With bitter foods, what you eat determines what you like to eat

Introducing herbal foods into a diet is a common sense approach to a healthy diet, but many people do not like the taste of vegetables, particularly bitter greens.

But give a chance to this broccoli.

It will not just change your mind; this will actually change the taste of these foods, according to a new study from the University of Buffalo.

What at first looks like a culinary sleight of hand is actually a scientific case based on specific proteins present in saliva. These proteins affect the taste and the composition of the diet determines, at least in part, these proteins.

Saliva is a complex fluid containing about 1,000 specific proteins. The identification of all the players is a work in progress, but all we eat is dissolved in saliva before interacting with the taste receptor cells and all these proteins are candidates for influencing the stimuli before the food be tasted.

"What you eat creates the signature in your salivary proteome, and these proteins modulate your sense of taste," said Ann-Marie Torregrossa, badistant professor in the department of psychology at UB and deputy director of the Center for Ingestive Behavior. University Research, an in-depth research at home to study eating behavior, obesity, obesity and other factors contributing to people's daily decisions regarding food and fluid intake.

"We have shown in previous work on rats that changing your diet changes the protein content of your saliva, and now we show that the proteins in your saliva change your taste."

The results, published in the journal Chemical senses, have applications ranging from the obesity crisis to medical compliance.

"If we can convince people to try broccoli, green leafy vegetables and bitter foods, they should know that with repeated exposure, they will taste better once they regulate these foods." proteins, "said Torregrossa.

How much of repeated exposure? Give me a number.

"Our data does not provide numbers, such as 12 servings of broccoli, however, for people who avoid these foods because of their bitterness, but want to include them in their diet, they should know that their taste will eventually change."

Bitterness is also an almost universal feature of many pediatric medicines, and forcing infants to swallow a bitter liquid – which they want to reject – can be a challenge.

"An additive to this drug to make it less bitter would increase compliance," she says. "This sounds like liquid dietary supplements in the geriatric population, which often contain sugar to tame bitterness.Equiring the same result without sweeteners has obvious benefits."

According to Torregrossa, health and nutrition professionals can at least advise people to explain the role of these salivary proteins.

"Trying to convince someone that a good salad tastes good is not going to work because for that person, it does not taste great. Tastefully understand that we are dealing with something mobile is important. "

Think about it in an evolutionary context.

Bitter foods, for foragers, may be a sign of danger, but it is an unreliable predictor. Why look for another source of food if there is something abundant and safe?

"Instead of having the cognitive burden of learning that a food is safe and having to keep that memory, you know instead that this bitter food will eventually taste good," Torregrossa says. "It's an elegant physiological shift that allows you to put those foods into your diet."

For the study, Torregrossa taught the rats to choose one of two bottles of water after tasting a solution, to indicate if it had a bitter taste. In this case, animal research allows for stricter dietary control and the variation of specific proteins can be monitored in a manner that is difficult to obtain with human participants.

"It's interesting because we do not ask: do you like that? we are only trying to find out if you can taste bitter, "she says. "Animals whose bitter-induced salivary proteins are activated can not experience bitterness at higher concentrations than animals that do not have the same activated protein.

"Once these proteins are on board, the bitter taste is like water, it is gone."

Torregrossa's work is an intriguing tactic in the fight against obesity, which involves leading many battles against overconsumption of foods high in fat and sugar.

"The variation around sweets is very small," she says. "Almost everyone loves cupcakes, but the difference between tastes and broccoli is huge.

"This research helps explain why this variation with bitter foods exists and how we can get more people to eat broccoli rather than cupcakes."