echidna

So why is the sense of taste reduced when one pinches one's nose or has a cold ?

Mad Kally

Because you can't smell..

echidna

And so ... ?

It seems like placing my hands over my ears and not being able to see anything.

Mad Kally

smell

Miller-Keane Medical Dictionary, 2000

(smell) the sense that enables one to perceive odors; it depends on the stimulation of sense organs in the nose by small particles carried in inhaled air. It is important not only for the detection of odors, but also for the enjoyment of food. Flavor is a blend of taste and smell. Taste registers only four qualities: salt, sour, bitter, and sweet; other qualities of flavor depend on smell. Called also olfaction.

This is a very long winded post for me.... lol

echidna

Wierd, the stuff you know without actually managing to drop the pieces together.

Given how bland taste seems without smell, those taste buds really only make up a small part of the actual taste range. I never quite realised that but I suppose I always got confused when people describe taste as being performed by the tongue. Shame it still won't help my cooking though.

Cheers Kal.

Bugger, I even repeated the misnomer myself, confusing taste with flavour. No matter, you get the gist.

echidna

http://www.women.com/entertain/award...559268,00.html

Apparently not just you.

Coragyps

They are the folks that bring us the journal Nature, one of the premier sources of "hot" research papers in the world. It's been around since back in the 1800's, and, with Science, is The Place to get published.
I'll never get a paper in either, though - crap, I've even given up on the Nobel Prize!

tronvillain

How does taste work? Well, you have receptors that detect sodium ions (salty), receptors that detect sugars (sweet), receptors that detect hydrogen ions (sour), receptors that detect alkaloids (bitter), and receptors that detect amino acids like glutamate (umami). Now, most things that taste good are good, or at least they would have been in a normal human environment. It is simply that humans are not adapted to the huge excess of calories and concentrations of sugar, fat, and protein that are possible today.

Ensign Steve

Winging it based upon what I learned in physiological psychology 8 million years ago:

Taste buds are modified skin cells on the tongue that have receptor nerves directly under them. That's different from the sense of smell, where the chemical in question actually comes into contact with the nerve itself, and that's why the smell receptors are the only neurons that regenerate; they die off after detecting so many toxic* chemicals. *(for lack of a better word: toxic to the cell, not necessarily toxic to the human)

Your answer: In both cases (taste and smell) the detection takes place when a chemical of a certain shape fits into a receptor of a certain shape, like a key into a lock. That specific receptor's sending of the message to the brain tells the brain the shape of the molecule and the brain identifies the chemical based upon that.

The sense of taste is weakened when you can't smell because the tongue only senses the 5 tastes, and the smell helps differentiate between the 1000s of types of food we may eat.

Ab_Nomal and Mortal Wombat have it right about the "healthy" foods. Back in the day when we had to chase our food across the tundra and beat it to death with a club, those who craved calorie-dense foods like fat and sugar were able to survive, while the geeks who craved salads and vegetables starved themselves out of the gene-pool.

Coragyps said: "And BBT - I read somewhere the other day that about 25% of men (my elder son is one) have particularly acute response to bitter tastes, so many vegetables are just too nasty to eat for them - the cabbage family in particular." That's called super-tasting, and people often can't eat broccoli or sacharin (?!) when they have this. I used to think my stepmom was full of it when she said diet pop made her sick, but that was before I found out about this. She has no problem with beer, though it's not her favorite.

The fifth (MSG) taste, from what I understand, is (for lack of a better description) the "fat" taste. It isn't found only in MSG, but that is why MSG makes food taste so good. It makes it taste like it's higher in fat. Yum yum!

This concludes my lecture. Hope that helps.

mike_decock

How much of what we think "tastes" good or bad is psychological? I'm sure most of us have "acquired" a taste for some kind of food or drink over a certain amount of time.

-Mike...