How to Exercise Your Tongue by Adding More Variety to Your Diet...

Here are some exercise tips…for your palate:

1. Eat More Bitter Foods. We're all born with an aversion to bitterness, but our levels of sensitivity vary greatly. Some kids will eat broccoli from the get-go. It may taste one-third as bitter to them as it does to the child who tests your very last nerve at the dinner table. You can usually tell who is the tolerant taster (that is, the one with the less sensitive palate) and who is the hypertaster ("I only eat white foods"), but you can coach and nurture them both into being open-minded eaters.

One study found that only 5% to 8% of the calories we eat are bitter. But the compounds that make foods taste bitter (carotenoids in sweet potatoes and spinach, flavonoids in cranberries and kale, polyphenols in wine) also make them good for us. Consider the initial taste shock of bitter foods such as cranberries, cocoa and kale to be positive, rather than negative. Bitter = healthful.

2. Try Something New. At a restaurant, order something you would never cook at home. Instead of recoiling at the smell of something foreign and pungent, get to know it better. I used to abhor the very smell of canned tuna. That was before I landed a canned-tuna client and had to taste it every week for four years. These days I'm an aficionado of good (healthy) tuna.

3. (Read more..)