Could one contributing cause to obesity involve a simple problem in which some diners don’t get enough taste satisfaction? A group of researchers now say these folks may become obese because they keep eating after they should be sated – but still crave sensory satisfaction…
Can’t stop eating – or don’t want to? New research suggests that folks used to
a Fatty diet may keep eating after they should stop because their
taste buds are blunted and their brains aren’t satisfied.
What they did
A team at the university of Birmingham, State University of New York, wanted to see how taste sensitivity related to obesity. So, they et up a mouse-based study in which they measured the intensity and duration of taste signals to the brain from the taste buds.
“It’s surprising that we know so little about how taste is affected by obesity, given that the taste of food is a big factor in determining what we choose to eat,” said Team Leader Dr. Patricia Di Lorenzo.
What they found
They found that taste responses in obese rats were smaller in magnitude, shorter in duration and took longer to develop, compared with those in lean rats.
These results suggest that a high-fat diet produces blunted, but more prevalent, responses to taste in the brain, and a weakened association of taste responses with ingestive behavior.
The takeaway
We often remark on how similar mice are to humans in key ways – a congruence that makes mice convenient and fairly accurate stand-in for humans in such experiments. Di Lorenzo says she’s highly confident that the mouse experiment results would translate to humans.
“Others have found that the number of taste buds on the tongue are diminished in [both] obese mice and humans, so the likelihood that taste response in the human brain is also blunted is good,” Di Lorenzo observes.
The inference from her team’s research is that obese folks eat more to achieve what they perceive as ‘satiation’ than folks with normal taste buds.
My take
The idea is simple to demonstrate and even simple to understand. But I think it will be very difficult to get obese folks to eat less and settle for less gustatory satisfaction.
On the other hand, solving their problem may be as easy as recommending they start using MSG on their food to perk their taste buds and increase their dining satisfaction. As we reported not long ago, MSG has recently been rehabilitated and the ‘third seasoning’ has been vindicated by new research on its safety and functionality, after decades of vilification as a result of bogus accusations that it causes headaches and other ‘allergy symptoms’ in some diners.
For a few, though, the knowledge that their taste bugs may not be as acute as those of ‘normal’ folks may be enough to encourage them to simply add more Herbs and Spices to their food to compensate for the deficiency. At what price does health, happiness and longer life come, these days?
~ Maggie J.