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Why do some people feel the need to gobble up everything in their line of sight, while others can eat a third of that and yet stay satisfied? Are the moderate eaters just pretending to be happy with their stupidly tiny portions, secretly bursting into tears every time they see a Doritos commercial?

Well, there might be an actual, physical reason, and that reason is all about the mouth: Some of us have crappier taste buds than others. Namely, obese people, and specifically obese children.

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"Shit, I don't even have a tongue."

It appears that fat kids tend to have worse taste buds than their leaner counterparts, and this could be a significant factor as to why they became fat in the first place. The theory is that because of their crappy tasting capacities, it takes more food to experience the same "taste hit" as a person with a normal tongue.

In an effort to verify this, researchers gave both obese and non-obese children different taste strips to lick and identify. These strips were infused with base flavors (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory), and they all had different intensities of taste. Their scores were ranked on a scale of 0 to 20, and the fat kids performed significantly worse than non-obese ones; on average, they only scored 12.6, while others scored a solid average of 14. While the obese children had no problem identifying what a given taste was, they did have trouble identifying its strength level. In other words, they tasted the same things, only not as intensely.