ABSTRACT
Highly specialized and functionally integrated cognitive systems facilitate hedonistic and healthy foodpreferences. Guided by survival needs, flavor preferences not only select safe, nutritious dietarycomponents, but also those with negligible calorific value but significant health benefits, for example,spices. Feeding behavior, both innate and acquired, is guided not only by taste receptors on the tonguebut also visceral organs. The gustatory cortex receives information from all senses, not just taste, suggesting multiple checkpoints in predicting and evaluating healthy foods. Ayurvedic interpretation of‘rasa’ as chemistry is compatible with medicinal value of diets because, taste and odor are chemosensoryperceptions. As flavor and taste are linked to the chemical structure of compounds, taste might offerclues about pharmacological activity. Ayurvedic idea of vipaka, or post digestive perception of taste,recognizes the extended role of taste receptors beyond the tongue and stretching into the viscera.Ayurvedic wisdom is consistent with evolutionary guideposts that suggest three successive stages ofnutritional appraisal: before, during, and after ingesting food. While olfaction induces affinity orrevulsion even before ingestion, gustatory receptors on the tongue evaluates nutritional value uponcontact, and the chemoreceptors in the deeper metabolic systems probably pronounce the final verdicton the nutritive and health benefits of ingested substances. Alliesthesia, neophobia, and the extremevariation in human T2R genes (coding for bitterness receptors) illustrate the importance of adaptivelearning of dietary preferences. These evolutionary clues are compatible with the Ayurvedic principle of‘rasa’, in facilitating the process of drug discovery.© 2017 Transdisciplinary University, Bangalore and World Ayurveda Foundation. Publishing Services byElsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).