Can we taste more than just bitter, salty, sour, sweet and umami?

this video is sponsored by skillshare bitter salty sour sweet umami is there nothing more there may indeed be according to emerging science there could be a sixth basic taste and a seventh and an eighth our taste buds may be able to perceive certain kinds of fat certain kinds of carbs beyond just sugar certain minerals beyond just salt and maybe even water itself we're going to look at the evidence for all of those and now you might be thinking wait a minute of course i can taste fat and carbs fat and carbs are my favorite tastes well you gotta remember the difference between taste and flavor flavor is the combined experience that we get via a few distinct sensory systems we smell the food as well as we taste the food because those things happen at the same time we people find it very difficult to separate the two this is dr carl philpott professor of rhinology and olfactology at the university of east anglia yeah people inevitably will feel like they kind of you know taste these things ordinarily and and and fatty foods or you know something like cream i guess or something like that that's got a fat content and they will say yeah i can i can taste that but it's probably you know a large part of that's obviously the smell of it and our smelling system is way more sophisticated than our other taste perception systems by some estimates we can smell over a trillion distinct odors most of the detail that we experience in food and drink is smell and there's other things too like the hot sensation we get from chili and the cool sensation we get from mint that's called chemists and some people consider that to be part of flavor then there's astringency which is that kind of dry feeling you get in your mouth from red wine or from certain unripe fruits some people consider that to be part of flavor too personally i'd lump it in with texture a taste is certainly part of flavor but strictly speaking taste is only this thing that we experience via these receptors called taste buds that are in our mouth and at the very top of our throat most taste buds are on our tongues taste is pretty much what you sense on your tongue and it happens when certain substances fit into those receptor cells like a key into a lock in simplistic terms you know the receptor has a sort of certain shape and the thing that come in you know the molecule he's trying to pick up has a shape that fits within that um and then when when those two things sort of fit together that sort of enables some uh what we call a g-coupled protein sort of reaction to occur inside the cell it causes a whole biochemical chain of events to unfold that ultimately opens up a pathway to your brain when sugar for example hits one of your taste buds it effectively completes the circuit that lights up the sweetness bulb in your brain for the existence of a taste modality as they say to become broadly accepted scientists like dr philpot want to see basically two things they want to see what is the actual physical receptor pathway that the substance is kind of acting on and then they want to see whether people are aware of what they get via that pathway and they can assess the latter by a couple of methods they can look at like responses inside people's brains or they can you know like talk to people this is how scientists prove the existence of umami starting with japanese chemist kikunai ikeda in the early 20th century it's an event somewhat infamously dramatized in a corny video made by the company ikeda went on to co-found ajinomoto the original producer of msg as the story goes ikeda's wife tay made the family a dashi broth and while tasting it he had an epiphany he thought this is doing something to my tongue that is totally distinct from sweet sour bitter or salty [Laughter] would you run to the grocery for me i want dried kombu they're not open this late please tay just go and get what you can this is crazy please dude how about you go to the store are your legs broken anyway scientists later proved that amino acids called glutamates form a key that can fit into the lock of a few different receptor types in the taste buds that's the biochemical pathway proven they also had to prove that people are actually aware of it and that's a little more complicated our way of verbalizing what we experience is entirely determined by our cultural context right not everybody has the literal vocabulary for umami if you went to japan for instance obviously where the term came from people were very much familiar with that as a concept a colleague of mine did a survey of the local population in switzerland and asked them just to describe when given monosodium glutamate what it was they were tasting and there were about 40 different things they came out with so i mean for example i know what umami is but when i put straight msg on my tongue i could swear that it tastes kinda sweet not just meaty or savory or other words that people use to describe things like umami but it tastes sweet to me is that my nature or my nurture so you've got the cultural complexity on one hand and the biochemical neurological complexity on the other all of this explains why there could be scientific controversy over such a seemingly simple question like can we taste fat but here's the evidence for that one oleogustus some scientists are calling it and it's not the taste of fat per se but rather free fatty acids most of the lipids that we actually eat from oils and animal fats these are triglycerides three fatty acids those are the long squiggly things all stuck to one glycerol that's the short line on the end there now we definitely perceive triglycerides we feel them that is one source of creamy texture in the mouth however both human and animal studies have indicated an ability to taste free fatty acids fatty acids that have been broken off from that glycerol the breakdown of triglycerides into free fatty acids is something that happens to food as it ages and it spoils as a result people seem to have evolved to find lots of free fatty acid taste and or smell to be repulsive especially certain kinds of fatty acids that result from spoilage but triglycerides also break down another way in your mouth i mean obviously saliva in the mouth does allow for um some initial sort of breakdown of molecules uh um through initial digestion so um you know that we know that that's where the sort of uh digestive process starts this is pure speculation on my part but i do wonder if this is maybe one of the reasons why chocolate can be so much more delicious if you just let it melt slowly on your tongue particular types of fatty acids that are freed by the enzymes in your saliva seem to taste good particularly good to certain people or again mice tons of things that we think we know about people are really things that we know about mice because mice are easier to study here's a study where scientists found that mice who had more of these certain kind of taste receptors demonstrated a preference for foods containing oleic acid and linoleic acid there's also a human study where they put nose clips on people and then they diluted their samples into these viscous liquids to kind of hide the texture of the samples and the people were able to tell the difference between samples that contained linoleic acid and samples that didn't one reason why the fatty taste is not yet broadly accepted maybe that not everybody has it taste preferences are not just people being fussy people are born with different tasting hardware and at least some people's taste hardware might be able to detect starchiness as well this is a very new area of research spearheaded by dr jaiyun lim at oregon state university she and colleagues have done these experiments where they gave people a compound that blocks their sweetness receptors and the people were still able to taste carbs carbohydrates are just different arrangements of sugars simple carbs taste sweet to us one sugar hanging out by itself or maybe two stuck together this is sucrose table sugar it's gonna taste sweet to us really really big amalgamations of sugars all stuck together complex carbs those do not fit into the lock the sweetness lock on our tongue however dr lim's research indicates that enzymes in people's saliva break complex carbs down into smaller carbs that people can taste even with their sweetness receptors turned off people describe it as like a bready taste or a flowery taste or a rice like taste but again that's relatively new research and as yet no one has identified any specific receptor that would pick up the starchy taste in contrast scientists have identified a specific taste receptor for calcium or at least they've spotted it in mice maybe we have it too and maybe that's why chalk has such a distinct taste yuck anyway people seem to be able to taste a few minerals not just calcium that's that's less well-defined really i mean a lot of people um are aware of sort of metallic tastes um i see a lot of people complain of metallic taste as a specific kind of you know symptom when they come to the clinic um i guess a lot of people will have the experience of maybe cutting their finger and sort of you know sucking their finger and thinking they get a metallic taste which you know could be the iron in the uh and the blood the hemoglobin sort of molecule contains iron at the center and that's all kind of empirically indisputable right the only question is what actually are we experiencing when we experience the taste of those minerals are they tastes in the traditional biochemical taste bud sense or is it something else going on maybe something electrical as has been hypothesized i think further research is required to kind of truly determine whether there is actually a metallic taste or whether it's just a sort of part of the chemical reaction that's happening in the mouth that we're experiencing and picking up on whether it's taste or smell or something electrical galvanism there is one place where we are definitely aware of mineral content and that is in water we've all had the experience of getting weird tastes from the tap as we travel from one place to another where the geology or the pipe systems introduce different minerals and metals and such into the water but you can get those things out via distillation distilled water and then you can do tests with it scientists have known for a long time that insects have a taste response to pure water and some of them are arguing now that mammals like us might have one as well i think this is based on sort of mouse uh sort of models and and the fact they appear to sort of potentially have a receptor or respond to sort of you know water as a discrete sensation and you may kind of think well that's pretty weird indeed every definition of water that you can find says right up front that it is tasteless it may be that the touch and temperature sensations that we get from water are simply way stronger and they drown out this relatively subtle taste sensation that we get from pure water as well or maybe it's a situation like umami where people certain groups of people simply have not developed the skill of articulating what they are tasting this is why something like wine tasting is regarded as a skill people practice disentangling the distinct sensory elements of the experience and then they learn names for those elements so they can communicate what they want i'm going to give you the foundational terminology and really the philosophical journey around tasting wine so that you enjoy it more that's from a wine buying and tasting course available now on skillshare the sponsor of this video skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of useful and inspiring classes that can help you explore your passions the media production classes are particularly useful to me here's one i should take on the intersection of media and food that is cookie decorating with lori shannon flooding cookies doing wet on dry flooding wet on wet flooding doing a lot of different details or even get into doing some stencils skillshare classes are not haphazard tutorials they're classes with a logical flow with homework and they're curated for learning rather than just entertainment so there's no ads and skillshare is always adding new classes that will allow you to follow your creativity wherever it leads you best part skillshare is less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription the first thousand of you who click my link in the description can try skillshare for free you'll be doing us both a favor hit my skillshare link in the description thank you skillshare and thank you to all of the scientists out there working tirelessly to help us all better understand what exactly is happening on

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 831,136

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Id: JdeYqR2YUR0

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021