> But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of them detects the attractive, relatively low levels of salt that make potato chips taste delicious. The other one registers high levels of salt—enough to make overly salted food offensive and deter overconsumption.
I can imagine a future scenario where, in the interests of public health, someone figures out how to transliterate the 'too much salt' genes to 'too much sugar' genes.
Of the various ways that I could see human augmentation play out for the better rather than the worse, I'd rank that right behind tetrachromacy and hypoxia genes (particularly for Martians and Lunatics)
> I can imagine a future scenario where, in the interests of public health, someone figures out how to transliterate the 'too much salt' genes to 'too much sugar' genes.
Doing it for the masses “for their own good” is quite dystopian.
But doing it for yourself is easy and no gene therapy is required. Just cut out sweet foods and after not too long normal foods like bread will taste sweet, and sweetened foods will taste unnaturally toxic.
> Just cut out sweet foods and after not too long normal foods like bread will taste sweet
I don't really eat (or drink) that much sweet stuff at all, but I assume this is not-great industrial-scale bread you're talking about - with sugar added, not just a little salt, as a preservative; or for a shiny glazing.
There's no sugar in the regular bread I bake every few days/week, and unsurprisingly it doesn't taste sweet.
I really don't think any less sugar in my diet would change that (I'm not 'cutting' it, I just don't at all often have pudding, never sugar in my coffee, etc. I'd have to drop chutneys, fruit, wine to have much less).
Leads with a photo of 'not-great industrial-scale bread', and even explicitly calls for 'slice of cheap bread' as an ingredient... it's not doing much to convince me that the described effect is due to starches converting that quickly. I'm fairly confident the packaging for the pictured slice would have listed sugar as an ingredient.
I’ve tested it on homemade bread without sugar and noticed it. It even works when you don’t tell people ahead of time why they’re doing the experiment.
The link was chosen arbitrarily, you can find plenty of other examples if you’re concerned about its authenticity. But, it’s not a very strong flavor so you do want a bland bread.
> I can imagine a future scenario where, in the interests of public health, someone figures out how to transliterate the 'too much salt' genes to 'too much sugar' genes.
This has already been contemplated as a way to reduce consumption of red meat. [1] Just make people allergic to it. All in the name of fighting global warming of course.
I don't think the "too much sugar" crisis in the US is due to people cannot feel there is too much sugar. It's just overly sweet food is the default in so many parts of the US. Ice cream here is much sweeter than in Asia. Cup cakes in the US can send me straight to sugar coma after just one bite.
When I asked a friend if they thought the cup cake was sweet. They said that isn't cup cake supposed to be sweet? And they don't think it's overly sweet since all the cup cakes they have had were like that.
One must be careful when editing the germ line. Imagine that your gene changes were propagated but a disaster befalls the planet such that calories are now scarce as had been dozens of millennia ago. Those who couldn't eat enough food or consume enough sugar-based calories could die out, and if there are enough of those kinds of people among the population, the population size could reduce significantly.
I can imagine a future scenario where, in the interests of public health, someone figures out how to transliterate the 'too much salt' genes to 'too much sugar' genes.
Of the various ways that I could see human augmentation play out for the better rather than the worse, I'd rank that right behind tetrachromacy and hypoxia genes (particularly for Martians and Lunatics)