Why Cats Don’t Have A Sense of Sweet Taste?

Imagine a plate full of candies, chocolates, and cupcakes placed right in front of you, and you cannot resist yourself from indulging into the delicacies of desserts. But the moment you excitingly put a piece of chocolate in your mouth and feel no sugary taste...how would you feel? This is what it is to be a cat. Life is a combination of sugar and spice to keep everything nice. If sugar is eliminated, then all it remains is a life full of spice. No humans in the world could ever live without sugar as it’s our body’s necessity and also a lip-smacking food full of happiness.

However, as a pet parent, you should know for a fact that your feline friend’s world is without sweetness. From many cat facts, it is one of the most interesting facts to know that cats are deprived of the sugary rapture of dessert. Here’s a detailed explanation about why cats have lost their taste for dessert.

Humans, dogs, and most mammalian tongues possess taste receptors for sugar. The specialized taste bud receptors pick up on a sweet taste and send a pleasant signal to the brain. The sweet receptor is actually made up of two coupled proteins generated by two separate genes known as Tas1r2 and Tas1r.

In humans and other mammals, the two genes form the coupled protein, and the news is rushed to the brain when something sweet enters the mouth. Sweetness is a sign of carbohydrates, which is an important source for plant eaters and other mammals like humans. Our feline buddies carry broken versions of genes that build sugar detectors on the tongue. Genes that are not important for a species survival tend to accumulate more mutations over time. Hence, cats are completely heedless to the sweet taste.

The feline species are exclusive meat-eaters. The interesting fact is, all the ancestors of carnivores had a functioning sweet-tooth gene which eventually deteriorated independently in the different branches of their family tree. Therefore, cats can’t taste sweet, and this is not just a burst on anecdote. It is because most pet parents may claim that their beloved cats love candies, doughnuts, and ice-creams, but it is the fat in the form of carbohydrates that cats enjoy to eat. Invariably, the sweetness was confounded with fat and other things.

Therefore, as obligate carnivores, cats don’t need, nor they can digest or process carbohydrates, so evolution eventually deleted the gene for the sweet tooth.  Hence, when your cat yearns for sweets, she is actually looking for the fat, or perhaps she likes the texture for other chemicals found in the treats you are offering. However, no matter if your cat cannot taste sweets, all you can do is fill their life with an abundance of sweet memories through all your love and proper health care by using quality cat supplies.

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