The Effect Cigarette Smoking Has on Your Taste Buds

Did you know that smoking cigarettes is often linked with weight loss? It is believed that smoking and nicotine makes food less pleasing to the taste so that smokers end up losing weight. If this were so, it seems to me that many people who are grossly overweight would end up jumping on the bandwagon and take up smoking in order to shed many unwanted pounds.

Cigarette smoking not only deadens the taste buds but the receptors in the nasalepithelium as well. This interferes with the senses of smell and taste as well as being a contributor to periodontal disease. There is sufficient evidence to prove that nicotine has the power to suppress nerve activity in areas of the brain that are associated with the sensation of taste.

Nicotine has several properties that are associated with it that may cause taste suppression:

1. The bitter taste of nicotine may override other tastes.
2. Nicotine has an irritant sensation that may inhibit the taste response. This is similar to the way that capsaicin works. This is the chemical involved with making chili peppers burn and thereby reduces some of the taste sensation.
3. It is thought that nicotine is able to enter the brain and thereby activate areas that are involved in feeding. Different feeding centers now interact with brain areas that are directly involved with taste. When these areas are activated by cigarette smoking, they may inhibit nerve cells that are responsible for taste.

In one experiment that was conducted, electrical activity was recorded in brain nerve cells that were responsible for taste both before and after bitter-tasting quinine, nicotine or cigarette smoke was touched to the tongue. The effect of quinine and nicotine was compared with nerve cell activity that was cause by taste stimuli. Also cigarette smoking was tested to determine if there were any other ingredients in the smoke other than nicotine that contributed to the suppression of taste.

Another thing that had to be determined was whether taste suppression occurred in the brain or in the tongue. This was done by using specially selected chemicals that would block any nerve cell receptors that normally responded to nicotine. These chemicals were not able to make their way into the brain, so the conclusion was made that the site of a person's nicotine suppression was in the tongue.

A study was also going to be done as to how nicotine affected taste in humans. A method was developed to see in nicotine reduced the intensity of taste and real foods. Another objective was to re-address the role that nicotine played in raising taste thresholds.

When a person quits the dangerous habit of smoking, then a common side effect is weight gain. However, smoking interferes with carbohydrate metabolism as well as with pancreatic function and this leads some people to lose weight when they stop smoking. This is not to say that a person will either gain or lose weight. Each person is different. Just as with the weight issue, so it is with taste buds and smell. When a smoker becomes a nonsmoker, his or her smell and taste buds are reactivated. This may lead to an increased food intake, but not always.

It seems that the main culprit in altering the sensation of taste is nicotine. Did you say that you were going to stop smoking yesterday? The best solution to the problem is to stop smoking so that you will have your sense of taste return to you.