Approximately how long can taste recalibration take when consciously reducing added salt?
Answer
Sometimes just a couple of weeks
The process of taste habituation, where the palate adjusts its baseline expectation for saltiness, can occur relatively quickly when there is a conscious and sustained reduction in dietary sodium. While individual results vary, the text indicates that this shift—where lower sodium levels begin to taste perfectly savory and previously normal foods start tasting aggressively salted—can manifest in as short a timeframe as a couple of weeks. This rapid adjustment confirms that the recalibration is primarily a function of exposure and sensory learning, as opposed to long-term physiological adaptation involving complex fluid balance mechanisms.
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