If you’re to believe the hard working folks over at vocabulary dot com – and who are we not to? – then the phrase “sweet tooth” first proliferated among English speakers hundreds of years ago. It apparently comes from the word toothsome, meaning “delicious.” Tooth became synonymous with taste, and voila: sweet tooth = a taste for sweets.

Now you don’t have to be the editor-in-chief of vocabulary dot com to understand what a taste for sweets means, nor do you have to look too far to find somebody who probably has one. And for good reason: sweet things taste good. Like, really good.

Why do sweet foods taste good?

Now there’s a question! Though it’s far from a settled fact, it’s been posited in Western scientific literature that there’s an evolutionary purpose behind our collective sweet tooth. Our bodies require glucose to function, so the thought is that we developed taste receptors adept at identifying sweet plants in order to suss out good, safe sources of readily available glucose. 

The upshot to this particular theory is that we in turn developed taste receptors that read bitter flavors as less desirable, because bitter plants can have higher levels of certain toxins. Short of candy, foods tend to contain multiple flavor profiles, so the ratio of sweet to bitter is often viewed as how early humans figured out what was okay to eat.

 Contemporary research suggests that there are a variety of factors that go into just how sweet a person’s tooth may be. And the physical and chemical mechanisms through which we perceive flavors like sweetness are extremely complicated. (Seriously. If you can parse through scientific literature like this and clearly understand it all, you probably don’t need to be reading this blog post!)

Sweet foods in Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine

Of course, contemporary Western scientific borderline-consensus is just one way of looking at the reason our bodies crave sweets.

In Ayurveda, the ancient Indian medicine system, there are six tastes: sweet, sour, salty, spicy/pungent, bitter, and astringent. Every taste is comprised of a combination of the five natural elements: space, air, fire, water, and earth. 

But in most foods, one or two of these elements are dominant. These elements each carry unique, essential health-giving properties, so our bodies – by craving each of these tastes, in accordance with our needs – guide us toward eating a balanced, nourishing diet. The sweet taste in Ayurveda is associated with energy. Common sweet foods under this system include: sweet fruits, root vegetables, licorice, honey, rice, milk, and other milk products.

And in Traditional Chinese Medicine, which holds that high quality whole foods can be used as medicine, there are five flavors: sweet, pungent, salty, sour, and bitter. Each has its own therapeutic benefits, but too much of any specific flavor can lead to the opposite effects.

In TCM, sweet foods are viewed as strengthening or energizing, and common examples include root vegetables, beans, legumes, fruits, and most whole grains.

Can what we perceive as sweet change over time?

Let’s run those lists of Ayurvedic and TCM sweet foods back again…

Root vegetables? Beans? Milk?

To many reading this blog, those foods probably aren’t dancing through your mind when fantasizing about a sweet post-dinner treat. But when you stop and think about them more deliberately, they are in fact faintly sweet in their own way. Foods like sweet potato, adzuki beans, and condensed milk are common sweetening agents, after all.

But when you compare the subtle sweetness of adzuki to the five-alarm sweet attack that is a milk chocolate bar, then yeah… adzuki doesn’t taste so sweet.

That’s because your tastes can change over time. Think about how your favorite foods have evolved from the time you were a small child to now (unless you’re currently a small child reading this blog post, in which case, good for you). It’s a well documented phenomenon: kids dislike bitter foods and can’t get enough sweet ones, while adults tend to tolerate or even enjoy bitter flavors.

But even once our palates mature, they’re still subject to change. When you think about it, it’s probably not too shocking that if you eat a lot of a certain flavor – say, super hot peppers or hot sauces – that your tolerance for it will increase over time, to the point where you’ll need more of those peppers mixed into your omelet or an even spicier hot sauce to get the same flavor impact.

 This is certainly true of sweet foods and how our taste receptors perceive them.

Can sweet sensitivity be improved?

That’s a simple question with a somewhat more complicated answer. Small, not exactly perfect studies suggest you can. While these results are promising, it’s important to remember that the processes through which we assess sweetness are complicated and not limited to our taste  buds. Pretty much all of our senses play a part in how we experience flavor!

So while there’s some data suggesting that you can “reset” your taste buds’ ability to detect sweetness by decreasing the quantity and intensity of sweet foods you eat, in reality, it’s tough to say whether that “reset” is more chemical/physical, or psychological.

Either way, it does appear possible to retrain yourself to appreciate more natural sweetness, if you find yourself wishing already sweet foods were even sweeter. In the admittedly not perfect study referenced above, experiment participants were able to do so after replacing “40% of calories from simple sugars with fats, proteins, and complex carbohydrates” for five months. 

Remember: there’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying sweets! There’s room for sweet foods – ranging from your garden variety carrot, all the way to that pack of gummy bears – in every diet. But by reestablishing a lower baseline of sweetness, you’ll probably enjoy that carrot a whole lot more, along with other more nutritious, naturally but more subtly sweet foods.