Hijacked Taste Buds Our taste buds have been hijacked by the food industry to make us believe we're eating deliciously flavored non-foods that ultimately make us not feel well. How can we retrain our taste buds and get back to eating nutritious, real, whole foods? Find out what's behind this bamboozling and how to turn it around. In our podcast we mention a couple of books on the topic (links below) as well as a delicious beet recipe.

The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose Beet Hummus Recipe

Here's the transcript of speakers Wendy Bright-Fallon and Debbie Peterson.

Wendy  00:00

My husband and I were recently in a store that we usually don't go to. And he said, Wendy, come over here and take a look at this aisle. And I swear it looked a mile long, and it was all lined with candy, the whole thing. And there were all these banners saying how much fun you could have and all these insane colors and very alluring signs. Then we went to the next aisle, and it was a whole aisle of sodas, and then it just kept going on and on. And I really felt like I was in a foreign place. It felt just so fake to me - so unreal.

Debbie  00:49

I want to take a step back for a minute and introduce us, because we get so excited about these topics. You're listening to Nourish Noshes and I'm Debbie.

Wendy  00:59

And I'm Wendy. We're so glad you're here talking with us.  Let’s be clear, we want to have pleasure with food. But there's so much out there hijacking our taste buds. And what do we do about it? So we're going to talk about this. The evolution of it all.

Debbie  01:19

Yeah. Right. That is so attractive to so many people.

Wendy  01:23

What we're going to uncover today is how addictions happen. How do we get so lured by the processed stuff?

Debbie  01:33

We’ll talk about how these products and foods are hijacking our biology.

Wendy  01:51

Yeah, we just have not caught up really to this industrialized world - meaning our tastebuds and our response to all things not real.

Debbie  02:07

That's right, exactly. Let's start with taste buds. A little geeky stuff. Wendy  02:16

So I did not know this, but we've got 10,000 of these little tiny, tiny taste buds. And each one of them has 50 Plus taste receptor cells.

Debbie  02:29

Yeah! What does that look like? That's crazy stuff. That's why we have our tape. That's why we taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami - I think I got them all. Our brain recognizes those flavors, because those are the natural flavors, right? And it sends signals to our brain and to the rest of our body to start digesting – kicking in our digestive process.

Wendy  03:01

Yeah, that's when our digestion actually begins - right in the mouth with the salivary glands - when we smell something or see something that tastes good, or that we assume tastes good and looks good - our salivary glands squirt.

Debbie  03:17

Right. And we depended on these tastebuds, especially when we were out, you know, hunter gatherers, nomadic lifestyles, where we had to trust that because some things were not safe to eat - our taste buds are programmed to be very sensitive.

Wendy  03:36

Yeah, it was a warning signal, right? If it was too bitter, we would say okay, that's gonna hurt me as poisonous. I'm not gonna have any more of that.

Debbie  03:46

Right. And on the other side, is that these taste buds were  also survival instincts because we needed to seek out foods that were nourishing to us with vitamins and minerals and things that our bodies needed, like salts and sugars and fats. We had to seek those out because they weren't readily available.

Wendy  04:08

They were the way to survive.

Debbie  04:11

If you think about that hunter gatherer 8000 BC, who was out there on the savanna?