How age affects our taste in food

Sophisticated adults love to dine on olives, blue cheese and anchovies – but many hated these foods as a child.

Now, experts have discovered the 'gastronomic watershed' – the age at which we start to like ‘grown-up foods,’ the Daily Mail reports.

A survey discovered the average person is aged 22 when they start to appreciate more complex, stronger flavours like goats cheese, chilli sauce and avocado.

The research identified 20 foods we are unlikely to enjoy until we hit our late teens and early 20s.

Previously, scientists have theorised our changing tastes are due to how the number of taste buds in our mouths declines with age.

Babies are born with innate cravings for sweet things, as our mother’s milk is packed with sugar and fat.

Infants have around 30,000 tastebuds in their mouths, so strong tastes will be much more intense for a child.

This explains why nursery food is so bland and why children might find strong tasting foods overpowering.

By the time we become adults, only a third of these taste buds remain, mostly on our tongues.

This explains why we can then tolerate and enjoy stronger tastes.

According the survey, many of us find it difficult to appreciate the taste of strong tasting fish like mackerel during childhood and even throughout our teen years.

And mature cheeses fared no better, with most people aged 21 before they appreciated parmesan and aged 22 before they liked to eat blue cheese.

Similarly, most people didn’t appreciate a spicy curry until their late teens.

Unsurprisingly a host of vegetables featured high up on the list, with spinach and peppers both beginning to appeal to our taste buds at the age of 21.

Chilli sauce, gherkins, garlic and horseradish sauce featured in the list of 20 'grown-up' foods, as did kidney beans.

But goats cheese proved to be the most disliked childhood flavour, with the average person not fully appreciating it until they hit 28.

Other flavours that failed to please our palate during our younger years were olives, which we only begin to enjoy at the ripe old age of 25, and oysters, a taste we acquire at 24.