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- An Evolutionary Perspective on Food and Human Taste
Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 9, 6 May 2013, Pages R409-R418
Paul A.S. Breslin
SummaryThe sense of taste is stimulated when nutrients or other chemical compounds activate specialized receptor cells within the oral cavity. Taste helps us decide what to eat and influences how efficiently we digest these foods. Human taste abilities have been shaped, in large part, by the ecological niches our evolutionary ancestors occupied and by the nutrients they sought. Early hominoids sought nutrition within a closed tropical forest environment, probably eating mostly fruit and leaves, and early hominids left this environment for the savannah and greatly expanded their dietary repertoire. They would have used their sense of taste to identify nutritious food items. The risks of making poor food selections when foraging not only entail wasted energy and metabolic harm from eating foods of low nutrient and energy content, but also the harmful and potentially lethal ingestion of toxins. The learned consequences of ingested foods may subsequently guide our future food choices. The evolved taste abilities of humans are still useful for the one billion humans living with very low food security by helping them identify nutrients. But for those who have easy access to tasty, energy-dense foods our sensitivities for sugary, salty and fatty foods have also helped cause over nutrition-related diseases, such as obesity and diabetes.
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- The Molecular and Cellular Basis of Bitter Taste in Drosophila
Neuron, Volume 69, Issue 2, 27 January 2011, Pages 258-272
Linnea A. Weiss, Anupama Dahanukar, Jae Young Kwon, Diya Banerjee and John R. Carlson
SummaryThe extent of diversity among bitter-sensing neurons is a fundamental issue in the field of taste. Data are limited and conflicting as to whether bitter neurons are broadly tuned and uniform, resulting in indiscriminate avoidance of bitter stimuli, or diverse, allowing a more discerning evaluation of food sources. We provide a systematic analysis of how bitter taste is encoded by the major taste organ of the Drosophila head, the labellum. Each of 16 bitter compounds is tested physiologically against all 31 taste hairs, revealing responses that are diverse in magnitude and dynamics. Four functional classes of bitter neurons are defined. Four corresponding classes are defined through expression analysis of all 68 gustatory taste receptors. A receptor-to-neuron-to-tastant map is constructed. Misexpression of one receptor confers bitter responses as predicted by the map. These results reveal a degree of complexity that greatly expands the capacity of the system to encode bitter taste.
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- Nutrient sensing in the gut: new roads to therapeutics?
Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 24, Issue 2, 1 February 2013, Pages 92-100
Sara Janssen and Inge Depoortere
AbstractThe release of gut hormones involved in the control of food intake is dependent on the acute nutritional status of the body, suggesting that chemosensory mechanisms are involved in the control of their release. G protein-coupled taste receptors similar to those in the lingual system, that respond to sweet, bitter, umami, and fatty acids, are expressed in endocrine cells within the gut mucosa, and coordinate, together with other chemosensory signaling elements, the release of hormones that regulate energy and glucose homeostasis. In health, these nutrient sensors are likely to function as inhibitors to excessive nutrient exposure, and their malfunction may be responsible for a variety of metabolic dysfunctions associated with obesity; they may thus be considered as new therapeutic targets.
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Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 7, R247-R248, 12 April 2011
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Bitter taste induces nausea
1 Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
2 Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
3 Section of Gastroenterology, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, USA
4 Department of Nutritional Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
- Nausea is the most characteristic negative experience that typically accompanies toxin-induced illness. Because most plant-derived toxins taste bitter, there is a rational link between bitter tasting compounds in the mouth and nausea that often results from their ingestion. It is surprising then that there are no experimental data demonstrating this connection. There are, however, data consistent with this notion. For example, people who are the most sensitive to bitter stimuli are more prone to motion sickness , and bitter taste sensitivity and pregnancy associated nausea are positively related, a response postulated to protect the fetus from poisoning . Moreover, we know that bitter taste slows gastric emptying, a correlate of nausea . Bitter taste is strongly sensed by the glossopharyngeal and vagus nerves , which innervate the posterior oral cavity and the gastrointestinal tract, respectively. The two projection fields of these sensory nerves are immediately adjacent within the nucleus of the solitary tract as well as in other brain relays , thus establishing a neuro-anatomical substrate for taste inputs to influence gastrointestinal states. Here, we report the first direct demonstration that bitter taste stimulation, but not sweet, salty, or umami taste, induces nausea, showing that the body not only detects potential toxins but anticipates their ingestion by inducing a prophylactic aversive state.