Kids who hate stinky cheese and greens often grow into adults who can’t get enough of them. Why do our tastes seem to transform in our teens? And can we change our tastes deliberately as adults? Here’s what scientists know so far.
The first thing to know about our food preferences is that genetic influences play a surprisingly small role in the matter. We are born with an innate like of sweetness and a dislike of anything sour or bitter.
These taste partialities have evolutionary roots. Sweet foods, such as fruits, are good sources of nutrients and energy, so we are predisposed to like them. “Ripe fruits are generally safe to eat and have a lot of vitamins,” Phillips says. “And ripe fruits are naturally sweet.” Bitter tastes, on the other hand, are common in plant toxins, so we are hardwired to detect and dislike them. This aversion to bitterness partially explains why I — along with most other people — once hated certain vegetables.
We are also built to favor fatty food for their high calorie count, which provides us with necessary energy. So you’re particularly bound to savor anything that hits you with a fat-sweet or fat-salt combo […]
While these innate factors do influence our food choices, the preferences we develop in our lives are mostly learned, Philips says. And they can begin before we are even born.
Inside of the womb, the fetus inhales and exhales amniotic fluid, which is flavored by the mother’s dietary habits.
After birth, your preferences continue shaping for the next two years. “Up until the age of 2 you will eat anything,” Philips says. But then you become neophobic — that is, you don’t like new food. So if you hadn’t already been exposed to a certain flavor by the time you hit your terrible twos — whether through amniotic fluid, breast milk or solid food — chances are you won’t like it. […]
The key, then, is to make the food not new. Basically, you’ll like a new or previously hated flavor if you’re repeatedly exposed to it — studies suggest that it takes 10 to 15 exposures. “So if there’s something you don’t like, just eat it over and over and over again,” Philip says.
Learning to like a new flavor is relatively easy, but switching to a whole new diet takes time […] In these cases, your body is already very used to certain things, so it’s more than just making a psychological adjustment, as it is with learning to like new flavors — you’re taste buds need to adjust, too.
For the most part, our food preferences are learned, though we have a predisposition to like certain tastes. It all seems simple enough, but there’s a lot more the psychology of taste can teach us about what we like to eat.
For example, some people are considered “supertasters.” These individuals, in general, taste bitterness more intensely, so they are more likely to avoid green vegetables […]
Another thing to consider is the role that our other senses play in our food preferences. We all know that the smell of food affects how it tastes, but visual cues also matter. If you change the color of a common food or drink, such as making grape juice green, people will perceive the flavor as being different. Some of us also have biases against certain textures, Philips says, though we can learn to get over those feelings.