Our Sweet Teeth

We are, it seems, pre-determined to love the taste of all things

sweet. Evolutionary biologists argue that survival once depended

on our ability to take in quickly high amounts of nutritional

energy, a major source of such energy being found in

carbohydrates, which include sugar. As frugivores, we generally

prefer our fruit as ripe as possible, its degree of edibility being

signalled by sweetness, too. While sweetness signals calories,

bitterness in contrast may indicate the presence of toxins. It

appears that our predilection for sweetness is, like the incest

taboo, a cross-cultural phenomenon, and that it is ubiquitous and,

in all likelihood, innate: the facial expressions of new-borns, for

example, display unambiguous pleasure when sugar is placed on

their tongues. We appear, moreover, to have raided beehives for

millennia: there is evidence in Mesolithic cave paintings that

feeding on honey has always been part of our primate nature. We

share our love of sweetness with most other mammals, the sole exception being felines.