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The Fruit Of Taste Buds

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Taste buds Taste buds are sensory organisms that are found on your tongue. They allow you to experience tastes that are sweet, salty, sour and bitter. The bumps that are located on your tongue is called papillae, which contain taste buds. Taste buds have extremely sensitive microscopic hairs called microvilli. Microvilli send messages to the brain about how something tastes, so you can tell if something is sweet, salty, sour, or bitter. The average person has around 10,000 taste buds, and they are replaced every two weeks or so. As a person ages, those taste smells do not get replaced so, an older person might have only 5,000 working taste buds(The Nemours Foundation, 2015). Smoking also can reduce the number of taste buds (Greene, 2011). The taste buds are not the only thing that makes you be able to taste foods. Olfactory receptors, which are located in the uppermost part of your nose, contains special cells that help you smell. These receptors also send messages to the brain. While you are chewing, the food releases chemicals that immediately travel up into your nose. These chemicals trigger the olfactory receptors inside the nose. So your nose and your taste buds work together to send messages to the brain to determine if something is sweet, salty, sour, or bitter. If you have a cold or allergies, and your nose is stuffy, you notice that your food seems not have much flavor. That is because the upper part of your nose, containing the olfactory

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