There is a new version of TASTE.
Bardi is by Jason Socrates. Our understanding of the sensory system has been deepened by the discovery of a new taste cell.
I wondered if it was possible to do the same thing deliberately after hearing this story. If the brain can be tricked into liking something by accident, could you also do the same thing by taking a pill or painting a few drops of solution on your tongue before a meal? Can science turn the experience of eating Soylent Green into one of the best crme brlées of all time?
My father was gagged years ago when he took a huge slurping bite of what he thought was a fat orange. He thought it was the most poisonous piece of fruit he had ever tasted. He asked his companion what was wrong with the orange. She said it was actually a fruit. The taste of the rotten fruit was so bad that it tasted like a switch in his mouth.
A taste of evolution. The anecdote is germane to a group of researchers at the University of Buffalo. The discovery of a new type of taste cell has upended what we know about the human taste system.
We are able to detect certain flavors of things in our environment that are good for us and bad for us, because we know how to spot them. We can detect sweet things because sugars are a key chemical by-product of carbohydrates, which we typically consume as a basic food in our diet. We detect salt quite well because we need it to maintain cardiovascular homeostasis. One of life’s oldest needs is analyzing chemicals on the tongue and detecting flavors that indicate whether something is food or foul. The prevailing idea in biology today is that the modern mammal taste system evolved to serve that most fundamental of needs.
The new taste cell was discovered by a team at the University of Buffalo in New York. Humans are able to taste bitter flavors with accuracy thanks to our forgotten, foraged past. Frogs and mice have 50 and 35 Tas2r genes, respectively, but chickens have only three.
Paul Breslin, a nutrition scientist at Rutgers University and researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, says that they are a food chemistry analytical machine. Today, taste is almost irrelevant for the modern human, since at least one can drive past a thousand restaurants to a 24-hour grocery store bursting with food choices. We did not evolve with such abundance, but rather in a world full of famine and strange, bitter things that may be toxic.
The cat is considered. Cats don’t need a lot of sugar in their diet, except for the occasional non-critter Bon-bon. This isn’t just a question of preference, it’s evolution Cats don’t have genes that make them like sugar. There are cats, cows, koalas, and dolphins.
What would it be like to eat meat with a cat tongue? Steve Roper, a University of Miami Biologist, published a review on the current state of knowledge on taste buds a few years ago. Roper said that if a cat licks something sweet, it is because they detect the fat in that food and not the sugar.
You would never want to eat a salad with a cow’s tongue because cows don’t like grass, and they wouldn’t be able to taste it the way we do. Cows are sensitive to bitter foods, unlike humans. They still detect it, but it’s not so good.
Cats have a taste for food that’s called the “avowed savory taste”, and this makes sense because they eat a lot of meat. What would it be like to eat meat with a cat tongue? It is impossible for science to say for certain, but one can imagine a sensory system that tastes good.
Animals have reached a point in their diet where they have more or less one thing in their diet. Koalas, pandas, and sea lions are pescatarians, and they mostly eat eucalyptus. According to experts, you can see the same trend in lots of animals like these, a refinement of their taste systems to suit their niche. The taste system is a mirror of our environment, says Maik Behrens, a Biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Systems Biology in Germany. A few years ago, he published a paper about the ability of chickens and frog to taste bitter flavors.
Don’t try sushi with a dolphin’s tongue. It is because we taste bitter better than bottlenose dolphins that we taste bitter. They simply swallow their fish.
If an animal’s sense of taste is informed by what’s to eat in the environment in which they live, how they find that food in the first place matters. The more forages an animal has, the more it will need to detect bitters. That ape is alive and well within us.
The learned aspect of taste is often promoted by food lovers. Our taste preferences are hardcoded from the beginning. Babies will coo at sour and sweet foods in their mouths when they are born. “If you don’t know what you’re going to eat, you have to engage in this process of evaluation,” says Breslin.
He said that ape is alive and well within us. Chimpanzees and other apes love sugar for the same reason. We were meant to be sugar eaters like the orangutans and the gorillas.
There was a single type of taste cell that responded to all tastes. As we discovered different taste cells, that concept was slowly refined. The sense was still that a single cell would detect a single taste, even though scientists classified taste cells into different types. Medler explained how the new taste cell did not behave the way we expect it to.
Medler and her colleagues recently discovered a subset of cells that were responsive to four of the five basic taste qualities and seem to be just as important for the perception of those tastes. Roper is a Biologist from the University of Miami.
The quest for a new experience. Julie Mennella, a Biologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center who studies taste also, was not involved in Medler’s research. The study involved isolating taste cells for their electrical signaling, as well as extensive behavioral experiments in which mice were trained to seek out bottles of solution they liked. Medler and his team showed that when mice lose their broadly responsive taste cells, they behave like they can’t taste anything.
There are more than one candidate for the new sensory flavors, according to Richard Mattes, a nutrition scientist at Purdue University. New tastes for calcium, carbon dioxide, starch, and short-chain carbohydrates have been proposed. They are not accepted in the scientific community. Some scientists have proposed that additional tastes could exist, and some of them have been identified, but not everyone agrees with the current breakdown of taste into five key flavors.
Under the right testing conditions, people can say, ‘Oh, no!’. This isn’t like any of those others. It is a strong case in my mind.
There is overwhelming evidence that fat tastes good. There is a human taste cell called CD36 that can detect fat. There is a mechanism for it to transduce signals to the brain, and these signals seem to be tailored specifically for fat. People can detect fat on their tongues in sensory experiments.
The last time a new flavor was added to the list was 20 years ago, when umami was discovered, but it was almost a century after the first proposal of it. The discovery of the new type of taste cell by Medler and her colleagues is not quite as profound as the one by Ikeda, but experts say it is not all about new tastes. Identifying these new cells is an important step in our efforts to understand the basic features of human taste, like how taste cells communicate with each other and how our sense of taste works.
The argument is that humans have the ability to detect a specific type of fat called free fatty acids, which are present in rancid food. The food industry has been aware of this for a long time and tries to eliminate free fatty acids from food. Cold pressing olive oil reduces the temperature dependent oxidation of the oil, which produces free fatty acids and fouls the taste of the oil.
Covid, shingles, and spit. The hope is that the study will help us understand how taste signals are sent back to the brain.
People will describe the taste of white wine that has been dyed red but is otherwise unchanged as if it is a red. It always seems to come back to the brain when it comes to taste. The mind exerts a huge influence over how we perceive food because it combines taste signals with signals from our other senses and integrates them with memories and other things.
A dramatic change in flavor brought about by new information is an example of this. Many of the tricks you can do with taste have to do with how taste signals are processed. You won’t be able to tell if it’s strawberry, lemon, or grape if you hold your nose, close your eyes, and eat a jellybean. A strong driver of flavor perception is color, which can have nothing to do with taste. People will describe the taste of white wine that has been dyed red but is otherwise unchanged as if it is a red.
Other things can affect taste in other ways. People lose their sense of taste completely because of shingles, which can affect the taste cells in the brain. A group at Harvard showed earlier this summer that the loss of smell and taste is probably caused by coronaviruses, and this is a common side effect of COVID-19.
You don’t have to think about taste in your mind. It is highly adaptive. When rats are fed a diet of bitter foods, their saliva upregulates the proteins in their saliva that interact with bitter compounds, blocking them from interacting with their taste buds. People see the same thing. Almond milk will change the saliva profile of people over time and they will crave it more.
Medler says that it is a big problem with old people becoming malnourished. The taste system can affect our consumption. Aging can lead to the loss of taste because the cell turnover process can become impaired. It can be profound. Older people who experience taste cell degradation lose appetite.
Mennella says that the number one reason for noncompliance is the medicine’s taste. Ear surgeries and tooth removal can affect the taste of food, as can head injuries and radiation therapy. The quality of life and treatment outcomes can be impacted by the loss or distortion of taste, which is an unwanted side effect of chemotherapy and other medicines.
If the human sense of taste can be changed through injury or infections, can it also be changed by things like almond milk? Your tongue is being hacked.
Roper says that the work of Dr. Medler does not lead to an A-ha! moment. He says that the work gives us more information, but we still have a long way to go to understand the taste system. The experts were skeptical about whether it will be possible to change the taste of a food in this way.
There are a lot of health applications for such a hack, such as restoring taste, altering the chemistry of food to make it less sweet, and reducing salt content without affecting taste. Changing taste for artistic or hedonic effect is a purely culinary question. Could we use hacking the tongue to enhance the experience of eating food? A chef could change all the options to make a dining experience better.
Roper compared our understanding of the taste system to the ability to hear but a few notes of a musical composition, saying that it won’t be until we hear the whole thing. Will people on the ship licking a tube of toothpaste-looking stuff and then eating a Soylent say, “Oooh, this tenderloin is extremely tasty?” Breslin asked what she was doing. That is going to be a really, really hard thing to do.
Whether it is an orange or a grapefruit, that is up to you.
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