Can you train yourself to like foods you hate?

Why do we all have different tastes in food? You’re a fan of a vindaloo but your partner opts for a korma. You love yeast extract, they hate it. You reach for chips, they think they’re bland.

Just like our taste in music, TV and culture, taste in food differs from person to person. But why does the same food bring about such different responses in different people? And the all-important question, can you train yourself to like healthier foods? We find out…

We recognise five basic tastes: sweet, bitter, sour, salty and umami (savoury). But we also recognise an enormous range of flavours, as every variety of every ingredient has an individual flavour. “Taste stimuli are detected by taste receptors in taste buds. You have small pink bumps on the tip of your tongue, which are fungiform papillae – these house taste buds”, explains Dr Qian Yang, assistant professor at University of Nottingham.

Qian has published research examining why we have different tastes in food. She explains just how important smell is to our experience of flavour.

“Human noses can detect a trillion smells. When we eat and drink, [flavour] compounds release from our food and travel to the olfactory [smell] receptors, while taste compounds are dissolved in saliva and reach taste receptors. Thus, taste and flavour perception is a combination of taste and aroma.”

So why do we have different responses to the same food? Well, it’s down to a mixture of genes, culture and environment.

Is it a man? Is it a plane? Is it a super-taster? Well, if you’re labelled as a fussy eater and enjoy foods that others think are bland, you may well be the latter. Despite it sounding like a positive, being a super-taster is unlikely to be something you’d aspire to. Here’s why.

Back in 1991, experimental psychologist Linda Bartoshuk published research that explained people tend to fall into the category of ‘super-taster’, ‘medium-taster’ or ‘non-taster’. You could be forgiven for thinking super-tasters (having more taste buds than the rest of us) would appreciate more flavours, but the opposite is true.

Having more taste buds means super-tasters are sensitive to a chemical called ‘6-n-propylthiouracil’ (PROP), which is bitter and causes us to find foods off-putting. The rest of us (said to be 75 percent of the Western population) either don’t taste bitterness (25 percent) or taste it but don’t mind it (50 percent). So super-tasters might also be seen as super-fussy, as their palate rejects certain foods, such as broccoli and coffee.

Are some foods an acquired taste?

Our taste buds decrease in intensity with age, so some strong flavours, such as stilton and olives, might be more enjoyable as we get older, explains Dr Qian. “These foods are normally introduced later in life. Exposure helps us to learn to like certain foods. For example, there is evidence that suggests children need to be exposed to a food at least 12 times before they start to like it. As we grow up, our taste buds become less intense. This means adults might be less sensitive to some tastes, which might contribute to our increased liking of some strong-flavoured food.”

“Several factors may contribute to taste sensitivity. Gender, age, weight, diet, health, medication, smoking, hormones and taste receptor genes”, says Mari Sandell, Professor in Sensory Perception for the Functionary Foods Forum.

Plenty of research has investigated which biological and cultural factors can cause tastes in food to differ. A University of Turku, Finland study examined whether age, BMI and gender impacted ‘taste modality recognition’ within Finnish residents, and concluded, “Older age (>50 years) and male gender predicted a less sensitive sense of taste in general. For umami, high BMI along with older age predicted lower sensitivity.”

Dr Qian has also researched how ethnicity and sex impact taste, both in terms of genetic and environmental factors. Her findings included men having a sweeter tooth than women and East Asians (predominantly Chinese) having a high proportion of super-tasters and “low sweet-likers”.

How important is environment?

How much of our experience of taste and flavour is down to environmental factors rather than genetics? “Both factors contribute to how we perceive taste and the food we enjoy. PROP taster status is related to genetic make-up. This could contribute to how intensely we perceive taste sensations. But environmental factors also contribute to our food preference and eating habits”, says Dr Qian.

Mari agrees: “For sensitive tasters, it is possible taste receptor genes and genotypes play a very important role. It is also possible children raised in the same family, society and cultural environment may be different tasters, and little details like taste receptor genotypes may affect taste perception. But on the other hand, what food is available depends on the food culture, so people do not have the same options to activate their sense of taste. In general, both genetics and environmental factors are important.”

If you find a lot of food tastes bland – a complaint some people make about some healthy ingredients – what can you do to enhance your taste experience?

Matt Owens, a food taster and flavour developer, and Vice Chairman of the Craft Guild of Chefs, explains how to test and fine-tune your sense of taste. “Test yourself at home by seeing if you can correctly pick out the ingredients in a food product. Taste it blindfolded, write down what you think you can taste, and check against the ingredients list.

“Once you start to master this, see if you can pick out more complex themes, such as roasted or herby notes. You can also create your own tongue map to better understand how you experience taste. Using examples of the main tastes, caffeine for bitter, sugar for sweet, vinegar for sour etc, you can test to see exactly where in your mouth you are sensitive to them.

“But it’s not just about your taste buds. You need to look after all your sensory assets. I’ve spent years training and educating mine, as well as keeping healthy, which is essential to the job. Many lifestyle factors impede your ability to be good at understanding flavour. Nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, spicy and strong flavours inhibit your ability to precisely identify flavours. These are known as ‘inhibitor’ tastes, a good example of which is a hot chilli or a cooling menthol gel. If a person regularly has a lot of these, they become desensitised to them and other flavours, and this in turn impairs their ability to pick out more sensitive notes.”

Can you train yourself to like foods you hate?

What does this mean if you want to learn to like a food you usually push away? According to Mari, the trick is to keep trying a food: “Repeated exposure usually helps people to accept flavours. But it may not be so easy to repeatedly try something you do not like. Some people may need to try the same food more than others. It is pretty easy to give up if you are not motivated.”

Guy Crosby, Adjunct Associate Professor of Nutrition at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan school of Public Health, agrees. “It is possible to learn to like tastes that a person finds unpleasant”, he says. If you’re a super-taster, of course learning to like foods might be harder. The first trick is to find out if you are one. Guy has studied super-tasters and says, “Paper test strips are available for determining if you are a super-taster. They contain a very small amount of a bitter substance. Super-tasters find them extremely bitter, while normal tasters taste very little bitterness.”