Why does food lose taste?

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When you put food in your mouth, after a few seconds of chewing (depending on the food) it will lose taste.

Why is this?

Secondary question, what exactly determines the taste of an item/food?

In: Chemistry

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well first, the “taste” of food comes from how the chemicals in your food interact with the sensory nerves in your tastebuds (along with your sensory nerves in your nose that sense smells, smell and taste are very intertwined).

Depending on the kind of chemicals in the food, they react with your taste buds in different ways, causing different signals to get sent to your brain, which you brain then interprets as it’s taste/flavor.

So. Back to your first question.

The taste of food starts to go away for a combination of two reasons, first is that you’re swallowing/running out of the chemicals in the food for your taste buds to interact with.

Second is that while our brain likes taking all kinds of information in, it actually starts to filter out “extra” unimportant stuff.

Have you ever walked into a room and smelled food cooking, and then realized a couple minutes later you couldn’t really smell the food anymore.

Your brain was filtering out that smell because it just wasn’t deemed important information anymore, and then same thing can happen to the other senses, like taste.