Our test buds get less sensitive as we age, but many extremely sugary or salty foods that children enjoy can seem really “overwhelming” or even unpalatable to adults. Why would children enjoy these overwhelming foods more if they are more sensitive to them?
Anecdotally, it also seems like elderly people eat a lot of bland foods compared to children and younger adults. Why wouldn’t elderly people with less sensitive taste buds prefer intensely flavored foods? Is it generational? Am I misunderstanding “sensitivity” in this context?
In: Biology
As one reason, our perception of taste is not in our taste buds. It is in our brain. The degree of sweetness we perceive is directly related to the level of activity in certain brain cells in a part of the brain called the gustatory cortex. The level of activity in this region is influenced by taste buds, but it is also influenced by other brain cells and complicated chemistry. Regardless of how taste bud sensitivity changes with age, our brains can adjust the degree of sweetness we perceive just by adjusting the activity in these brain cells.
As a second point, the pleasantness associated with sweetness (hedonic valence) is an entirely separate brain function that involves very different areas of the brain. Just as the degree of sweetness is encoded by the level of activity in sweetness areas, the degree of pleasantness of a sweet taste is encoded in the level of activity in reward areas. Like taste brain cells, reward cells can also be influenced by many factors. How they respond to a sweet taste can be adjusted by many different factors (for example, hunger, expectations, certain drugs, etc.).
tldr: perceived sweetness and perceived pleasantness are two different things that each depend on many more factors than age. Our brain can adjust these on purpose.
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