Hello you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.

Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure.

We hope you enjoy it. This week the program is about change,

positive change. Looking at how our relationship with food, our taste,

palette preferences, has been shaped. But more importantly, how, despite it often

feeling otherwise, those tastes and preferences are not set in stone and can change for the better.

Our way through this idea has been guided by the latest book from Food writer B Wilson,

the remarkable first bite, how we learn to eat. It's a real wow of a book, drawing on the

latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and nutritionists, as well as on lesser-known

older studies and experiences from around the world. It shows the whole arc of

influences that get us reaching for the comfort foods and pushes us to understand the role of love at the family table and why that love is so often mistranslated into sugar and sweetness.

But the real power of the book lies in the way it documents how those preferences are not fixed. We can change as we'll hear in three powerful

stories. So forget finger wagging, forget government advice to eat five a day.

This is a far more ambitious and radical enterprise.

And B Wilson joined me in the studio,

I started by asking her about changes in her own relationship

with food. As a teenager I was a compulsive eater. I endlessly went on these short-lived diets.

I never thought I would get out of that trap of losses

and gains and shame about food.

And then somehow, over a period of months, if not years, I changed and now I can honestly

say I'm able to eat without guilt, food is a joy, and I felt

so grateful for this change and the more I delved into the subject I wanted to look to see whether

...