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Why Does Some Food Taste Bad To Some People And Good To Others?

People who have a lot of papillae—the bumps on our tongue, most of which house our taste buds—often find flavors overwhelming. They’re “supertasters,” and as such they add cream to their coffee and order food mild instead of spicy. Subtasters, on the other hand, have low papillae density and prefer their chicken wings “atomic.”

Individual taste, however, isn’t simply about papillae; it also has to do with our buds’ ability to detect different molecules. Although our brains can recognize the same five tastes—bitter, sweet, salty, sour and umami (savory)—the suite of chemicals that can trigger those signals varies from one person to the next. Alexander Bachmanov, a geneticist at Monell…

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Articles of Interest

A Taste You Hate? Just Wait

A life breaks down into epochs, with bright dividing lines between them. There’s the period of impotence and innocence before a driver’s license, and the insurance premiums and speeding tickets after. There’s pre-mortgage, when a landlord handles plumbing emergencies, and post-mortgage, when you’re on your soggy own. There’s beet aversion, and there’s beet adoration.

Are Women Better Tasters Than Men?

The findings may help explain why women are more likely than men to develop chemical intolerance syndromes — when you notice and become irritated by odors present at very low levels.

Do You Taste What I Taste?

The tongue and the nose do not, of course, tell us what we think about the things we smell, taste, and feel; it is the brain that draws the conclusions. How the brain translates and interprets the information collected by the tongue and the nose is a dauntingly complex transaction

How our sense of taste changes as we age

Taste is a complex phenomenon. We do not experience the sensation through a single sense (as we would when we see something using our sense of sight, for example) but rather it is made up of the five senses working together to allow us to appreciate and enjoy food and drink.

People Who Taste Too Much

There is a good reason why kale evokes such strong feelings in different people. What is harshly bitter to some 25% of the world—often classified as "supertasters"—is barely bitter to about another third. The rest of us fall somewhere in between. Such stark differences in how we perceive taste are programmed into our DNA.

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To the ranks of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami, researchers say they are ready to add a sixth taste — and its name is, well, a mouthful: "oleogustus." Announced in the journal Chemical Senses last month, oleogustus is Latin for "a taste for fat."

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Resources

Good Taste is the Worst Vice

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