Is Fast Food Killing Our Sense of Taste?

From WebMD:

Your sense of taste is being barraged by the loads of salt, fat, and sugar found in double cheeseburgers, waffle fries, and milkshakes.

Did you ever notice that all fast food joints have the same "smell"? Hot oil mixed with eau de onion? Some people have even half-jokingly suggested there may be a secret addictive chemical pumped in.

"[The sense of taste] is in a bad way," Steven A. Witherly, PhD, president and CEO of Technical Products Inc., a food consulting firm in Valencia, Calif., tells WebMD. "Fast food has ridiculously high levels of salt, fat, and sugar -- and the brain likes salt, fat, and sugar."

Everyone has about 10,000 taste buds on his or her tongue (although these may thin as people grow older). "Fast food does not so much dull the taste buds as affect how the brain processes that taste as pleasurable or unpleasant," Witherly says. Hormones such as insulin and leptin also affect the brain's impression of a given food. "Snack food is affecting how we process food."

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