I Hacked My Tastebuds to Reduce My Sugar Intake
Welcome to the strange world of pragmatic biohacking
As I drank a glass of pure lemon juice on a Wednesday afternoon, I could feel it lightly stinging my lips and face. But despite the juice’s intense sourness, my mouth was filled with the delightful, sweet taste of homemade lemonade as I gulped it down. Why? Because minutes earlier, I had ingested Synsepalum dulcificum, an African berry whose extract temporarily altered the function of my tastebuds, transforming sour flavors into sweet ones.
Welcome to the strange world of biohacking. Biohackers use modern technology and scientific breakthroughs to hack their own bodies. Some inject themselves with DNA via Crispr or embed microchips in their skin. My goals for biohacking were much tamer and more pragmatic. I love sweets. But a mounting body of evidence shows that excessive sugar consumption can cause or exacerbate all manner of health problems.
Might it be possible, I wondered, to leverage my neuroscience background in order to hack my tastebuds, reducing my sugar intake and potentially improving my health--ideally without skipping dessert? I decided to find out. This article shares my first experience, and is part of an ongoing series in which I’ll explore taste biohacking here in DIY Life Tech. One caveat: I’m not a doctor. As I’ll explain below, you should check with your own doctor before trying anything which might impact your health.
Taste is one of the least studied senses in neuroscience. Vision and hearing are absolutely essential to daily life, and even touch can be used to achieve scientific wizardry like animating a prosthetic limb. Taste, on the other hand, feels simple and a bit pedestrian. As millions who have lost their sense of taste to Covid-19 have discovered, though, functioning tastebuds are essential for a good quality of life.
The human gustatory system can detect five core tastes: salty, sweet, sour, umami (savory), and bitter. Taste begins on the tongue, with tastebuds which are tuned to detect the presence of sodium chloride in salty foods, various sugars in sweet foods, acids in sour foods, glutamate (from proteins) in savory ones, and thousands of potential toxins (including the alkaloids in coffee) which are collectively perceived as “bitter". Taste begins on the tongue, but taste sensations are quickly encoded by our taste buds, and then shunted up to the brain, which combines them with other sensory data to produce the complex sensations we experience when we eat food.
Humans are tuned to seek out sweet and savory things, and sugar triggers the dopamine-releasing reward neurons of our ventral tegmental area. That made a lot of evolutionary sense in ancient times, where sweet foods were a valuable source of calories. It’s less helpful today, though, when the sweet things our brains seek out are more likely to be 48oz sodas than the honey or fruit our ancestors would have hunted for.
Eating sugar is a surprisingly hard habit to kick. Some studies have suggested that sugar can be as addictive as cocaine. In at attempt to have our cake and eat it too, people have developed all manner of calorie-free artificial sweeteners. Most work by using calorie-free chemicals or plant extracts to stimulate our sweet taste buds in place of real sugar.
But one artificial sweetener stands out, because it works in a totally different way. Miraculin is a protein extracted from the fruit of the Miracle Berry tree, which is native to Africa. Miraculin by itself doesn’t taste sweet. But when you consume it, the protein performs a strange kind of magic, binding to the sweet taste buds on your tongue and temporarily altering their function. If you then eat sour or acidic foods, miraculin causes them to taste sweet, even if they contain no sugar.