Taste: It's in your nose and memories

Here are some of the lessons from science that may help you think about eating in a new way:
1. You like what your mother ate
If you're pregnant, you may be transferring preferences for certain flavors to your baby right now. The food you eat gets into the amniotic fluid and flavors it. The fetus can detect those flavors and remember them after birth, Beauchamp said. This also happens with breast milk when a mother nurses an infant. As children get old enough to eat solid food, they show a preference for flavors they first experienced in the womb.
It works for flavors like carrot juice, but not for something like salt, since the amount of salt a mother eats doesn't affect the saltiness of amniotic fluid or breast milk. It's actually the smell component of flavors that gets transferred. Mothers can enhance a child's liking for healthy foods such as vegetables by eating them while pregnant and nursing.
In general, experience informs taste preferences, so if you know you've liked salty foods in the past, you're going to want them again. If everyone collectively moves toward a low-salt diet, people will begin to crave it less, Beauchamp said.
And these preferences can begin from infancy. Babies fed starchy table foods high in salt showed elevated preferences for it, he said.
2. The "tongue map" isn't exactly right
You may have seen a textbook diagram of a tongue with a "sweet" spot on the front, "salty" areas on the sides and a "bitter" zone in the back. It's true that these areas are a bit more sensitive to those flavors, but in reality, there's no clear-cut map of which parts of your tongue taste what, Beauchamp said.
In fact, there are taste receptors in the back of the throat. This was shown in a case of a woman whose tongue needed to be removed, and she could still sense flavors, he said.
3. The nose knows taste
A lot of what you perceive of flavor is actually aroma, scientists say. At the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Jane Leland of Kraft Foods' research and development group demonstrated this by having the audience pinch their noses while eating a yellow jelly bean. The candy was nearly tasteless.
What's going on? Basically, when your nose isn't closed up, the aroma of the food from your mouth is going through the back of the throat to the nose to give you the full flavor experience. When you block off the front part of your nose, it's like closing off the end of a hose and the water is no longer flowing, Beauchamp said.

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