Super Tasters ??

[chazwicke]

This from the Baltimore Sun:

Supertasters' discriminating abilities are right on the tips of their
tongues.

By Liz Atwood Sun Food Editor
September 29, 2004

Fifteen years ago, Lillian Wagner was working in the packaging plant of
Vanns Spices filling bottles when the company's owner, Ann Wilder,
asked employees to try samples of a sandwich spread.

Wilder was trying to develop a nonfat recipe for Miracle Whip and had
grown weary of tasting various versions herself. She gave the samples
to the employees and right away Wagner noted differences in their
flavor, picking out hints of nutmeg, for example.

"It became immediately apparent she had a real talent," Wilder says.

Wilder snatched Wagner off the production line and put her to work
helping create spice blends. Today, Wagner, 73, is Vanns' chief blender
in charge of coming up with new seasonings for the company's wholesale
and retail markets.

Wagner says the promotion surprised her. "I had no education," she
says. "It's just that my taste buds work well."

Although Wagner has never been tested, she apparently is among the 25
percent of the population scientists have dubbed "supertasters."

Supertasters are born with more taste buds - as many as 100 times more
- than most of the population and taste flavors more acutely, says Dr.
Linda Bartoshuk, a researcher at Yale University School of Medicine who
studies taste.

<...>

Bartoshuk and her team are studying why some people have such tasting
abilities. She first came up with the supertaster label in 1990 after a
study in which she gave subjects a bitter compound called
6-n-propylthiouracil.

About a quarter of the group could not taste the compound, about half
could taste a slight bitterness and the rest tasted acute bitterness.
These were the supertasters.

Bartoshuk says further research revealed that supertasters seem more
sensitive to all kinds of tastes and mouth sensations, not just bitter.
[hops!]

Sweets, particularly sugars, seem twice as sweet to supertasters. And
supertasters also perceive more pain - from chile peppers, black
pepper, ethyl alcohol, carbonation in carbonated water, she says.

Researchers recently have identified the gene that can make someone a
supertaster or nontaster, she says, but that gene alone doesn't seem to
account for the differences.

Women are more often supertasters than men. Asians tend to have a
higher percentage of supertasters than other ethnic groups. And not
surprisingly, chefs tend to be supertasters.

<...>

And what might not come natural can be taught.

"You can educate people to learn to detect certain flavors," says
Silvia King, principal scientist in the Sensory Science laboratory at
McCormick & Co. [Beer Judge Certification Program!]

<...>

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/dining/bal-fo.taste29sep29,1,5148959.story

[chazwicke]

And this from the Washington Post:

U.S. Scientists Win Nobel Prize In Medicine for Studies on Smell

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A12

A pair of American scientists who as co-workers and later as
competitors worked out the basic biology of the sense of smell -- one
of the body's most enigmatic and emotion-laden functions -- yesterday
won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

<...>

Odor is a big part of what is perceived as taste; to people lacking a
sense of smell, most foods -- even some putrid ones -- taste alike.
Odors are also notable for their ability to stir memories and emotions
-- a function of the nasal lining's direct connection to deep and
"primitive" parts of the brain. And as the world's perfumers have long
averred, smell is an important mediator of personal attraction and
perhaps even love.

In painstaking experiments conducted on odor-detecting cells lining the
noses of mice, and in later experiments on human nasal cells, Axel and
Buck found that as much as 5 percent of the genes in mammals were
devoted to the sense of smell -- an astonishingly high percentage that
reflects their importance.

Subsequent work showed that more than half of the 900 or so human genes
devoted to detecting odors have mutated to the point of uselessness
during the course of human evolution, evidence that people have
gradually come to rely more on vision and hearing.

<...>

The nose, Axel and Buck found, hews closer to the immune system, with
each odor-detecting neuron in the nose bearing just a single odor
receptor, each able to detect just a few closely related odors.

They went on to show that all cells sporting the same detectors pool
their signals at intermediate processing centers in the brain's
olfactory bulb. The brain's cortex interprets that pattern of incoming
messages as a particular smell.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5099-2004Oct4.html

[Seymour]

There was an article about this in the August Smithsonian as well; I didn't post it then because I was new and assumed you'd already talked of this! Bartoshuk had mentioned that supertasters might shun microbrews because they're too flavorful. Does that make BMC drinkers "supertasters":p ?

[wortchillergoal]

There is a Pastry Chef from France like this. His name is Piere Herme. He use only a salt from a certain region in France because of it's taste. He can pick it out in a blind tasting. He added just a few tiny flakes of black pepper to a mango dessert he makes for us to enchance the mango flavor. He can tell when there is no pepper.

[Steve16823]

Originally posted by chazwicke
This from the Baltimore Sun:
Bartoshuk and her team are studying why some people have such tasting
abilities. She first came up with the supertaster label in 1990 after a
study in which she gave subjects a bitter compound called
6-n-propylthiouracil.




I've taken this test. It was fairly bitter, but I don't think I reached the "supertaster" threshold.