Journal · Gut · Heart · Brain

Can You Actually Retrain What You Crave?

By Jez

Greek yoghurt with nuts and fruit: retraining your taste buds

I used to be a two-sugars-in-the-tea person. Milky coffee too, with something sweet stirred through it, usually more than once a day. And on a Sunday afternoon, with the football on, there was a fairly reliable chance I’d work my way through most of a tub of Ben & Jerry’s without really noticing I’d done it.

None of that describes me now. I drink black coffee, ground at home, most days. Tea has become the occasional exception rather than the rule. Most mornings I eat nuts, which I avoided for most of my life, mixed through Greek yoghurt with more fruit than I’d ever have eaten in one sitting. And if I walk past a tub of Ben & Jerry’s in the shop now, something odd happens: I remember exactly how good it used to feel, but the pull to actually buy it just isn’t there.

I didn’t decide any of this in one go. It crept up on me over years. But it made me wonder whether you can really retrain your taste buds, and how much of what we crave is simply a habit we’ve never questioned.

Why you can retrain your taste buds

It turns out there’s a good biological reason changes like this are possible at all: taste buds aren’t permanent fixtures. The cells inside them that detect sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami are replaced every week or two, around every ten days on average. Your sense of taste isn’t fixed in childhood and carried unchanged for life. It’s a system that’s constantly rebuilding itself, which means it’s also a system that can be retrained.

That matters, because a lot of sugar appears to dull the very machinery doing the sensing. In a 2022 study at the University of Michigan, rats given sugar water for four weeks showed a drop of around 50% in how strongly their taste nerve responded to sweetness, and they had fewer sweet-sensing cells in their taste buds. Their response to salty, sour, bitter and umami didn’t change at all.

The encouraging part: four weeks after the sugar water was taken away, their sensitivity to sweetness had come back. The dulling wasn’t permanent. It was a response to the diet, and it reversed once the diet changed.

It’s a rat study, so it can’t tell us exactly what happens in people. But it lines up well with my own experience. When I took my tea and coffee heavily sweetened, ordinary sweetness (a piece of fruit, plain yoghurt) barely registered. Now that I eat far less sugar, those same foods taste noticeably sweeter. Nothing about the fruit changed. What changed was my ability to notice what was already there.

Salt seems to work the same way

There’s encouraging evidence for salt too, this time in people. In a small 2022 study from the University of Kentucky, adults with high blood pressure spent 16 weeks gradually cutting back on salt, with regular coaching and a handheld device to check the salt content of their food. They reduced their sodium intake by around 30%, and rather than finding food bland, they enjoyed their lower-salt meals more as time went on: from 4.8 to 6.5 on a 10-point scale. They still liked salty food, but their everyday meals no longer felt like a sacrifice.

I think this is the part that surprises people most. We tend to assume eating less sugar or salt means gritting your teeth forever, a permanent swap of pleasure for virtue. What the research (and my own kitchen) suggests is that the hard part comes first. Stick with it for weeks rather than years, and the goalposts genuinely move.

It isn’t just willpower

The part I found harder to explain to myself was the pull in my head: the way a food you used to love can stop feeling like a treat at all.

Sugary, highly palatable food triggers the release of dopamine in the brain’s reward system. In a well-known 2010 study, rats given free access to rich, high-fat, high-sugar “cafeteria” food overate, gained weight and ended up with fewer of a particular kind of dopamine receptor, called D2. With fewer receptors, the same food delivers less reward, which tends to drive more wanting, not less. The researchers compared the pattern to what happens in drug addiction. It’s also a big part of why so much ultra-processed food is so hard to stop eating.

I recognise that cycle from my old Sunday-afternoon ice cream habit, even if I couldn’t have named it at the time: never quite enough, always wanting a bit more once I’d started.

On the rare occasion I eat something very sweet now, I get close to the opposite. It tastes too sweet, I feel full quickly, and sometimes there’s a slump afterwards that leaves me sluggish rather than satisfied. That slump is real: a quick rise in blood sugar is often followed by a fall, and the fall can show up as tiredness, low mood or the urge to reach for something else sweet. It’s the background chatter we call food noise.

Once you’ve felt that cycle a few times and actually noticed it, it becomes a fairly effective deterrent on its own. Not willpower, exactly. More like your own body handing you the evidence.

Nuts, yoghurt and a more Mediterranean way of eating

The nuts and Greek yoghurt habit is a slightly different story, and I think it’s more about repetition than biology.

The best research on this comes from young children. In one UK study, toddlers who were offered a new vegetable (artichoke) again and again were eating more of it after just five tries, whether or not anything was added to make it more appealing. Simply meeting a food repeatedly, without pressure, made it familiar.

I don’t see why that would switch off in adulthood. I ate nuts occasionally, without ever really disliking them, until the mix I kept adding to yoghurt because it was easy had quietly become something I looked forward to.

The wider shift towards more fruit, more fermented dairy and a broadly Mediterranean way of eating happened the same way. Not as one big decision, but as one small swap making the next one feel normal, until the shape of an ordinary day’s eating had moved without me consciously steering it.

If you want to try it

None of this means changing your palate is quick or effortless. It took me years, not weeks, to get where I am. But the research suggests the part people dread most is shorter than most of us assume. A few things worth knowing:

Give it about a month. Taste cells renew roughly every ten days, and in the sugar study, sweet sensitivity had recovered four weeks after the sugar stopped.
Go gradually. The salt study cut back step by step over 16 weeks rather than all at once. Half a spoonful less sugar in your tea is a perfectly good start.
Expect the first few tries to be the hardest. In the children’s study, five tries was enough to make a difference.
Notice how you feel afterwards. The slump after something very sweet is useful information, not a failing.
Make swaps, not bans. Keep things you enjoy, like yoghurt, fruit and nuts, within easy reach so the new habit is the easy one.

Where I’ve ended up

Perseverance isn’t really about fighting your own preferences forever. It’s giving your palate, and your reward system, the repetition they need to settle around a new normal. After that, eating well stops being a decision you have to keep making and simply becomes what you reach for.

I still remember loving that tub of Ben & Jerry’s. I just don’t want it the way I used to. If you’d told me a few years ago that was possible, I’m not sure I’d have believed it either.

Read: Ultra-Processed Foods