Why do we turn up our noses at certain foods? 20 September 2013 Last updated at 16:55 By Michelle Warwicker BBC Food The secrets behind people's food hates are being explored by experts who want to understand more about what we don't eat, as well as what we do eat. Do milk puddings turn your stomach? Does broccoli, liver or cheese offend your taste buds? You are not alone. Food writer Stephanie Lucianovic has experienced more food aversions than most. "Being picky is not a choice; it's a thoroughly miserable way to live," she says. "Revulsion followed by gagging," are the words she uses to describe her sensations when attempting to eat certain foods she hates. Currently these include raisins, bananas and offal. In recent years we have seen TV programmes fixate on the extreme way people eat, such as in Freaky Eaters and Supersize vs Superskinny. But for most of us, our food loves and hates are less extreme, and change throughout our lifetimes. David Jackson from Leatherhead Food Research had an initial dislike of olives. "They are quite bitter and astringent," he says. I remember really hating them. But then again I think [it was] probably something along the lines of, when you get to a certain age and you want to appear more sophisticated... then there's that motivation to just continue to eat them even though you might not really like them in the beginning. "Everyone's got their own almost 'fingerprint' of hates," says Dr Emma Uprichard from the University of Warwick. Her recently published study on food hates also uncovered common patterns in the foods British people reject. Collectively we share things... in Britain we don't eat horse meat generally. But of course that is eaten and entirely acceptable in other places. One re-occurring theme to come out of the study was a very British aversion to milk puddings - semolina and rice pudding - often associated with school dinners of the 50s and 60s. Although the data goes back as far as the 1930s, Dr Uprichard believes some of the food hates described are still very relevant. Offal, and in particular liver, is still a common hate, for example. The biological reasons for our aversions to certain foods has been quite extensively studied. But the social ones are more blurry. "It's hard to say why many people grow out of their food hates over time, but it is clear that a lot of people become less fussy as they get older," says Dr Uprichard's fellow researcher Paul Chappell, from the department of sociology at the University of York, UK. Being faddy is associated with childhood - people expect children to have a wide array of foods that they don't like. The same isn't true for adults, being a fussy eater is less socially acceptable and rejecting certain foods because you don't like them can cause socially awkward situations," he says. Of course, if the food hate is too strong... then maybe no amount of social pressure could get you to try it. Stephanie Lucianovic, whose book Suffering Succotash is about life as an adult picky eater says fussy eaters are stigmatised. [It is] mostly because non-picky eaters seem to have this idea that being picky is a choice and that, therefore, picky eaters are being annoying or inconveniencing others by being picky. As a picky eater, she trained herself to grow to like certain foods by pairing them with flavour she liked. Now once-loathed broccoli, peaches and Brussels sprouts have become much-loved fixtures on her plate, she tells BBC Food. The biological reasons as to why we turn our noses up at certain foods are more clear cut. Scientists researching genetic differences in people describe three groups of "tasters": "super tasters," "non-tasters" and "regular tasters." Super tasters tend to have a stronger correlation to genes that code for the taste-bud receptors that pick up bitter compounds. This means super tasters are more likely to have strong aversions to bitter foods such as broccoli and Brussels sprouts. Our sense of smell is also a big influence on food aversions. "Let's take a cheese for example... as you mature or age the cheese or else if you put some ripening fungus into the cheese, such as in blue cheese," explains David Jackson, "that will produce and degrade the amino acids in the proteins of the milk and will produce these really smelly compounds. And what you find across the population is, because people are more sensitive to this you can have a lot more food aversions around this. There are evolutionary explanations for reactions to bitter-tasting or sulphur-containing foods. Hunter-gatherers would have relied on their sense of smell - food with a strong smell of sulphur or amino acids could indicate it was covered in bacteria. "If they ate it, it would make them sick," explains Mr Jackson. Similarly, evolution could explain an innate aversion to bitter tastes. Some inedible plants contain compounds that are bitter-tasting, and in the past people who could better detect this danger "would have had a better chance of survival." Many simply "grow out" of food aversions, but what if they do not? Motivations to overcome certain food aversions vary. It could be to do with social pressure or to seem more "sophisticated." Or it could be a desire to eat more healthily. The best way to grow to like sprouts, broccoli, tomatoes, olives and the rest? Eat more of them. The approach with the most evidence for overcoming food aversions is "repeated exposure," where the more often you sample a certain food, dislike will decrease and like will increase. Take the classic anecdotal example of tasting beer or wine for the first time. Too much tequila David Jackson from Leatherhead Food Research on how we may develop new food and drink hates: We have a very strong connection between our sense of smell and memory. So if you had too many tequilas on one occasion "the smell of a tequila afterwards would actually start making your stomach churn." You know that if you had one sip it's not going to do the same thing again. But it's more of a biological reaction that your body has an ability to do. If you got really sick from eating something once, your body's not going to allow you to do that again. "Very often the first time that you taste it it's 'oh actually this isn't really nice at all it's really bitter'," says Mr Jackson. But then if people try it over a period of time then they grow to like it, and they overcome that aversion and it becomes quite a pleasant experience that they go on to enjoy. Children, more than adults, are often influenced by "neophobia" - a natural cautiousness around new foods. "One of the things that's really interesting and fascinating is that for children, at certain parts of their development, all foods are new, if you think about it like that," explains Mr Jackson. But Dr Uprichard suggests it could be time to relax the pressure on getting children to eat more healthily. She admits she has to be "tentative" with the data in her study, but says: "It seemed a lot of adults had a lot of memories of food that they hated as children, that didn't scar them as adults later. One question we ask is maybe we could actually kind of relax some of the policies around children's eating, because there's so much emotional labour for parents to make children eat particular foods. And in a way helping the parents not to feel so guilty all the time.