Learn How to Love Healthy Foods

Find out how you can use all 5 senses to learn to love healthy foods.

Love edamame? Loathe broccoli? Run screaming from salmon? You may think that your love or hate of certain (especially healthy) foods is hard-wired in your taste buds, but it turns out a lot of our tastes for foods can be learned and relearned—even as adults. Our flavor preferences are malleable: "Eating is a multisensory experience with many opportunities to intervene," says Barb Stuckey, author of Taste What You're Missing: The Passionate Eater's Guide to Why Good Food Tastes Good (Free Press, 2012). While there are only five tastes that we can detect—sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami, which means savory or meaty—there are many factors that impact flavor. "A food's texture, how it sounds, how appetizing it looks and how it smells, all play a role in flavor perception," says Stuckey.

—Holly Pevzner, November/December 2012 EatingWell Magazine

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