Urged on by your peers, you take your first sip of coffee, and a whirlwind of sensation hits you: the jolt of the caffeine hit, the sweetness of the extra milk added in preparation, and above all an overpowering aftertaste of bitterness that can’t leave your tongue. Your friends are laughing at you—allegedly, they didn’t break a sweat with their first espresso—but a purely biological reason could account for the difference in reaction: you may just be a supertaster.
Constituting about 25 percent of the world’s population, supertasters are gifted with a heightened sense of taste. The mark of a supertaster is not just in their tongue: besides having a greater number of taste buds concentrated in the bumps that scatter the organ, supertasters are highly sensitive to 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP), a bitter chemical that openly reveals itself to the genetic elite of taste. The rest of the population would have a very different experience when exposed to the chemical: regular tasters, making up half of the population, would find PROP bitter but handleable, while non-tasters, who occupy a fourth of the population, wouldn’t be able to taste the chemical at all.
This translates to different eating habits among individuals for foods of strong flavor, on top of factors cultivated by culture and the environment. “Having more tastebuds means there are also more pain receptors, and that is why supertasters often cannot handle spicy foods and generally avoid anything bitter,” says Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, an American psychologist specializing in genetic variations in taste perception. "Why would nature do that? Because bitter is our poison detection system."
Notably, sensitivity to taste can also play a role in the severity of diseases. Researchers at Baton Rouge General divided one hundred patients with COVID-19 into groups of non-tasters, regular tasters, and supertasters and documented the patients’ sensitivity to taste by a taste strip test. They found that non-tasters were at greater risk for symptoms of the virus; in fact, all hospitalized candidates were solely from the non-tasters category, and not a single supertaster was present in the sample size of COVID patients. With a loss of taste being one of the hallmarks of the virus, and documented evidence showing the perception of taste impacts how the body fights respiratory illnesses, the research reveals insight into how sensitivity to taste can be an indicator for current treatments to diseases.
The comparatively better health of supertasters extends to benefits in lifestyle. Supertasters are less likely to smoke and drink due to an increased sensitivity to the taste of cigarettes and alcohol respectively. They also (wisely) avoid bitter vegetables like broccoli and kale, though science says this is a lost opportunity for the potential well-being of supertasters against diseases like cancer. Supertasters have a taste of the extremities when consuming food; for supertasters, that fact is theirs to make into a blessing or a curse.
Jiwon: From reading your article, I could see that being a supertaster had both positive and negative effects on a person’s health. Overall, does being a supertaster benefit or harm a person’s health, and does the evidence point to a cause-and-effect correlation?
The point of the article is to illustrate both the positive and negative aspects of being a supertaster, and that extends to a supertaster’s health. Thus, taking a distinct side on this type of issue is hard, since personal lifestyle and genetics play a large factor in determining “health”. As for the cause and effect point, the sources I use could suffer bias/errors in their methods of collecting data, but I think it’s safe to say the trends I outlined in the article prove instances of cause-and-effect correlation.
Sally: Does loss of taste only indicate how the body responds to respiratory diseases? What about other diseases?
Taste disorders are not exclusive to respiratory diseases! You can find them with diseases from diabetes to dental hygiene, and even with nervous system disorders. A single symptom isn’t always exclusive to any individual type of disease, and loss of taste is no exception.
Xavier: Are there any other noteworthy differences in the way supertasters and non-tasters aside from their sensitivity to bitterness?
Supertasters will experience all basic tastes at a heightened level: these include sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami.
Hannah: You mentioned how sensitivity to taste can be an indicator for treatments against diseases but how can this help people, non-tasters and regular tasters, who are not born with such sensitive tastes?
The blunt answer: it can’t in a really meaningful way. Non-tasters and regular tasters, however, don’t have to face the potential downsides that supertasters find.
Works Cited
Barham, Henry P et al. “Does phenotypic expression of bitter taste receptor T2R38 show association with COVID-19 severity?.” International forum of allergy & rhinology vol. 10,11 (2020): 1255-1257. doi:10.1002/alr.22692
Crosby, Guy. “Super-Tasters and Non-Tasters: Is It Better to Be Average?” The Nutrition Source, 31 May 2016, www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2016/05/31/super-tasters-non-tasters-is-it-better-to-be-average/.
Hayes, John E, and Russell S J Keast. “Two decades of supertasting: where do we stand?.” Physiology & behavior vol. 104,5 (2011): 1072-4. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2011.08.003
Ly, A, and A Drewnowski. “PROP (6-n-Propylthiouracil) tasting and sensory responses to caffeine,sucrose, neohesperidin dihydrochalcone and chocolate.” Chemical senses vol. 26,1 (2001): 41-7. doi:10.1093/chemse/26.1.41
Turner-McGrievy, Gabrielle et al. “Taking the bitter with the sweet: relationship of supertasting and sweet preference with metabolic syndrome and dietary intake.” Journal of food science vol. 78,2 (2013): S336-42. doi:10.1111/1750-3841.12008
“What Makes a Supertaster and How to Know If You Are One | CBC Radio.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 19 Apr. 2019, www.cbc.ca/radio/what-makes-a-supertaster-and-how-to-know-if-you-are-one-1.5103847.
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