Author: Lela Nargi / Source: Science News for Students
Food Network host Andrew Zimmern once asked Taria Camerino: “What do I taste like?” It’s a strange question. But not for Camerino. This Atlanta-based chef is one of many people who sense their world in special ways.
Camerino was born with synesthesia (Sin-uhs-THEE-zhah). That means her senses are tangled up with one another. (The term comes from the Greek words syn, meaning together, and aesthesis, meaning sensation.)
Some synesthetes see each letter of the alphabet in a particular color. Others see shapes when they hear music. Camerino’s brain links things she sees and hears to flavors. That’s how she could answer Zimmern’s unusual question.
“I watched the way he moved,” she recalls, and discovered that he tasted like toasted prawn shells and bay-leaf syrup. Her unusual sensory ability lets her understand people through food. Sometimes, she uses this gift to aid people. Some illnesses dull their victims’ senses. With Camerino’s help, some who had lost much of their sense of taste regained “more connection to [it].”
Most people are not synesthetes. But everyone’s senses work together to process taste. Scientists are discovering how these connections affect what we eat. They’re also learning how tastes’ hidden meanings might lead to behaviors that might make people sick — or do the opposite: encourage healthier eating.
Tastes carry hidden meanings
For the most part, people process different sensations — taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight — in different parts of the brain’s cerebral (Seh-REE-brul) cortex. That’s its outermost layer. But all the senses talk to each other through neural networks. These are groups of interconnected brain cells, called neurons.
The signaling between these sensory cells lets us hear the crispy crunch of a potato chip and know it’s fresh. Or see a plump peach and think, “Yum, that looks sweet!” The information we get from this chatter helps us decide what to eat.
What and how we make those decisions interests Julie Mennella. She works at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pa. As a biopsychologist (BY-oh-sy-KOL-oh-gist), she studies how behaviors can be affected by taste preferences that develop during infancy and early childhood.
Early in human history, the ability to recognize and respond to different tastes without thinking helped people survive. A sweet taste, explains Mennella, isn’t just pleasing. It also tells someone that a food is rich in calories. That’s important because calories provide the energy needed to fuel our bodies. A salty taste indicates that food contains salt — sodium chloride. It’s a mineral needed for bone health, especially when bones are growing during childhood.
Sour and bitter tastes also carry messages — negative ones that might cause you to spit a food out. A sour taste told our ancestors a food might be spoiled. A bitter taste might have meant a meal was poisonous.
You might enjoy eating sour fruits such as lemons or grapefruit, or bitter vegetables such as turnips or Brussels sprouts. But you probably learned to like their tastes over time.
Today, most of us don’t have to hunt or forage for food as our ancient ancestors did. We can find plenty of meat and fruit — and chips and cookies — at the supermarket. What scientists call our food environment has changed.
Our brains still give us cues that guide our food choices, though. And that can be a problem — especially for kids. Mennella found in a 2016 study that kids and teens prefer far sweeter tastes than do adults.
This preference can set kids on a lifelong path to unhealthy eating. A sweet tooth can lead to overeating — and obesity. It also ups the risk someone will develop diseases such as diabetes. A strong preference for salty foods can foster overeating, too. It’s also been linked to health problems such as high blood pressure. Such issues have been growing throughout the world’s wealthier nations. By studying taste, Mennella and other scientists are searching for clues about how we sense foods in hopes of learning how to turn those risks around.
Tricking taste
Some people are drawn to really sweet things. Others, not so much. Scientists would like to know whether we’re born with these preferences.
In her own work, Mennella has found that what parents feed their infants can affect a child’s likes and dislikes later in life. One 2011 study by her group showed that infants fed sweetened water grew up preferring sweet drinks. Babies given unsweetened water did not. This suggests, she says, that cutting out sugary drinks might help infants develop into kids without an intense hankering for sweet treats.
Her goal is not to deprive children of all sweet treats. What fun would that be? Instead, she says, “We’re trying to figure out if we can shift their preference for added sugars.” (Added sugars are those that manufacturers — or diners — add to those naturally present in foods.)
Can kids be convinced to choose a banana instead of a cookie, for example? “We want to uncover some of the mysteries of how we can get children to like healthy foods,” says Mennella — such as, how many exposures to a fruit will they need before they actively reach…
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