OK, so we know that having a sweet tooth isn’t necessarily good, but… we just love sweet things.
Which makes us a little bit sceptical of this study. Because, if you had a choice to eat a chocolate bar, would you rather it taste delicious, or sour?
That’s basically what this new study has found. Different parts of our tongue taste sweet and sour, and scientists have found a way to turn those receptors on and off.
The study was published in the scientific journal Nature, which saw research being carried out on mice. When we eat, the different taste receptors on our tongue send signals to our brain, so lead author of the study Charles Zucker, tried to re-wire the mice, so that their brains would interpret flavours differently.
One experiment they tried was getting the mice to drink plain water. The ‘sweet’ receptor in the brain was turned on and the mice gulped back the water.
However, when the receptor was switched with a drug to taste ‘sour’, the mice wouldn’t drink the water.
This leads the researchers to believe that the mice get pleasure from sweet food and drink – just like us – and they’re likely to consume more sweet things even if they’re full or don’t need it. But if the ‘feel good’ part of our brain is switched off when it comes to food, we’ll stop overeating sugary and fatty foods.
