Eating vegetables is boring no more. (Source: TED/Facebook)
Ask any parent and they will tell you how difficult it is to get their children to eat vegetables. However, when it comes to chocolates, they have to make little or absolutely no effort at all. Ever wondered why? Well, that is because the brain prefers sweets. Before all the parents out there lose hope, there is some good news. A new technology known as optogenetics might help trick the taste buds and your child might just eat vegetables willingly.
In case you have your doubts, you can watch this video where an experiment was conducted on a fruit fly – their taste buds are similar to ours. A flypad – an iPad for fly – was used to conduct the experiment. Then, each fruit fly was put in each one of the chambers of a pad and a little bit of broccoli and banana were provided to analyse and study their inclination. The number of times they had banana and broccoli were measured and the resultant data was transferred to the computer.
The findings revealed that they preferred bananas to broccoli much like children. And this happens because the taste buds, made up of specialised neurons called taste receptors send a signal to the brain every time we eat something. Thus, we are attracted towards sweets and not so much towards vegetables. But is it possible to rewire the brain and make vegetables taste sweet and appealing? Yes, optogenetics is the revolutionary new tool that lets you do that. In case you are curious, watch how it functions here.
What do you think about this revelation? Tell us in the comments below.