Chocolate ratings are fundamentally very personal, for at least two reasons:
Furthermore, it seems to be generally, but not always, true that adults prefer dark chocolate, whereas children prefer milk chocolate.
Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular bar in the UK, accounting for about half of the chocolate bar market there. the Americans prefer dark chocolate with the smokey flavours of South American beans, continental Europeans prefer plain chocolate which has a higher cocoa content and is finer ground than British chocolate. We don't know the reason behind this. This page explores several possibilities, and we would appreciate input from any reader with data that would shed some light on the subject. , but speculate that it may be due The reason may have something to do with the change in our taste buds and smell receptors with age, but This sense of taste is very valuable in avoiding harmful foods. Many poisonous plants taste bitter, and so we tend to avoid bitter foods, at least as children. Culturally, we may overcome this "negative" taste sensation, but it is none the less true that foods like coffee and spicy foods are an acquired taste. In rats, if the animal is presented with a new food, it will only eat a little of it. If during the next day or so it feels ill, it will never touch that food again. If it does not experience harmful side effects, it will try a little more of the food. It is this cautious approach that makes rats so difficult to poison. Probably most of us have had the same experience, that if we eat something and then are, by coincidence, all shortly afterwards, we will instinctively dislike the food that we ate before we were ill, even though we know that the food was not the cause of our illness. This can be an especially serious problem for very ill people, who gradually come to associate more and more foods with their illness, and who may eventually lose all interest in food. So how do we know which potential foodstuffs are safe to eat? In both rats and people, an important part of this comes from social conditioning. We eat what other people, especially our families, eat. http://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/summer/scor/articles/scor48.htm Chocolate is at least a once-a-week habit for nearly half of all Americans, according to one survey. Americans consumed an average of 10.6 pounds of chocolate candy each in 1992, according to the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, but the world-champion Swiss eat twice as much. Britons, Germans, the Dutch, Belgians, the Irish, Australians and even the French all eat more chocolate per capita than Americans do. Hershey also can tell you that 24% of the chocolate we consume is solid chocolate candy, and the rest comes as coating on something else - from Milky Ways to Thin Mints. Hershey also found, using U.S. Department of Agriculture data, that women in their 40s eat chocolate as often as teen-age boys do, and both groups out-gobble others by a considerable margin. SDUT, 2/9/95, Food-2. Researchers have long suspected that men and women do not crave the same foods. And now several unusually comprehensive studies seem to confirm that their tastes, when it comes to obsessions, really are different. Harmony is over the horizon, however: One just-completed study shows that as men and women age, their cravings become more similar. For those over 65, a frantic raid on the refrigerator might even be a shared experience. In the last five years, more than 50 papers have been published on cravings, a subject that intrigues and confounds researchers. While scientists are confirming that women tend to crave sweets and men tend to crave meats, there is still no agreement on where cravings come from or what they mean. Although specific cravings could have a nutritional base, most researchers suspect that the desired food is needed more for hormonal or other physiological reasons not yet understood. People who feel isolated or embarrassed by their food cravings should know they are not alone. Unless these scores of research papers are wrong, there is really nothing unusual about driving through a blizzard in the middle of the night to find just the right flavor of ice cream. "The specificity is important because it distinguishes a craving from general hunger," said Dr. Harvey Weingarten, a professor of psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Others stress that the energy used to acquire the craved food is sometimes greater than the energy provided by the food itself - suggesting that people may be driven by extremely strong pleasure receptors in the brain. Indulging nonspecific cravings often produces guilt and depression. When specific cravings - focused on a particular food - are gratified, however, almost all men and a majority of women in the studies report feeling better. In one of the largest studies on food cravings ever undertaken, Weingarten surveyed 1,000 McMaster University undergraduates in 1991. Of those, 97% of the women acknowledged specific food cravings, while only 67% of the men did. Among those who had these specific cravings, the sexes were more or less equal: Both men and women said they experiences the cravings between five and nine times a month. Women craved chocolate more than any other food. Men, while noting they sometimes craved chocolate, reported far more frequent longings for steak, hamburger, lasagna and seafood - foods that are high in protein and, in most cases, fat. These desires showed up again in a new study at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research group in Philadelphia. The study, conducted by Marcia Pelchat, surveyed two groups - those between 18 and 35, and those 65 and older. In the younger group, women craved high-fat sweets over entrees 2-to-1. Mostly they craved chocolate, in every form: candy, cake, cookies, ice cream. In the group of young men, the reverse was true. In the older group, men still craved entrees over sweets 2-to-1, but the older women craved sweets and entrees in about equal numbers. They also reported fewer cravings than the younger women. In a recent diet book, "Why Women Need Chocolate" (Hyperion, $19.95), Debra Waterhouse, a registered dietitian, cites a large number of research references to support her thesis that women crave chocolate and other sweets and fats when their serotonin and endorphin levels are low. These "feel good" amino acids, she says, are activated in the brain by fat and sugar. They are at their lowest ebb right before menstruation, when the endorphin high produced by ovulation is dropping. The ensuing ennui, crankiness and lethargy are relieved by chocolate and other sugar and far combinations that release both serotonin and endorphins into the brain. Waterhouse says that men do not crave the same foods that women do because they are ruled by testosterone, not estrogen, and they need more protein to build and synthesize muscle. The eating patterns of men have not been studied as much as those of women. Most researchers, while indicating some support for the hormonal theory of women's cravings, are not willing to say whether men are seeking protein, fat, or something else altogether in cravings things like hamburgers. "We thought at first it might just be a macho thing," said Dr. Adam Drewnowski, professor and head of the human nutrition program at the University of Michigan. "But then we found that lab animals showed the same food preferences as humans." Although a food craving could theoretically signal a nutritional deficiency, most people do not report cravings for tofu, carrot sticks or spinach. Rather, they head for the high-fat, sweet or salty items that, since childhood, have signaled pleasure. Food cravings can strike at any time, but they are most often reported in the late afternoon and early evening. They can be "site-induced" (passing by a bakery) or, seemingly, come out of nowhere. No one craves specific foods as seriously or with as much determination as a pregnant woman. The most frequent cravings are for fruit and fruit juices, chocolate and dairy products, in that order. Once the second trimester begins, cravings zoom, says Patricia Pliner, a professor of social psychology at the University of Toronto who has done extensive research on food cravings in pregnancy. But nowhere in her extensive research did she find anyone with a special interest in dill pickles. Nor did any of the pregnant women studied by Pliner express a desire for greasy or fried foods. In fact, the distinct aversion to those foods was a strong in the pregnant women as their cravings for the desired items, she said. SDUT 5/25/95, FOOD-15.
Half of the number of taste buds on the tongue are lost between age 30 and age 60, with 80% lost by our late 70s compared to the number we had at age 20. Interestingly, we lose taste buds preferentially from front to back on the tongue, in the order of sweet, salty, bitter and sour.
But much of our sense of taste is actually our sense of smell. If you hold your nose while eating chocolate, for example, you will have trouble identifying the chocolate flavor-even though you can distinguish the food's sweetness or bitterness. That's because the familiar flavor of chocolate is sensed largely by odor. As we get older we lose sensitivity (we require more odor to detect it) and we also lose our ability to discriminate between odors. As early in life as when we were toddlers we begin to show changes in our olfactory epithelium. We actually lose sensory cells and they are not replaced. At age 25 we have 50,000 olfactory receptors (mitral cells), at age 60 we have 30,000 and by age 90 we are left with 15,000.
(Although note that some webpages claim that Recent studies on healthy individuals do not confirm previous reports based on institutionalized patients that the number of lingual taste buds decline with age. In healthy community dwelling older adults, recent tests suggest that there is only modest change in taste recognition or enjoyment.
Furthermore, there are vast differences in taste sensitivity between people. Apparently, people fall into one of three categories, based primarily on the ability to taste bitter tastes:
Supertasters generally experience many pastries as too sweet, coffee as too bitter; hot peppers and ginger burn, many fruits and vegetables--such as broccoli--are unpleasant, and they require that food should be served at a tepid temperature. This population is very sensitive to gradations in fat content of foods, while nontasters cannot distinguish between skim milk and cream and require more seasoning in food to get a flavor. There is some fluctuation in bitter taste sensitivity during monthly estrogen changes in young women and sensitivity to PROP tends to decline with age. Supertasters experience sweet foods as more sugary, fat foods as more slippery, and hot foods as more spicy than regular tasters or nontasters.Bartoshuk LM, Duffy VB, Reed D, Williams A. Supertasting, earaches, and head injury: genetics and pathology alter our taste worlds. Neurosci Behav Rev 1996;20:79-87 the number of supertasting women drops after menopause. In a study of 60 women age 65 and older, Laurie A. Lucchina, also at Yale, showed that about 7 percent were supertasters. Bartoshuk speculates that the supertaster gene becomes less active after the childbearing years, perhaps because it's no longer necessary to protect a developing child. SN 7/5/97. The sweet side of salt As any aficionado of chocolate-dipped pretzels will tell you, the salt is an integral part of the package. That pretzel lover can't tell you why, but researchers in Philadelphia probably can. Their study suggests that salt blocks the bitter flavor of foods. That filter allows more desirable flavors, such as sweetness, to shine through, says Paul A.S. Breslin of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Breslin and Monell director Gary K. Beauchamp report their findings in the June 5 Nature. Salt seems to do two things, Breslin says. First, it imparts a desirable salty flavor. Second, it "changes the character of foods so that some of the bitterness is suppressed," he says. For example, chocolate, which has a slightly bitter edge to it, tastes sweeter with salt. Breslin, P., et al. 1997. Salt enhances flavour by suppressing bitterness. Nature 387(June 5):563, in SN 7/5/97. Bartoshuk has actually found an anatomical difference between supertasters and regular tasters. On your tongue you have little mushroom-shaped structures called "fungiform papillae". The taste buds live inside these fungiform papillae. Bartoshuk found that supertasters have many more of these taste buds, than regular tasters do. You can test this yourself. Wipe some blue food-colouring on your tongue. Get a plastic hole reinforcement ring, (you know, the kind that is usually placed around a standard-size punched hole in paper - the plastic doesn't get mushy on your tongue, like paper would). Place the ring on your tongue. If you are a regular taster, you will see only a few "little mushrooms" inside the circle. But if you're a supertaster, there will be more than 25 of them http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/gmis9827.htm adults for whom one piece of chocolate is do divine they feel fully satisfied, may be sureprtasters San Francisco Chronicle, A1, 02/17/97 You also have some genetic variation in olfaction. But even more important than the genetic variation, you have life-span variation. Olfaction begins to decline at about 40 years of age, and it declines quite steadily. We don't know if that's a true age effect or if it's due to pathology, because your olfactory system is so exposed to viral illness. In any case, as you age, your ability to smell is lessening steadily. And your ability to taste is not, not nearly so much. The main effect of aging on taste, we think, happens to women at menopause. The ability to taste bitter is a poison detection system. And it looks as if the body has arranged it so that women vary in their ability to taste bitter, depending on whether they are protecting a fetus. There's variation with the menstrual cycle, and it appears to make women heightened responders to bitter early in pregnancy so that they become very good poison detectors. Once you've been pregnant, you're always a little more sensitive to bitter than you were before. At menopause, it falls off a cliff, and women become much less sensitive to bitter than they were. We know a lot about the pleasure that is associated with those experiences, believe it or not. One of the amazing things about olfaction is it has this ability to take components and relearn them in combination. An apple, cinnamon. Your brain learns a template that's a holistic sort of map of this, and you learn it as a new whole. The apple pie is a new template. It's not the same as the apple template mixed with the spice template. Here's the important property of olfaction: Those templates acquire pleasure. The more templates you have, the more pleasure you can acquire. Because of the way olfaction works, as soon as you can identify an odor, you acquire the emotional valence-that is, it's either good or bad-based on your experience. The acquisition of affect to olfaction is very vivid, very powerful and very hard to lose. Often, tastes that are not pleasant to start with eventually grow on you. Men are more likely to be nontasters; it is women who are more likely to be supertasters-probably to protect the fetus. http://info.med.yale.edu/external/pubs/ym_sp99/cover/taste1.html Sweets, particularly sugars, are much sweeter to supertasters, by at least a factor of 2. So when you taste sugar out of the sugar bowl, supertasters perceiving twice the sweetness at least than a non-taster is. A variety of bitters, including the caffeine in coffee are related to this; the bitter of saccharine is related to this. The people who hated the aftertaste of saccharin were tasters. The non-tasters find it to be simply sweet. we can predict that supertasters will dislike coffee and espresso, and if they drink coffee they'll be drinking coffee with milk and sugar and adding thereby more fat and sugar to their diet. Supertasters will also dislike bitter vegetables: kale, mustard greens, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage and so on, and when they consume them they'll consume them with cheese sauce, cream sauce, butter and so on. And another dislike will be dislike for hot curries, peppers, hot compounds and various spices. The one study that we have now completed deals with grapefruit juice, and we have found that again our tasters and supertasters dislike grapefruit juice and prefer orange juice which does not contain any naringin. alcoholism has been associated with non-tasting Someone else in the audience wanted to know if a sign that you were a supertaster was finding the taste of orange juice bitter after you'd washed your teeth. It's a familiar experience. Linda Bartoshuk: The effect - it's called the orange juice effect in the toothpaste business. It's caused by the detergent in toothpaste. The active layer in the taste system is a phospholipid layer. You know what happens to a layer of lipid when you add a detergent to it? Well that's what happens to your taste system when you put detergent in your mouth, brushing teeth. So you brush teeth and the phenomenon is that your ability to taste sweet declines, and everything that should normally taste sour, tastes as if a bitter taste has been added to it. So naturally the orange juice becomes quite unpleasant. It doesn't last too long, about a half hour and it'll wear off. Asians have a greater proportion of tasters, and we've confirmed that. They have a greater proportion of supertasters as well. Among female Caucasians about 35% are supertasters; among male Caucasians about 10% are. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/helthrpt/hstories/hr090697.htm Frosting is yucky. Coffee can be too bitter and alcohol too sharp. Hot peppers and ginger produce an unpleasant burn, but pungent foods are liked. Hypertasters often prefer their food tepid. The taste buds of hypertasters also are "tuned off" to fatty substances, not because of the flavor-which they do not detect-but because of a tactile sensation the brain interprets as viscous, slippery or greasy http://smartwine.com/wbm/1997/9704/bmd9701.htm preference for sweets vs. supertaster: http://smartwine.com/wbm/1997/9704/bmd9739a.gif bitterness test not trimodal: http://smartwine.com/wbm/1997/9704/bmd9739b.gif http://smartwine.com/wbm/1997/9704/bmd9740.gif But with experience we can develop a taste for bitter compounds, and thereby enjoy coffee and dark chocolate http://www.neurobio.arizona.edu/arldn/282/Blk7Lec1.htm It is now known that age takes a much greater toll on smell than on taste. Scientists have found that the sense of smell begins to decline after age 60. Women at all ages are generally more accurate than men in identifying odors.
The series of Chocolates by Jamieson is an ideal product to use to test such preferences. The chocolates are virtually identical except for the percentage of chocolate solids and milk in each bar. They produce five chocolates with 38, 47, 53, 60 and 70% chocolate solids, with the first three containing milk.
All the research on taste indicates that children's taste buds are more sensitive to bitter -- thus their frequent dislike of certain vegetables and other foods. As we age, our poor old taste buds get blunter and we seem to prefer stronger taste stimuli. This probably underlies adults' preferences for stronger, darker "more bitter" chocolate.
When Jamieson has done samplings/tastings of their chocolate, typically it is adults who prefer the darker chocolate, children the milks though not exclusively, e.g., my reference above to the professional " mouth --a chocolate consultant. One professional "mouth" liked the 47% best of all I did a talk about chocolate in a local kindergarten class (5-6 yr olds). They systematically tasted all 5 chocolates --90% preferred the milk, but in each case there was one child who preferred one of the other 4 chocolates. It is also the case that when doing in-store promotions (we've done several now) I've come to learn the world is divided into milk chocolate lovers and dark chocolate lovers --and the two groups typically do not overlap. I speculate that it has something to do with individual's sensitivity to "bitter" taste. That is the taste dimension to which people refer when questioned about their preferences, or why they prefered one chocolate over the others. Milk chocolate lovers usually say they don't like dark chocolate because it is "too bitter", although they will often add that ours is "less bitter" than many dark chocolates. Those with marked preference for dark chocolate often say that milk chocolate is "too sweet", "yucky", and they perceive it to be "a child's chocolate" so these are other factors to think about.
Sources: Fact Sheet on Aging: Changes in Taste; Perspectives on Aging: An Introduction to Gerontology; Reflections On Taste For Oral Health Professionals; Smell and Taste Disorders; Chocolate Lover or Broccoli Hater? Answer's on the Tip of Your Tongue; SDUT, 2/9/95, Food-2; SDUT 5/25/95, Food-15; Why Women Need Chocolate, Debra Waterhouse, 1995. The Sweet Lure of Chocolate; Discovering the Sweet Mysteries of Chocolate; Chocolate - melting the myths; Chocolate Pushes Sex Into Second Place; Supertaster; San Francisco Chronicle, A1, 02/17/97; An education in taste; Super Tasters - Taste, The Mind and Nutrition; http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/hu/projects/abstracts/96hb0099.htm The frequency and pattern of chocolate consumption in female and male university students.
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Last update: 29 July 2000.