Do Your Tastebuds Actually Change As You Age?

Why you happily eat vegetables today that you hated as a child

Sam Westreich, PhD
Sharing Science

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If snow tastes different today than in your childhood, try not eating the yellow stuff. Photo by Nicole Elliott on Unsplash

These days, I’m a sucker for a good Brussels sprout. I’ll even order them as an appetizer at restaurants — caramelized with a bit of garlic and shallot? Yes, please!

My childhood self would have been horrified to see this. As a kid, vegetables tasted awful and bitter and gross, and I had to douse my small, parent-mandated serving of frozen vegetables in salt and butter to choke it down.

What changed? Did the vegetables change, or did I? And why would our taste buds change as we age, anyway?

It’s a combination of physiological (body) changes, and mental changes. The number of taste buds changes, but so does our brain.

Taste buds — they’re everywhere!

I’ve written about taste buds in the past, when I talked about how, despite what an enduring myth insists, they aren’t localized on the tongue by flavor type. We don’t just taste sweet things on the tip of our tongue only.

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Sharing Science
Sharing Science

Published in Sharing Science

Observations and analysis from scientists on bacteria, biotech, health, and how we live and interact with our natural world.

Sam Westreich, PhD
Sam Westreich, PhD

Written by Sam Westreich, PhD

PhD in genetics, bioinformatician, scientist at a Silicon Valley startup. Microbiome is the secret of biology that we’ve overlooked.