What can cause tastes to change? Taste buds are constantly being replaced, so changes in health, nutrition, medications, hormones and age can all affect how they function, causing foods to taste bland or all the same, or leading to a metallic, sweet, chalky, blood-like or otherwise undesirable taste in the mouth.
republic - a form of government whose head of state is not a monarch; the head of state in a republic is usually a president. form of government, political system - the members of a social organization who are in power. Translations.
However, by some definitions, the US is a republic and not an indirect democracy. By those definitions, a democracy is one in which the people have absolute control. By comparison, a republic is a form of government in which there is a constitution or some other sort of basic law that limits what the people can do. By this definition, the US is clearly a republic and not a democracy because there are limits on what sorts of laws the people can make.