How Obesity Kills Your Ability To Taste Food

Taste buds are actually a collection of roughly 50 to 100 cells that come in three varieties, (each responsible for detecting different tastes—salty, sweet, bitter, umami, and sour) and have a lifespan of only about 10 days. "Taste buds turnover very quickly, you will get a whole new set of taste buds in probably four weeks, all the way through your life," Dando says. Fueling that turnover are stem cells, which sit at the base of taste buds and continuously churn out new cells. "You can imagine it's a balance of new cells being born and old cells being broken down and dying," he says. "What we saw is both sides of that balance being tipped." In the obese mice, apoptosis increased in the taste buds, and the number of cells responsible for producing taste bud cells declined.

Article source here:Arts Journal