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DailyDirt: This Tastes Funny… Here Try It

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There’s no accounting for taste — unless of course you have to quantify it with sensory panels and professional tasters. It’s not quite an exact science which is sorta why you can never get 4 out of 5 dentists to agree on anything, but researchers are still trying their best to learn about how we perceive different tastes. If you’re a serious foodie or just curious, check out some of these links on flavors and how we sense them.

• One hypothesis for why people have bitter receptors is that early humans needed to avoid poisonous plants, but that explanation hasn’t been supported by much evidence. It’s a mystery why we can perceive bitter as a taste because the ability doesn’t seem to correlate at all with diet and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. [url]
• Red pandas apparently like the taste of aspartame (and other artificial sweeteners), and these bears are the first non-primate mammals known to have such a preference. The researchers who made this discovery placed a sweet solution and a control of plain water in front of animals in a zoo for a day, and a preference was observed if the animals drank more of the sweet solution rather than plain water. Recently, giant pandas were also found to like sugar, even though they typically eat mostly bamboo. [url]
• Maybe you remember learning about a tongue map where sweet receptors are on the tip of your tongue and bitter receptors are on the back? Sorry, but researchers say that map is wrong. The ability to taste bitter, sour, sweet, salty and umami can be found all over the tongue, in the same areas. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, bitter, flavors, food, pandas, sweet, taste, tongue

DailyDirt: Accounting For Taste

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thanks to the receptors in our taste buds, eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Of the five different taste sensations, sweetness is probably the most pleasing. Starting from infancy, our bodies are already programmed to seek out sugar because it provides the energy to keep us going. There is also some indication that babies can be influenced to like salt if they are exposed to salty foods early on. As part of an evolutionary survival mechanism, our bodies are programmed to avoid eating bitter tasting things because many toxic compounds taste bitter. People like to eat sour-tasting foods, like citrus fruits or pickles, but from an evolutionary perspective, sourness is generally a warning for food spoilage. Finally, umami is supposed to be a “savory” taste, which is produced when our taste buds detect glutamate, the salt of the amino acid glutamic acid. Foods that naturally have an umami taste include cheese and tomatoes, so it’s no wonder that pizza tastes so good! Here are a few more tasty tidbits.

• Many animals, including cats and dolphins, can’t taste sweet things. It turns out that a large number of carnivores can’t taste sugars because they have non-working versions of the genes responsible for making sugar receptors on the tongue. [url]
• Researchers are working on developing artificial tongues that can mimic the human taste response to various flavors. However, to fully reproduce the experience of taste requires the development of an artifical nose, because a large part of “taste” is actually due to smell. [url]
• The elusive “salt receptor” is unlike the receptors for all the other tastes, and figuring it out is complicated by the fact that sodium is essential for life but can kill you at high enough doses. (Apparently, it takes only a few mouthfuls of salt water from the Dead Sea to kill a person.) Researchers now believe that there are two receptors or mechanisms involved in tasting salt — one that makes salt desirable and another (the elusive one) that makes it undesirable at high concentrations. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: carnivores, receptors, salty, senses, sweet, taste, tongue