Supertasters have a high sensitivity to flavor due to having more taste buds spread across their tongue. They may be identified through a lab test or by their intense dislike of certain foods. Supertasters tend to avoid sugary and fatty foods, which may lead to a lower risk of obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Some people are more sensitive than others to compounds in foods that create certain flavors. These people are called supertasters. The term may suggest that food tastes better to supertasters – that it tastes excellent, even. But is not so. Much of what tastes bland to those with ordinary gustatory talents, or cannot be discerned by them, has an identifiable taste to supertasters.
Supertasters are born with a high sensitivity to flavor. Even a person with an acute awareness of flavors can’t be considered a supertaster if they aren’t provided with the right equipment. That equipment appears to reside on the surface of the tongue, between the fungiform papillae, the structures that support the taste buds. Everyone has these structures, but supertasters have more of them than most, and therefore have more taste buds spread across the tongue.
While this physiological difference appears to explain supergustatory abilities, there may be other factors at work. The trend also appears to be related to sex hormones, as the majority of supertasters are female. The genes that determine supertaster status may have been heavily selected for in the days of avoiding plants in the wild that were bitter, and therefore poisonous, for better health and longer life.
The lab test that determines whether someone is a supertaster involves a substance called propylthiouracil (PROP). To ordinary tasters PROP is tasteless, but has a strongly bitter taste to supertasters. A look at the tongue can also help determine if someone is a supertaster. The surface of a supertaster’s tongue will appear particularly bumpy with fungiform papillae. Using blue food coloring to tint the tongue shows the bumps in greater relief.
But a supertaster may not need a test to determine its status. If a person is a super eater, the taste of some foods will be unpleasant to him. She can weigh her intense dislike of, say, broccoli, against the milder reactions of others to the same food. An accumulation of unusual taste reactions will suggest that she is indeed a super taster. Other slightly bitter foods for ordinary tongues but extremely so for super-tasters are coffee, dark chocolate and soy. Even supertasters find the taste of sugary and fatty foods overwhelming.
Bitter greens contain alkaloids that are helpful for cell repair, and super-tasters may miss out on the benefits. But because supertasters don’t like sugar or fat, they tend to suffer from obesity and cardiovascular disease less often than the rest of the population.
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