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PSC140Y-L4

3 min read

📗 -> 10/21/25: PSC140Y-L4

[Lecture Slide Link]

🎤 Vocab

❗ Unit and Larger Context

Small summary

✒️ -> Scratch Notes

Taste is a combination of taste, smell, and ----

What are taste buds?
What are the five primary tastes?

  • Bitter, salty, sweet, umami, sour

Papillae (raised bumps) on tongue have many sensory taste buds. Also some on rest of mouth, but most on tongue. No localization of ‘types’ of sensory buds (e.g. false that back of tongue is sensitive to spicy food)

Flavor also involves olfaction (smell)

  • Regular smell - Through nose to olfactory bulb (receptor)
  • Retro-nasal smell - Coming through the mouth and into olfactory bulb
    • Activated as you chew things in your mouth. As you eat, you also smell through mouth. This is part of the ‘taste’
    • One of the reasons colds change the way things taste

Gustatory system (taste buds)

Newborn taste experiment:

  • 200 newborns offered sweet or not sweet water
  • Measured how much consumed (under assumption more would be consumed if they like it)
  • Babies consumed more of the sugary water (with paired trials of water with: glucose, fructose, lactose, sucrose)
  • Shows:
    • Babies have taste, can tell the difference
    • Have a preference for sugary drinks over water

Development of taste preferences

They become more sensitive to tastes as they age

  • Minimum detection threshold is a higher concentration in children than adults
    • IE takes 6 sugar cubes for a kid to detect compared to 3 in adults
  • Also, preferred concentration is higher in children
    • They WANT 6 sugar cubes compared to adults 3
  • Similar pattern for bitterness sensitivity

Taste preferences

Exposure induces preferences

  • Seen trivially in the carrot juice experiment (mother consuming it prenatally and breastfeeding)
  • Breastmilk varies in taste with mother’s diet

Introduction of complementary/solid foods

Food group - were introduced peanuts, cow’s milk, wheat and egg between 3 & 4 months and given these foods until 6 mos
No food group — introduced complementary foods as usual

Parents completed questionnaeis on infants dietary diversity at 6,9,12 months

Exposure to more foods when young induced children to eat a greater diversity of foods

  • Possible that not the children preferring that food, but parents offering a greater diversity of food because of the experiment

Children reject novel foods

  • “Food neophobia”
  • 5-10 exposures to new foods reduces neophobia
  • Food neophobia is not specific to a single culture

Twin studies found monozigotic twins more similar than dizigotic twins for preference in:

  • Vegetables
  • Fruit
  • Protein
    (IE MZ more sim than DZ)
  • More GENETIC

Equally similar for:

  • Dairy
  • Snack
  • Starch
    Here:
  • More ENVIRONMENTAL

Gene X Environment:

AA = homozygous for bitter-insensitive alleles
AP = heterozygous
PP = homozygous for bitter-sensitive allele

70% of AP and PP identified bitter taste, and preferred sweeter
AP group had intermediate preferences/detection

Heterozygous children (64%) were more sensitive to bitter tastes than heterozygous mothers (43%)… why?

Conclusions

  • Taste preferences and sensitivity change over age
  • Changes in taste preferences are related to env factors
  • Some aspects of taste preferences are genetic, though environmental factors may push you

🧪 -> Refresh the Info

Did you generally find the overall content understandable or compelling or relevant or not, and why, or which aspects of the content were most novel or challenging for you and which aspects were most familiar or straightforward?)

Did a specific aspect of the content raise questions for you or relate to other ideas and findings you’ve encountered, or are there other related issues you wish had been covered?)

🔗 -> Links

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Connections

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