Why do our flavour preferences change?

A toddler may pull a face of pure disgust upon tasting spinach for the first time, but eventually, that same child can grow to tolerate the vegetable and eventually — gasp! — even like it. And even after childhood, a person’s flavor preferences can continue to evolve. The question is, how does that happen?

Our flavor preferences are shaped by many factors, including our genetics, our mothers’ diets during pregnancy and our nutritional needs in childhood, said Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist and member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But our biology doesn’t dictate which foods we come to adore or despise over time. Rather, our preferences are quite malleable, or “plastic,” and change depending on which flavors we get exposed to, when, how often and in what contexts, she said. 

Studies hint that learning to accept new flavors may come easier in early childhood, before age 3, whereas by comparison, older children may need to taste a new food more times before they learn to like it, according to a 2014 review authored by Mennella and published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. But while toddlerhood may represent a unique window of opportunity for broadening a person’s palate, “I don’t think that the window shuts,” Mennella told Live Science. 

So we all can learn to like new flavors, regardless of our ages, although bad memories of specific foods can be difficult to overcome, she noted. (For example, after an intense bout of food poisoning, you might feel queasy at the mere thought of the food that made you sick, psychologist and neuroscientist Hadley Bergstrom told Huffpost.)

On top of this ongoing learning process, our flavor preferences in adulthood may somewhat shift as our senses of taste and smell become less sensitive with age, although flavor sensitivity is just one of several factors that shape elderly adults’ food preferences, according to a recent report published in the journal.

Our perception of flavor emerges from not only taste but also our sense of smell, according to BrainFacts.org, a public information initiative run by the Society for Neuroscience. That said, many other factors influence whether we actually like the flavor we’re perceiving, Mennella said. These factors include innate, evolutionarily driven taste preferences; the physical properties of a food, such as its texture or temperature; and our previous experiences with a given flavor or similar flavors.

When we bite into a food, like a chunk of cheddar cheese, chemicals in the snack spill out into the oral cavity. Some of these molecules plug into sensory cells called taste receptors, located on the tongue and along the roof and back of the mouth. These cells detect at least five basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami (savory). 

livescience