Topic for Jul. 24. ( Mon )

[narman]

I would eat anything for lunch (but I won’t eat that) – how can I cure my aversion to eggs?

Killian Fox

Sunday 16 July 2017 14.00 BST

Paul Rozin is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent much of his career studying food preferences and disgusts. It turns out that he shares my feelings on this matter. “I can eat a scrambled egg if it’s got other things in it,” he tells me. “But I can’t stand hard-boiled.”

How would he describe our position on eggs? As aversions? As instances of picky eating?

“You wouldn’t say someone was a picky eater if they didn’t eat beef or didn’t eat asparagus – it would have to be a broader range of stuff,” he says, “whereas aversions are fairly specific.”

I was, in fact, an extremely picky eater as a child. Aside from eggs, I was hostile to a variety of foods that included tomatoes, cheese, pasta, mushrooms and any kind of meat stronger than chicken. I wouldn’t drink tea or coffee. I had no intention of eating anything that came from the sea. If it wasn’t for my mother’s perseverance, I would have happily subsisted on a very Irish diet of mashed potatoes and frozen peas.

This attitude took a knock when I went to secondary school. By my 20s it had all but disappeared. What remained was the dislike of eggs – although, as I’ve attempted to eat them several times since, I don’t think pickiness quite explains my situation. Does that mean it was caused by a bad experience?

Rozin says it’s possible, though he does point out that only about 50% of people with a food aversion can trace it back to a specific trauma. I’m unable to do this. Nor can my mother when I call to ask. “There were so many things that you didn’t eat back then,” she says, sounding fairly exhausted at the thought. The only unpleasantness she recalls was when, aged two, I got sick after eating scallops. Afraid I was allergic, she never gave them to me again.

It would make sense if I had a deep-seated grudge against bivalves. Conditioned taste aversions, to use the technical term, are defence mechanisms, snapping into action when we associate the taste of a certain food with something that made us ill in the past. But I’m happy eating scallops as an adult. Not every food-related sickness creates an aversion, nor does every aversion have an obvious cause. “In a lot of cases,” Rozin admits, “it’s a mystery.”

It’s possible I simply never liked eggs in the first place. All humans are born with innate preferences and aversions, which can be explained in evolutionary terms. As babies we like sweetness, because sweet foods such as fruits are good sources of nutrients and energy. On the other hand, babies tend to be wary of bitter tastes, which are common in plant toxins.

Beyond that, there are genetic predilections which affect how certain people react to certain foods. “Some people are more bitter-sensitive and don’t like things like brussels sprouts,” says Rozin. These are the so-called supertasters, whose heightened sensitivity to bitter tastes is believed to be caused by the presence of the TAS2R38 gene and a higher-than-usual number of fungiform papillae on the tongue. Around 25% of people fall into this category.

“There’s another alternative,” Rozin goes on, “which is that there’s a tendency for people to not like eggs – you know, they’re gooey and they have that sulphur smell. What happens is that most people overcome it.”

It’s comforting to believe that my wariness of eggs has a basis in common sense. It’s also interesting to consider that my tastes could be changed through sheer determination. Dr Lucy Cooke, a child psychologist who specialises in eating behaviour and is currently working with the feeding disorders team at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, says that exposure is key. “Most people start drinking tea with sugar, but at some point you might decide to not to have sugar any more. It takes 10 or 15 cups before you’re used to the taste of tea that way. By which stage, if you go back to tea with sugar, it’ll taste unpleasantly sweet.”

The more accustomed we become to a particular taste, the more likely we are to find it palatable. This corresponds with a well-documented phenomenon in psychology, known as the mere-exposure effect, whereby people tend to prefer things simply because they are familiar. There is also a physiological explanation. According to a Yale University study in 2013, subjects who encountered a new flavour and experienced positive post-ingestive effects were more likely find it better next time and eat more of it.

Although genes do play a role, the food dislikes we develop in our lives are mostly learned – which means, presumably, that we can unlearn them. “Disgust is more culturally defined than we would imagine,” says Cooke. “If everybody around you eats insects, you get used to the taste of them and you’re not going to bat an eyelid if someone hands you a plateful. Whereas we’re going to go, no thanks.”

Cooke’s approach, which she has developed in her academic work (she is an honorary research associate at University College London), is to start small and persevere. “I give children little bits of food to taste every day, repeatedly, and observe and measure their response to it,” she says. “If you want to introduce food to a reluctant child, mealtimes are not the best times to do it. So we invented a game to play outside of mealtimes that’s unthreatening and involves tastes of food in tiny portions. It works. As long as the child actually gets the taste on their tongue and does it often enough, we see big changes.”

from : https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/16/how-can-i-cure-my-aversion-to-eggs-psychology
(I edited original material, as it is too long to read. Just refer full story.)

[Joel Song]

Phew, I've just finished reading the original article, which is the longest I've ever read here.
It must have been quite a task to read it through and edit it~

[narman]

:) It was not that tough task, anyway I also think original article is quite long...