown to lower the risk of some cancers.
On another flavour front, Drewnowski, who took post doctoral studies in psychology at the
University of Toronto in 1980 and is a graduate of Oxford University, says North Americans are
losing the ability to trust their flavour sense.
"At one time we believed food that tasted good was the most nutritious," he explains. "Now we
distrust that. We say if it tastes good it cannot possibly be good for us and we must suffer to eat
it."
But contrary to that notion, he adds, "foods that really taste good are in fact the best for us and
I think we should go back to that."
TASTE AND FLAVOUR
FACTS:
Drewnowski says all foods have a place in a healthy diet
including
some fat.
-- The sense of taste comes from the
tongue. We are born with 10,000
taste buds on the back, sides and tip
of the tongue, on the palate and in
the throat.
In fact, a no -fat or low fat diet can hinder some good
phytochemicals such as beta carotene (an antioxidant and
cancer fighter) from being properly assimilated in the body.
-- Taste buds first appear when a
fetus is seven or eight weeks old,
and are functioning by the third
trimester of pregnancy.
"Many of the plant compounds are fat soluble," Drewnowski
says. "If you are eating, for example, shredded carrots and you
don't add fat, the beta carotene in those carrots is not being
absorbed so there is no benefit."
-- If you can't taste food when you
have a cold, it's because the cold
dulls your sense of smell, which is
largely responsible for taste
perception.
He is strongly against what he considers as "fad" diets such as
the Pritikin and Dean Ornish low-fat regime and now the all-therage Atkins high protein diet.
-- Burning your tongue kills some
taste buds, but they regenerate
within a few months.
-- Many factors may play a role in
what tastes we like or avoid, such as
genetics, age, gender, cultural
background, mood and even where
we live.
Source: Uncle Ben's Naturally
Select Rice.
"The latter came about because people simply got tired of
eating low fat," he says. "They said, 'I can't stand it anymore',
and along came the high-fat steak, eggs and bacon regime.
"No one in the nutritional industry is happy about it because it
is a high fat, high cholesterol and ketonic diet.
Ketone bodies are toxic compounds that can damage the brain
and cause nausea, fatigue and apathy.
Drewnowski says the ideal diet to lose weight is still the 60 per
cent carbohydrate, 20 per cent fat and 20 per cent protein which
offers a well balanced diet.
But when it comes to fad diets, he says, "the pendulum swings
both ways, from extreme high protein to extreme low-fat."
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