"Who has never tasted what is bitter does not know what is sweet." - Proverb

One of the things I hear often from clients and friends is that they don't like the way "x" food tastes or they don't like vegetables. And I don’t doubt that it’s true.

Do you know you have over 10,000 taste buds!? And that your taste buds change and regenerate on average every 10 days?! And as we age our taste buds can shrink and dull!

Our taste is more perception, sensory cues, temperature, smell, appearance, and more! We can train, test and strengthen our taste buds.

In fact, they say that a person or child needs to taste a food 7-8 times before they can really know if they like something or not. When you retrain your taste buds you also rewire your brain to crave different foods! And in doing this you can also shift your mood, your energy levels, how stress if handles, how you sleep and more!

This is not about denying yourself foods or restricting. It’s about being curious and training your tongue and mouth as if you would your biceps at the gym. Our tastes include sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Usually, we are good with the first two (salty and sweet), but the bitter, sour and umami needs a bit of attention, especially in the world we have created.

3 Ways to Train Your Taste Buds:

Try 5-9 different whole, fresh vegetables and fruits. Try foods like dark leafy greens (maybe start with spinach, less bitter and sweeter, and move your way up to rapini or dandelion greens, less sweet and more bitter). And learning to like and even love foods like celery, seaweed, fish, mushrooms, ferments, and tomatoes! These will help give you more variety of nutrients and prevent diseases.
Avoid caffeine, alcohol and refined sugars - these are stimulants that dull or affect our taste buds. They also imbalance our blood sugar and this can create cravings for those sugary, refined and fried foods.
Get in the kitchen and flavor it up! Rebecca Katz, one of my favorite cookbook authors, developed the FASS technique to make food more enjoyable:

Fat – Add things like good quality grass-fed butter or extra virgin olive oil
Acid – Add fresh lemon juice, a fancy vinegar
Salt – Add in mineral or quality sea salt (no this is not bad for you!, yes even if you doctor told you to stay away from sodium, if this is you, message me and we can talk more about why)
Sweet – Add in some good quality honey or maple

What foods do you hate and love? Try a food you don't love with a few different things in the FASS technique a few times and see how it goes! Give these tips a solid try for a couple weeks and see the chagnes! Let me know what you find out!