Taste! Navigating Flavor Aversions with Sherry Hess, NTMC Candidate from HEALCon 2025. Take this quiz to earn 1.5 CECs.

This presentation will approach the challenges of client compliance by embracing our innate ability to understand nutrition through the taste experience. The rate of client failure based upon flavor preference can be significantly reduced by helping clients to understand WHY humans have taste receptors, what biological functions our senses stimulate, and the nutrient/flavor correlations that we may be missing in our modern food system. 

It’s no coincidence that as our agricultural food system shifted to industrialized, chemically supported methods, our food got bigger, and more transportable, while simultaneously less nutrient-dense and flavorful. Decades later, we’re recognizing the hazards of these practices and facing significant challenges in our attempts to heal and detoxify our clients through whole-food eating. As veggies and meat have become less flavorful, we have given rise to functional foods in the nutrition space. This talk will cover the pros and cons of flavorings in these functional foods. 

I will present ways in which we can empower our clients to recognize that taste isn’t just about discerning if it tastes bad or good but that it has biochemical reactions that can help us better understand nutrition. We’ll match flavor to things like macros, micros, and antioxidants to the human tasting experience in a way that has yet to be embraced or fully understood.