The Foodie Noses!
Natasha Tungare,
Final Year BPTh,
Sancheti Institute college of Physiotherapy
I’m such a hardcore foodie that I always keep thinking what should I be eating next. I bet all foodies out there might be able to relate to this very well! After all we are the population who doesn’t eat to live, but lives to eat!
When you come home all tired and exhausted and you sense the aroma of the food being cooked in the kitchen at that time, you get totally mesmerized. You know your digestive juices specially talking about salivation occurs more just by smelling your food. So you can definitely understand how important our sense of smell is when it comes to eating. Ever happened that you kept your pizza in refrigerator for long time and then didn’t feel like eating it later because it smelled like a frozen pizza? This is because our sense of smell is responsible for the wonderful tastes of our delicacies. We actually understand if the food is fresh or stale merely by smelling it. I remember a few months ago when I had gone for a trek. It was around a complete 4 hour trek. We took a little longer due to halts in between. We were completely exhausted and were in desperate need of water or something to eat. After climbing a few distances, I could smell someone cooking Maggie! And yeah there was a small tea stall up there where they served Maggie as well. Your nose plays a huge role in what flavours your tongue. See, how interconnected our senses are! And that’s one of the wonderful parts about our senses.
And remember? When we had something like super bad cough and cold, we never felt like eating how much ever delicious the dish might have been. At that time our smell and taste gets kicked to the curb and as our nasal cavity gets congested due to mucus, the food tastes bland. Let me tell you why this happens. Our tongue consists of receptors on the taste buds giving us different tastes like sweet, sour, bitter and spicy. On the other hand our olfactory receptors present on the nasal cavity are responsible to sense these tastes send the signal to certain areas in brain which gives us idea about what we consume. In short, our brain perceives what food we eat due to converging effect of our smell and taste. Thus when our nasal passage is blocked, it is unable to send those signals to brain and hence the food seems tasteless even though our taste buds are functioning intact.
So now you know that you actually smell your food flavours!
Thanks to our interconnected senses!
Excellent! Now I understood that my nose is responsible for all the weight that I’ve gained… 👍