Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat
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ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."
Show me the receptors (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:the Calcium taste buds weren't listed (Score:3, Interesting)
First, did you actually read the article you linked to? It clearly states that they don't believe that we have an extra calcium sensing taste bud, but that our existing taste buds detect calcium as bitter, and therefore people who are sensitive to bitter (and don't like it) tend not to eat enough calcium as a result.
Second, there are probably a whole bunch of tastes we can detect that we don't list as having special taste buds. Picante* comes up high on the list (and is an important consideration in many cuisines). Umami was a taste that many didn't list until just a few years ago but was always a consideration in Asian cuisine (as is picante). Anyone with half a brain could have told you that humans can detect fat content in food by taste. Just go and try the fat free equivalent of a naturally fatty food. It'll taste like ass, precisely because you're not sensing the fat content. They can try to substitute things in to overcome this limitation like extra sugars or textures that mimic the mouthfeel of fat, but they aren't the same as actual fat.
* (This is the Spanish word for the hot kind of spicy. In English this is sometimes called piquant (from French), but that word can also mean spicy in a more general sense (think Christmas spice), and so I like the Spanish word instead. Hot is also a bad word for picante since it can also refer to temperature, and when talking about food, we need to differentiate somehow.)
Re:There's something else (Score:3, Interesting)
Many flavors are soluble in fat, but not water. When creating low fat versions of high fat dishes, you must always adjust the seasoning to account for this.
Re:A special category of first post for science (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A special category of first post for science (Score:1, Interesting)
Really impressive.
I could easily be missing something, but my reading of your reply does not detect an ounce of hostility to the GP.
Bravo,... you are a gentleman and a scholar!
Re:Protein? (Score:2, Interesting)
That kind of confused me, the umami taste is caused by glutamates which are sometimes found in protein heavy foods but also come from such random places as tomatoes, seaweed or a number of fermented sauces. Protein doesn't really have anything to do with it.
Actually, it does. All those "random places" you list contain protein. Don't mistake protein and meat.
Re:the Calcium taste buds weren't listed (Score:5, Interesting)
I may be mistaken, but I think it is generally considered that spicy or picante does not have a flavor receptor and that the picante experience can be attributed to chemicals that cause irritation in our mouths.
Yeah; you probably are mistaken. ;-) For a long time, there has been a bit of a medical mystery about how hot peppers produce a sensation that feels like major heat damage, but medical tests can't detect any actual tissue damage of any sort. This was answered a few years ago by some researchers who determined that the capsaicin chemical that does the job targets specifically the nerve endings that detect heat, and tricks them into sending a false signal to the brain saying "I'm being burned!"
An interesting aspect to this was verification that capsaicin does target specifically mammalian heat sensors, and doesn't work with birds. Anyone who has pet birds is familiar with this. Seed mixtures intended for birds such as parrots usually contain hot peppers, which the birds like. I like to grow my own hot peppers in pots that I bring in during the winter. I have to protect them from our pet conure and cockatiels, because they'll land and the plants and devastate them. When I decide to pick the ripe ones, the conure especially is right there demanding samples of the harvest, which she devours whole.
Further research is needed on the topic, but the hypothesis is that hot peppers evolved their "hot" chemical explicitly to distinguish between mammals and birds. Pepper seeds have a thin, leathery shell which doesn't survive the long, slow digestive system of most mammals. But birds can't afford to carry food around for long; they have a short, powerful digestive system that extracts just the easily-digested stuff and dumps the rest after only a few hours, because it would take more energy to transport it than it contains. The leathery shells of pepper seeds do survive a bird's digestive process. So the hypothesis is that peppers are specifically encouraging birds as seed-transport agents, and discouraging mammals that would digest the seeds.
There's some sort of biological irony in the fact that hot peppers have been spread from their origin (South America) to the rest of the world by a mammal (us). Of course, we can easily do something that's difficult for other mammals: We can dilute the hot pepper enough that it's just a minor (or not so minor) flavor mixed with other flavors, and not overpowering as it is if you eat the pepper alone.
In any case, to be on topic, we should note that the hotness of hot peppers isn't really a "flavor". It's more a case of our heat sensors being tricked by a chemical produced by plants that are trying to prevent us from eating their fruit and digesting their seeds.
Re:Show me the receptors (Score:1, Interesting)
Your ridicule is utterly misguided. Published research is often invalid when it comes to the conclusions drawn. In this case it is absolutely OBVIOUS that the post you replied to is plausible and the fact you can taste a thing does not mean you have a unique receptor for it, as the poster correctly said it may be other receptors.
It pays to use critical analysis skills when reading journals and not blindly accept conclusions, most research tends to overreach when it comes to the scope and importance and significance of findings.