![]() ![]() ![]() Sugar not only makes the taste of food and drink irresistible. They have on staff cadres of scientists who specialize in the senses, and the companies use their knowledge to put sugar to work for them in countless ways. The second thing to know about sugar: Food manufacturers are well aware of the tongue map folly, along with a whole lot more about why we crave sweets. ![]() Scientists are now finding taste receptors that light up for sugar all the way down our esophagus to our stomach and pancreas, and they appear to be intricately tied to our appetites. There are special receptors for sweetness in every one of the mouth's ten thousand taste buds, and they are all hooked up, one way or another, to the parts of the brain known as the pleasure zones, where we get rewarded for stoking our bodies with energy. In truth, the entire mouth goes crazy for sugar, including the upper reaches known as the palate. As researchers would discover in the 1970s, its creators misinterpreted the work of a German graduate student that was published in 1901 his experiments showed only that we might taste a little more sweetness on the tip of the tongue. That the back has a big zone for blasts of bitter, the sides grab the sour and the salty, and the tip of the tongue has that one single spot for sweet. The first thing to know about sugar is this: Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets.įorget what we learned in school from that old diagram called the tongue map, the one that says our five main tastes are detected by five distinct parts of the tongue. ![]()
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