SCIENCE - ON TASTEBUDS!

So what are you?  A supertaster, medium taster, or a nontaster?

HOW COME YOU DON’T THINK IT’S HOT?

One enduring mystery among those partial to spicy foods is why people have such varying tolerances for the heat of chile peppers.  As it turns out, there are several reasons why your dinner companion may find a bowl of chili only mildly spicy while the same dish causes you to frantically summon a waiter for a glass of milk to cool the heat.  Milk, not water, is the thing to drink when you want to cool the fire in your mouth.

Your dining partner may be experiencing “temporary desensitization.”  The phenomenon, discovered by Barry Green of Monell Chemical Senses Institute in Philadelphia, occurs when you eat something spicy hot, and then lay off for a few minutes.  As long as you keep eating chiles, their effect keeps building.  But if you take a break – even for as few as two to five minutes, depending on your individual susceptibility – you will be desensitized when you go back to eating the chiles.  A dish with the same amount of chilies will not seem as hot the second time around.

The more likely explanation, however, is that people who find chiles intensely, punishingly hot simply have more taste buds.  According to Linda Bartoshuk, a psychophysicist at the Yale School of Medicine (now at the University of Florida), human beings can be neatly divided into three distinct categories when it comes to tasting ability: unfortunate “nontasters,” pedestrian “medium tasters,” and the aristocrats of the taste bud world, “supertasters.”

This taste-detection pecking order appears to correspond directly to the number of taste buds a person possesses, a genetically predetermined trait that may vary by a factor of 100.  Indeed, so radical are the differences between these three types that Bartoshuk speaks of them as inhabiting different “taste worlds.”  Bartoshuk and her colleagues discovered the extent of this phenomemon a few years ago when they carried out experiments using a dye that turns the entire mouth blue except for the taste papillae (structures housing taste buds and other sensory receptors).  After painting part of the subjects’ tongues with the dye, they were rather stunned at the differences they saw.  One poor taster had just 11 taste buds per square centimeter, while one supertaster had 1,100 in the same area.

Further experiments confirmed that the ability to taste intensely directly corresponds to the number of taste buds.  Researchers found that women are twice as likely as men to be supertasters, while men are nearly twice as likely as women to be nontasters.

What does this have to do with how hot you find chiles?  It turns out that every taste bud in the mouth has a pain receptor literally wrapped around it.  Along with the extra taste buds comes a greater sensitivity to pain.  As a result, supertasters have the capacity to experience 50 percent more pain from capsaicin, the chemical that gives chiles their heat.

From American Classics by The Editors of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine.