Chapter 1. Supertasters

Short Description

Taste researcher Linda Bartoshuk of Yale University notes that people live in different taste worlds. By painting the tongue with a blue food coloring, she is able to determine a personís sensitivity to taste.

Long Description

Taste researcher Linda Bartoshuk of Yale University notes that people live in different taste worlds. By painting the tongue with a blue food coloring, she is able to determine a personís sensitivity to taste. The dye causes the structures that hold individual taste buds to stand out as pale dots against a dark background. The appearance of more dots indicates greater taste sensitivity. Those with the most dots are called “supertasters.” They can have up to 100 times more taste buds than other people. Supertasters tend to dislike the taste of alcohol because it is both bitter and burns the tongue. Similarly, they dislike bitter vegetables because their tongues are especially responsive to bitter tastes. Because of their heightened taste sensitivity, supertasters tend to be pickier about what they eat. Things do genuinely taste different. A non-tasterís and a supertasterís facial reactions to a bitter chemical reveal this difference. Whereas the non-taster shows little response, the supertaster finds the substance intolerable and immediately spits it out. Each of us, claims the narrator, seems to have a built-in limit to how strong a taste we can tolerate in our food.

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