Is Your Microbiome Telling You What Tastes Good?

If I were to ask you why you like a particular food, you would tell me, I'm certain, as other people do, because it tastes good. And I would say the same thing. And if I ask you, don't you like a food? It doesn't taste good to me. And certainly taste and odor, potentiated odor, are fundamental to this system, the flavor of the food. But what we learned over 40 years of studies is that there's another component to this that we refer to as feedback. And that feedback is coming from cells and organ systems, including the microbiome, and people are all over this now. They're the role of the microbiome in changing our liking for foods. Well, it's cells and organ systems, including the microbiome, that are feeding back, and a lot is known about those systems. way feedback occurs, neurotransmitters, peptides, hormones, we don't that's a whole huge topic in and of itself. But it's just to say there's a physiology that underlies that feedback. But what feedback is doing is it's changing liking for the flavor of food as a function of need. That summarizes hundreds of study literally hundreds and hundreds of studies that we did with cattle, with sheep, with goats, with other species. But feedback changes liking for the flavor of food as a function of need is really a summary of that.

And what's interesting though, Fred, is in humans, the same phenomena happens, but in reverse also. So, well, I mean, in both ways, right? So kids, for example, who are iron deficient will eat dirt to get iron, right? It's called pica. But also what we learned is that if you're eating ultra-processed food, which is 60% of our diet, People eat far more of that compared to a control group that's given nutrient-dense whole foods. They'll eat less because they're satisfied. So often people who are overweight or eating processed food are searching for those nutrients even though they don't know it. So they just eat more of the same junk while becoming more nutritionally deficient.