Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Plant Sciences, Zoology & Evolution => Topic started by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 08/01/2023 16:45:33
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I know that when we enjoy a meal, the pleasure does not solely come from the sensation our taste buds give us, but also (to a significantly lower extent) their smell, presentation, and the pleasant memories they activate. What evolutionary functions encourage animals with a lack of taste buds to seek food? If it is simply the pleasure of filling their bellies then they wouldn't be picky about what they eat, as long as it is edible. Is it possibly the combination of smelling and chewing their preferred food that creates a pleasurable sensation?
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Dogs do have taste buds. Rather fewer than humans and with different selectivity (they certainly taste and seek out sugar but seem less addicted to salt) but more than compensated by several orders of magnitude greater sensitivity to smell.
Dog food manufacturers use human tasters for quality control - a less unpleasant job than being a cat food taster because the domestic dog has evolved to eat a human diet with a few exceptions (onions and chocolate being toxic to canines).
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The results a few minutes to hours after eating a meal are also encoded into your emotional reaction to that food.
- I have heard of cases of food poisoning which turned people off certain foods (which were a previous favorite)
Our bodies also learn the calorific value of foods by the amount of glucose they generate after digestion
- This feeds into the complex system which tells you when to feel "full" (satiety)
- There is a hypothesis that artificial sweeteners in soft drinks might contribute to the current obesity epidemic by recalibrating the relationship between sweetness (detected on the tongue) and calorific value (detected by glucose entering the bloodstream)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_substitute#Obesity
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artificial sweeteners in soft drinks might contribute to the current obesity epidemic by recalibrating the relationship between sweetness (detected on the tongue) and calorific value (detected by glucose entering the bloodstream)
Wouldn't the opposite occur? Your tongue tells you that you have ingested more calories than you actually have, so you'd eat less.
But there's a potential psychological offset, balancing the "good" against the "bad". On a shopping trip with my teenage daughter we entered a well-known fast food emporium where she ordered "a double Whopper with cheese, extra fries, and a diet Coke". Fortunately she inherited skinny genes from her mum.
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The hypothesis is that if you eat predominantly artificially-sweetened foods, the relationship of sensed sweetness to glucose is recalibrated downwards (extractable calories are perhaps 1% of what you would get from table sugar).
- So when you do eat "natural" sugars, you might eat (say) 10 times as much sugar as you need before you feel "full".
- If your pancreas is working properly, this leads to a spike in insulin, which sequesters the excess sugar into fats.
See: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_sweetener
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Probably from their sense of smell, when you consider that their nose is so sensitive and that they are coprophagics it is quite remarkable.
Humans pleasure also mostly emminates from the nose, hold your nose and eat cheese or drink wine, it is a very bland experience. The taste sense is an early warning system to vent out poisons and to quality check the nutritional value, eat a solid block of butter and it magically changes in its desirability the further you get and you will probably vomit, unless of course your body desires fat in huge quantities in which case it tastes wonderful the whole block through.