How much do your taste buds have to do with your weight? Anything? Everything?
In a recent study researchers compared taste sensitivity in obese children and adolescents to that of healthy weight children and adolescents. According to this study, taste sensitivity is linked to weight.
Children and adolescents who were obese had less sensitive taste buds. That means for obese children sweet foods tasted less intensely sweet, bitter foods were milder and salt was not as readily perceived.
What do these differences in taste perception mean?
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The first sentence of the last paragraph begins “The scientific evidence is still out” and two sentences later, the last sentence, asserts: “It is not obesity that causes changes to sense of taste, rather it’s eating the foods that contribute to obesity.”So, basically, you are making assertions of fact without any scientific basis, admitting that up-front, and counting on the human preference for anecdotes and the last “fact” stated in a series of facts to influence people.These aspects of human psychology have been known for thousands of years, and, together with other quirks of our brains’ wiring like belief in authorities, form the basis of classical rhetoric, the art of persuasion.While this article is a clever use of human psychology to persuade, it is not science, it is not good science writing, and it is an example of the kind of activity which continues to prove that psychologists seem to think that a hypothesis is as good as a proven fact if it “makes sense” to you.We don’t know the answers to any of the questions raised in this article – at this point, it’s all speculation. Which the article states clearly. It’s really quite a wonderful exercise in rhetoric – too bad it’s in a place where people expect science writing, not belief boosting.