Do you have a sweet tooth that just won't quit and a weight that's climbing by the day? The problem may not be with your tooth but with your tongue. According to recent research conducted on rats, eating too much sugar in obese people may be caused by receptors on the tongue that are less sensitive to sweet tastes, causing overweight people to crave more of the sweet stuff.

In this study, it was shown that obese rats had fewer nerve cells fire in response to being given sugar, suggesting that they were less sensitive to the taste of sweet foods, motivating them to eat more. This is consistent with previous studies in humans that showed that humans who are overweight or obese have a stronger craving for sweet foods than their leaner counterparts. It appears that obese people don't taste sweet foods in the same way as leaner people and thus don't receive the hormonal signals that tell them they're eating too much sugar and consuming too many calories. As a result, they continue to indulge in sweet foods after a leaner person would have stopped eating.

Fortunately, it's thought that you can retrain the sensors on your tongue to be more sensitive to the taste of sweet by limiting the amount of carbohydrates you eat for several weeks. When you return to eating carbohydrates again, sweet foods will taste sweeter and you may avoid the problem of eating too much sugar.

It hardly comes as a surprise that Americans eat too much sugar. With the sugar content of processed foods being disturbingly high, it's not surprising that the taste buds can become desensitized to the taste of sweet even in a person of normal weight. By adopting a healthier diet based on unprocessed foods and avoiding the trap of eating too much sugar, it may be possible to retrain your taste buds to be more sensitive to sweet tastes, meaning they'll need less stimulation to be satisfied.

Retraining your taste buds to be more sensitive to sugar requires at least several weeks of sugar avoidance. At first it may seem difficult to carry out, but the longer you avoid eating too much sugar, the less intense the desire for simple carbohydrates will be. Interestingly, to re-sensitize your taste buds, you need to avoid artificial sweeteners as well since consuming these sugar substitutes has the same effect on the taste buds as sugar, increasing the desire for more sweet tasting foods.