Apart from giving you heart disease, obesity can also make your taste buds go bland

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Obesity can single-handedly mess with your health. Without making lifestyle changes and healthy additions in your routine you can’t do away with it. If not taken care of at a nascent stage, obesity can welcome heart ailments, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, high blood pressure, and many other serious diseases into your life.

A recent study says that obesity can make your taste buds go numb. Stumped?

According to this research published in the journal Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, explained how taste perception is known to change with obesity, but the underlying neural changes remain poorly understood.

“It is surprising that we know so little about how taste is affected by obesity, given that the taste of food is a big factor in determining what we choose to eat,” said Patricia Di Lorenzo, professor of psychology, Binghamton University.

To address this issue, a team of researchers including Di Lorenzo and former graduate student Michael Weiss aimed to detail the effects of obesity on responses to taste stimuli in the nucleus tractus solitarius, a part of the brain involved with taste processing.

The researchers recorded the responses to taste stimuli from single cells in the brain stem of rats that were made obese by feeding a high-fat diet.

They found that taste responses in these obese rats were smaller in magnitude, shorter in duration, and took longer to develop, compared with those in lean rats.

The results suggested that a high-fat diet makes taste buds go bland, and a weakened association of taste responses with ingestive behaviour.

While Di Lorenzo stressed that these findings currently only apply to rats, she said that this same process could possibly translate to humans.

“Others have found that the number of taste buds on the tongue is diminished in obese mice and humans, so the likelihood that taste response in the human brain is also blunted is good,” said Di Lorenzo.