A lapse in good taste

Ageing can mean our food loses some of its flavour. Tanith Carey looks at what causes this change

- Tanith Carey

TASTE is about so much more than the flavour of food. Whether it's that first lick of ice-cream on the beach on holiday or that mouth-watering bite of burger, taste is key to our enjoyment of life. But over time, our ability to register the flavours in food can fade - unless we take steps to keep it strong.

Here we look at how to supercharge our sense of taste again.

Why is taste so important?

Phrases like "sour grapes" and "bitter pill" are reminders that taste is a sense intimately linked to how we feel. Taste is key to good health because it's the body's 'gatekeeper'.

As we evolved as hunter-gatherers hundreds of thousands of years ago, we foraged for plants, berries, fungi, seeds and nuts. A delicate sense of taste was essential to help us tell the difference between plants that were safe to eat and those which were potentially poisonous.

To tell the difference between flavours, our tongues roughly have between 200 and 400 papillae - or bumps. On the sides of these papillae there are between three and 100 taste buds, each of them carrying up to 50 microscopic sensory cells. When these come into contact with food, they send signals up to the gustatory cortex of the brain.

This distinguishes between the main five flavours: bitter, salty, sweet, sour, and savoury.