Our sense of taste is complex. It takes all five senses working together to make us appreciate and enjoy our food and drink. Our sense of sight helps us consider eating the food in front of us and our sense of smell and taste can help us perceive the taste. The mix of texture, ingredients and temperature can help impact how we experience what we consume.
Unfortunately, this means that losing any of the five senses, especially smell or taste, can reduce the way we enjoy our food. It could lower our appetite, change the way that you taste your food and it can even cause over consuming it as it is a way to seek satiation and satisfaction.
This situation can happen when we get older. The way that we perceive taste will start to change once we hit the age of 60. That is also the age when the sensitivity of a person's sense of smell will start to diminish, and it becomes severe once a person hits the age of 70.
When a person's sense of smell does not function as well as before and can no longer discriminate or detect between the different type of smells, it affects the taste perception. The decline in the sensitivity of smell with age is the result of numerous factors such as a reduction in the number of olfactory receptors, which can help recognize different odor molecules in the back of a person's nasal cavity. It also declines the rate of regeneration of a person's receptor cells.
Another reason behind the impairment of the sense of taste as a person grows older is because of the changes in the structure of the taste papillae. The structure host taste buds in the mouth, on the palate and on the tongue. Fungiform, a type of papillae, which has high levels of taste buds, decreases in number as we grow older and it also changes in shape as it becomes more closed. The more open your papillae are, the easier it is for the chemicals of your food to come into contact with your receptors and create taste. A closed papilla decreases the chance of contact between receptors and chemicals in food, resulting in less perception of taste.
Other factors are poor chewing, which are common with old people as some of them lose their teeth. General health is also a factor in a person's sense of taste as medicinal drugs, cancer, respiratory infections, radiation, head injuries and environmental exposure like particulates and smoke can contribute to a declining sense of taste.
It is important to remember that not everyone's sense of taste decline in the same way. Changes are diverse among different genders and people. Though it is inevitable, there are still things that you can do to reduce the loss of taste. Research shows that keeping a healthy diet, having an active lifestyle and low to moderate consumption of the different tastes like sour, sweet, bitter, salty and umami, could help slow down the changes in the papillae.
