Curious facts about pets: cats can not taste sweet foods
Show key points
- Cats possess highly developed senses of hearing, vision, and smell, but their sense of taste is significantly less refined.
- Unlike humans, cats have a limited number of taste buds—around 470—which weakens their ability to detect diverse flavors.
- While cats can't perceive sweetness due to a faulty gene, they can taste unique elements like water and ATP, which signals the presence of meat.
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- Their strong sense of smell helps enhance the flavor of food, compensating for their limited taste perception.
- The absence of the functional TAS1R2 gene explains why cats are incapable of detecting sweet tastes.
- Even if a cat appears to enjoy ice cream or other sweet foods, it is likely drawn to other flavors, not the sweetness itself.
- Feeding cats human food, especially sweet items, can be harmful and is discouraged despite their apparent interest.
Cats are known for their strong senses: sharp hearing, vision adapted for movement and low light, and a very keen sense of smell. However, their sense of taste is much less developed than that of humans, dogs, and some other animals.
Strange things that cats can taste
Cats have relatively few taste buds—about 470 compared with roughly 9,000 in humans—so their sense of taste is weaker than ours. Although cats can't taste sweet flavors (we'll explain why shortly), they do detect things humans don't, including water and, in particular, the energy compound adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP provides energy to living cells, and cats' ability to taste it is thought to signal the presence of meat in their food. This is important because cats are omnivores and must eat meat in order to survive.
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Taste + Smell = Flavor
Smell also affects what cats eat. For humans, about 70 to 75 percent of what we perceive as taste comes from smell, because the combination of taste and aroma creates flavor. A cat's superior sense of smell helps compensate for its lack of taste buds, allowing it to enjoy different foods, such as chicken or white fish.
A fake gene and a lost future
Why can't cats taste sweet flavors? It's due to their genes—specifically a nonfunctional gene. One study compared cats' genes with those of species like dogs and humans that respond to sweet tastes. It examined the TAS1R2 and TAS1R3 genes, which together form the sweet taste receptor. While the TAS1R3 gene in cats is similar to the one found in dogs, TAS1R2 has multiple differences and is considered a pseudogene—a defective version of the functional gene. As a result, cats cannot detect sweet tastes.
But my cat loves ice cream!
If your cat seems to love sweet foods (note: ice cream is not recommended for cats), it's the other accompanying flavors that attract them—not the sweetness we enjoy.
Remember there are many reasons to keep human food away from cats, including that some human foods can be dangerous to their health. Sweet treats like candy may be fine for us, but not for cats—and they can't taste the sweetness we do anyway.