Medical research

Researchers find bitter taste receptors on human hearts

A team of University of Queensland researchers is investigating the surprising discovery that smell and taste receptors normally found in the nose and mouth can also be present on the human heart.

Overweight & Obesity

China researchers link obesity to bacteria

Chinese researchers have identified a bacteria which may cause obesity, according to a new paper suggesting diets that alter the presence of microbes in humans could combat the condition.

Health

Why we shouldn't like coffee, but we do

Why do we like the bitter taste of coffee? Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances. By evolutionary logic, we should want to spit it out.

Psychology & Psychiatry

Can blaming others make people sick?

Constant bitterness can make a person ill, according to Concordia University researchers who have examined the relationship between failure, bitterness and quality of life.

Inflammatory disorders

Bitter taste receptors hold key to treating asthma

One in nine Australians, among more than 300 million people worldwide, suffer from asthma. They experience a wide range of debilitating, even life-threatening respiratory symptoms from a disease that can be controlled but ...

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Taste

Taste (also called smatch or gustation; adjectival form: gustatory) is one of the traditional five senses. It refers to the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food, certain minerals, and poisons, etc.

Humans receive tastes through sensory organs called taste buds, or gustatory calyculi, concentrated on the upper surface of the tongue.

The sensation of taste can be categorized into five basic tastes: sweet, bitterness, sour, salty, and umami. The recognition and awareness of umami is a relatively recent development in Western cuisine. MSG produces a strong umami taste.

As taste senses both harmful and beneficial things, all basic tastes are classified as either appetitive or aversive, depending upon the effect the things they sense have on our bodies.

The basic tastes contribute only partially to the sensation and flavor of food in the mouth — other factors include smell, detected by the olfactory epithelium of the nose; texture, detected through a variety of mechanoreceptors, muscle nerves, etc.; temperature, detected by thermoreceptors; and spiciness, or piquance, also called chemesthesis.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA