Read Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good for Free Online Page A

universally true and may in some cases be false. Often, people who have very limited diets are HyperTasters. While this may seen counterintuitive, it makes perfect sense. To illustrate, let me use a different sensory discrepancy between Roger and me.
    My hearing is much better than Roger’s. While he attributes this to having attended too many Dire Straits and Tom Petty concerts in his youth, I know that his father suffers from the same subtle loss, so it’s most likely genetic. Sometimes I’ll walk in on Roger watching television and the sound is turned up so loud that I worry the neighbors are going to complain. He and I (and many men and women) experience the same level of decibels differently. I have to remind myself of this when I’m cooking for Roger. To him, the bitter vegetal notes of butternut squash are excruciatingly loud. To me, they give this sweet, starchy vegetable a pleasant complexity. We’ve learned to compromise. He turns the sound down while watching the tube and I no longer make him eat green vegetables that aren’t drowned in hollandaise to temper the bitterness he experiences from them.
     
    Sensory Snack
    The taste buds on the front of the tongue are adult-size by age ten, but the ones on the back don’t stop growing until about age sixteen. Regardless, adult-size taste buds don’t translate to adult tasting behavior. Similar to other body parts.
Props to PROP
    When the idea of segmenting people into groups based on their taster type was still new, Bartoshuk discovered that she could distinguish between the HyperTaster type and others by measuring people’s ability to taste a single bitter chemical called PROP (6-n-propylthiouracil), pronounced “prope.” To Hyper-Tasters, this chemical tastes horribly bitter. To Tolerants, it has no flavor at all. What a fantastic discovery this was at the time! This meant it was possible to simply ask people to taste a glass of water with a few drops of PROP in it and, if they reacted violently, you could anoint them HyperTasters. If they had a moderate reaction to it, you would call them Tasters, and if they tasted nothing, you’d call them Tolerant Tasters. This was a relief because it was so much easier than asking people to taste samples of hundreds of different foods and standardizing their responses, as researchers had to do to determine taster types in the past.
    As is often the case in science, later work demonstrated that it wasn’t quite so simple: There are HyperTasters who cannot taste PROP, and some Tasters who can. Sometimes the single-chemical PROP test gave an inaccurate result. It turns out that individual differences in taste sensation are much more complicated than initially thought. There are three main factors that account for individual differences in ability to taste. The first factor is the anatomy of your tongue, which is measured by counting your taste buds. The second factor is your medical history, and the third factor is your genes.
Extractions, Infections, and Accidents, Oh My!
    In addition to the density of taste buds on your tongue, the second indicator of taster type is your medical history. There are many things that can happen to you that can affect your ability to taste.
    For example, an ear infection can damage the chorda tympani taste nerve, which runs from the tongue up through the middle ear to the brain. Viruses, including flus and herpes, can also damage this nerve, resulting in the death of innocent taste buds and taste bud bald spots. This is a great reason to get a flu shot every year and to treat earaches immediately (not to mention that treatment relieves the often-excruciating pain). If you had serious ear infections as a child, it’s likely that creamy, fatty, and fried foods send you over the moon because, if your chorda tympani taste nerve was damaged, your trigeminal nerve (the onethat carries texture information) may be now be singing loudly without inhibition. I am somewhat certain that Roger’s