Sensitive tasters, or supertasters, generally have more taste buds--and they are often women. To them, vegetables are more bitter, fats creamier, and chili peppers hotter. Conversely, nontasters are more likely to eat excessively sweet, very fatty, and highly spiced foods. Not surprisingly, these sensory differences influence food choices, and therefore, health. Those with sensitive taste tend to be thinner because they have more taste buds. Alcoholics are more likely to be insensitive tasters, since they are less repelled by alcohol's bitter taste, Bartoshuk says. "If there's something that we can do to make certain foods more or less attractive to people, this has tremendous dietary significance."
Until 1992, scientists knew little about how the sense of taste really worked. In that year, Robert F. Margolskee, while at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, identified taste transduction components. Margolskee, now a Howard Hughes Medical Institute associate investigator and a professor of ...
