Why do our favorite foods and flavors change over time?

Weather of Arabia - You may have noticed the expression of disgust on the face of a young child who just tasted spinach for the first time, but in the end, this same child can become a lover of this vegetable and enjoy its taste, and even after childhood, a person's favorite flavors can continue to develop and may change Significantly as we get older, why do our preferences for foods and flavors change over time?

Our favorite flavors are shaped by many factors, including genetics, our mothers' diets during pregnancy, and our nutritional needs in childhood. Studies show that learning to accept new flavors may be easier in early childhood, before the age of 3 years. While older children may need to taste a new food more often before they learn to like it.

So we can all learn to love new flavors, regardless of our age, although bad memories associated with certain foods can be hard to overcome. For example, after a severe bout of food poisoning, you might feel nauseous just thinking about the food that made you sick.

Related: Why do scents evoke strong memories?

On top of this continuous learning process, our favorite flavors in adulthood may change somewhat as our senses of taste and smell become less sensitive with age, even though flavor sensitivity is just one of several factors that make up our list of favorite flavors.

How do we feel the flavors?

Both the sense of taste and the sense of smell are involved in the process of our perception of flavors. When you take a bite of food, chemicals in it leak into the oral cavity, and these molecules reach sensory cells called taste receptors located on the tongue and along the roof and back of the mouth, these receptors send messages to the brain .

At the same time, some small particles emitted from food and carried by air from inside the oral cavity rush through the throat into the nasal cavity, where they touch the odor receptors. Messages are sent to the brain, and this information is combined with that from taste receptors to bring us the distinct flavor of the food you perceive.

Taste cells in the mouth detect at least five basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami (a pleasant sour taste).

But this does not mean that all our taste receptors interact with flavor molecules at the same level, and taste receptors differ slightly between people depending on their genes, which in turn affects their sensitivity to different flavors.

To some extent, the microbiomes that live in our mouths (the oral microbiome) may also influence the molecules that are released from our food as we chew it, thus affecting the receptors that respond to multiple flavors in food.

However, many other factors influence whether or not we actually like the flavor we perceive, and these factors include:

• Innate taste preferences.
• The physical characteristics of the food (such as its texture or temperature).
• Our previous experiences with a specific flavor or similar flavors.