Find yourself regularly drooling over junk food, yummy chicken, that heavenly Butter Chicken, Baingan Ka Bharta, Hyderabadi zaffrani Pulao, Chicken Tandoori, Pav Bhaji,….the list is quite endless and so is the drool factor!

But as we all daydream about eating the above mentioned delicious dishes that make our palate go into overdrive, do we ever give a thought as to WHY? Why is that we love Indians love our butter chickens, Tandoori Chickens, Pav Bhaji’s so much. Never right! So, a group of scientists from the Deakin University, Sydney conducted a research on why we as humans are so fond of fatty foods and found out that apart from the normal five tastes that our tongue can detect - sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami – a unique protein rich taste which is found in soya sauce and chicken stalk, our tongues can also detect the taste of fat!

To prove this, the researchers conducted a test on a group of 50 people and found their ability to detect fat was linked directly to their weight! The study found that people who were sensitive to this taste of fat were inclined to consume less of it and thereby had a lower BMI (Body Mass Index) while those who were insensitive to this taste were found to consume more fatty foods and had larger waists with a higher BMI as compared to their ‘fat’ sensitive counterparts!

According to Russell Keast from Deakin University, we have so many fatty foods easily available now-a-days, that we have become de-sensitized to the taste of fat! Due to which he adds that, “We all like eating fatty foods. What we speculate is (that) the mechanism is to do with stopping eating. Your body is able to tell you you’ve had enough and stop,” he explained. “And if you are insensitive to it i.e.fat, you’re not getting that feedback.”, this simply means that with our taste buds being de-sensitized we are not getting the required feedback of when to stop and are this is leading to over-eating and ultimately poor health!

Now this should explain why we end up gorging on the Pav Bhaji’s and Hyderabadi Zaffrani Pulao’s every time they are placed in front of us!