Why some Baby Boomers like it hot, hot, hot

Hot, hot, hot peppers

As if aging Baby Boomers aren't losing enough, add a loss of taste to the list.

We're losing our hair, we need glasses for reading and distance, our hearing is going, and let's not even get into the 401(k) losses.

Our sense of taste is going too, and as a result, our hankering for hotter and hotter, spicier and spicier foods is growing.

Here's an interesting statistic, gleaned from a recent AARP Magazine article with the headline "Some Like It Hotter": In 1998, each person in the United States consumed 4.7 pounds of chili peppers (that excludes bell peppers, by the way). In 2007, our per person consumption of chili peppers jumped to 6.3 pounds per person.

The AARP article and others say the trend is due to Baby Boomers and the natural aging process that affects both taste and smell.

"As we age, the taste buds begin to disappear from the sides and roof of the mouth, leaving taste buds mostly on our tongue. The remaining taste buds eventually become less sensitive," says Phil Lempert, the Supermarket Guru, who analyzes food shopping and marketing trends.

In addition, with age some scents become more difficult to distinguish and that has an affect on the ability to perceive certain flavors.

The end result of all of this is the need for spicy foods because we perceive that the food we're eating is too bland.

What's interesting, according to Lempert, is that the effect we get from the jalapenos or Wasabi mustard or hot sauce or horseradish isn't taste, it's a nerve stimulus.

When we eat a hot pepper, for instance, it's the active components capsaicin that's kicking in.

"... the 'kick' or sensation is a function of how much pain it inflicts on nerve fibers in your mouth ... these pain fibers are actually wrapped around the taste buds. We consider them 'hot' because they stimulate only a subset of the pain fibers in your mouth, not all of them," he says.

It's said that salsa outsells ketchup, a point to bolster the hotter argument, though one source makes a good case that salsa outsells ketchup and ketchup outsells salsa, depending how you interpret the numbers.

Funny Tobasco hot sauce commercial: