Near-Fatal Attraction

By Michael Moss

The first thing to know about sugar is this: our bodies are hardwired for sweets. Forget what we learnt in school from the tongue map, the one that says our five main tastes are detected by five distinct parts 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 tongue map is wrong. 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 that we might taste a little more sweetness on the tip of the tongue. In truth, the entire mouth goes crazy for sugar, including the upper reaches known as the palate.

There are special receptors for sweetness in every one of the mouth’s 10,000 taste buds, and they are all hooked up to the parts of the brain known as the pleasure zones, where we get rewarded for stoking our bodies with energy.

But our zeal doesn’t stop there. Scientists are finding taste receptors that light up for sugar all the way down our oesophagus to our stomach and pancreas, and they appear intricately tied to our appetites.

Also, food manufacturers…have on staff cadres of scientists who specialise in the senses, and the companies use their knowledge to put sugar to work for them in countless ways.

From “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us”