Your tongue bristles with tiny bumps called taste buds: chemical receptors that interpret flavors and transmit that information to your noggin. Our sense of smell also greatly enhances the flavour of our food.
Taste buds have very sensitive microscopic hairs called microvilli. Those tiny hairs send messages to the brain about how something tastes, so you know if it’s sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. The average person has about 10,000 taste buds and they’re replaced every 2 weeks or so. But as a person ages, some of those taste cells don’t get replaced. An older person may only have 5,000 working taste buds. That’s why certain foods may taste stronger to you than they do to adults. Smoking also can reduce the number of taste buds a person has.
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