The taste advantage

Can being a supertaster – or a nontaster – affect your health? There are no studies that monitor the health statistics of supertasters from childhood to old age. So there’s no definitive scientific evidence. Most pronouncements on how taste sensitivity could affect health seem to be common sense.

Supertasters dislike bitter foods, including many vegetables and some fruits. Fruits and vegetables contain cancer preventing ingredients, which supertasters may miss out on. On the other hand, supertasters are less fond of sugar, fats, and salt than nontasters. This means they’re more likely to maintain a normal weight, which in turn can decrease their chances of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Here are the details.

Fruits, vegetables, phytochemicals, flavonoids, and naringin

Plants contain chemical compounds called phytochemicals. These are non-essential nutrients – we can live without them – but they appear to play a role in preventing disease. People who eat diets rich in plants seem to have lower rates of cancer and heart disease, the major causes of death in modern times.

Flavonoids, an important phytochemical found in fruits, vegetables, chocolate, tea, and wine, have an antioxidant effect in the body. They end up neutralizing potentially damaging free radicals. An interesting side note: While flavonoids act like typical antioxidants in a test tube, that’s not what happens in the body. Our bodies see flavonoids as foreign objects and try to eliminate them. This is what creates the increased antioxidant capacity of the blood.

Cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, cabbage, and spinach, are high in flavonoids. Unfortunately, it’s these very flavonoids that make these foods taste unpleasantly bitter. Supertasters either eat fewer vegetables than nontasters, or they add sauces rich in cheese, cream or butter to disguise the taste. Sauces with a high fat content are high in calories.

Ripe fruit has much more sugar (fructose) than vegetables, so bitterness is less of a problem for supertasters. Grapefruit is bitter due to naringin, a flavonoid so potent it’s practically a pharmaceutical drug. It’s an antioxidant, an anti-carcinogen, and it lowers cholesterol. It can also interfere with prescription drugs. There was a recent scare story in the news about “Killer Grapefruit.” I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Supertasters go easy on the vegetables and nontasters eat a wider variety of foods. A wider variety means a greater assortment of nutrients. This is healthy because you never know just which ones you really need. So nontasters have the health advantage here.

Sweet tooth

Just because fruits tend to be sweeter than vegetables doesn’t necessarily make them appealing to supertasters. Sucrose (table sugar) and fructose (fruit sugar) taste more intense to supertasters than nontasters, and this can actually turn them off. To supertasters, sugar tastes sweeter by a factor of at least two. Female supertasters are more or less indifferent to sweet tastes and find most desserts too sweet, whereas female nontasters really love anything sweet. Male supertasters are somewhere in between: they seem to like sweets. Since too much sugar leads to excess weight, supertasters – especially women – have the health advantage here.

Fats

Foods that contain fat have a creamy texture. The more fat, the creamier a food will taste. Supertasters are very sensitive to the amount of fat and dislike foods high in fat. I can’t imagine this myself, but according to research, nontasters can barely distinguish between skim milk and cream.

Dr. Valerie Duffy, a registered dietitian at the University of Connecticut, comments: ”If you go through life as a nontaster, it takes more to get the flavor out of food than it does for a supertaster.” You need more fat to get that sense of fat goodness, so you end up consuming more calories. Fats have twice as many calories as carbohydrates and proteins. Advantage here to supertasters.

Supertaster women weigh less

In a study of elderly women, supertasters weighed less, had a lower percentage of body fat, a lower BMI (Body Mass Index), higher HDL levels (the “good” cholesterol), and lower levels of fats (triglycerides) in the fluid part of the blood (serum). High levels of serum triglycerides are associated with heart disease and diabetes. It makes sense that supertasters would have these characteristics, since they dislike foods high in sugar and fats.

Beverly Tepper, a food science professor at Rutgers, found that women supertasters in their forties are 20% thinner than nontasters. BMI, which compares height to weight, is a quick if inexact tool for estimating a healthy body weight. A BMI of 25 or more is considered overweight. 30 and up is labeled obese. Tepper found that the BMI of supertasters averaged 23.5. Medium tasters averaged 26.6. Nontasters had a BMI of almost 30. So far, she has found this correlation only in women, not in men.

Advantage female supertasters.

Alcohol

One last health consideration is alcohol. Alcohol tastes especially bitter to supertasters, and it’s more irritating to the tongue. There have been studies to see if alcoholism is less prevalent in supertasters, but the results are inconclusive. For one thing, we can get used to bitter tastes if we enjoy the effect of what we’re drinking. Teenagers usually dislike the taste of black coffee initially, so they add lots of cream and sugar to make it palatable. Eventually, as they get used to the taste, they feel less need to modify their drink. (Or at least that was the case before lattes were so prevalent.)

A similar thing happens with alcohol. I remember the first time I tasted beer. I thought it was terrible. It’s an acquired taste, but most people manage to acquire it. You drink beer and other alcoholic beverages in social situations – parties, bars, restaurants. The social experience has a positive reinforcement effect on the taste. Over the course of many such experiences, the social and cultural determinants of taste override the strictly physiological ones.

So potentially there’s a health benefit here for supertasters, but it’s not clear they take advantage of it. The social and cultural influences on taste are so strong that they can override what our taste buds tell us. More on this in an upcoming post, The Pepsi challenge: How beliefs affect what you taste.

On balance then, if supertasters would just grit their teeth and eat their vegetables, the health advantage appears to be in their favor.

Related posts:
A matter of taste
How do you taste?
Orange juice and toothpaste
What is a supertaster?
The genetics of supertasting
Are you a supertaster: Do you really want to know?
Are you a supertaster: Look at your tongue
Are you a supertaster: How does PROP Taste to you?
Are you a supertaster: DNA testing
Why do we love high-fat foods?
Do we taste fat?
“Killer” grapefruit?
Grapefruit and the Pill
This is your brain on sugar — and sugar substitutes
The Pepsi challenge: How beliefs affect what you taste