eli5 How does holding your nose stop you from tasting anything?
In: Biology
A lot of what we think of as taste is actually smell. Most of the pleasure we got from food isn’t from the taste of it on our tongues, but what we smell of it as we eat it. So if we hold our noses, we don’t smell the food as much, and thus we don’t get as much pleasure from it. It’s just that we are so used to thinking of food as something we eat, that we don’t realize how much smell matters when eating.
A large part of what we consider taste is actually the smell of food as we eat/chew it. If you block that sense by blocking your nose, you lose that range of “smell-taste” and your food will taste different as a result.
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