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Dietitian
studies how ability to taste bitterness
affects food choices
By Kim Colavito Markesich
Is it possible to determine a person’s cancer
risk based on their food preferences? In her research,
Valerie Duffy, registered dietitian and professor of
allied health sciences, is examining the link between
oral sensation, food preference, and health.
“We live in very different oral sensory worlds,” Duffy says. “To
some, foods and beverages present a more pastel array of tastes and flavors,
to others a more vivid array. This variations influence our food preferences.
Since we tend to eat what we like and avoid what we do not, what we are trying
to do is connect this oral sensory variation to overall health.”
We can define taste as salt, sugar, sour, and bitter. But Duffy says there is
no word in the English language to fully describe what happens when we put food
in our mouth. “There’s more to oral sensation than true taste,” she
says.
Foods have flavors, texture, and pungent sensations. In the mouth, we not only
taste our food but we smell it as well. Try plugging your nose next time you
eat. After you have “tasted” the food, unplug your nose. The additional
food sensations are from the sense of smell.
“Whether we smell a food through our nose or mouth, the olfactory receptors
respond,” Duffy notes. “But when we smell a food through our mouth,
it combines with taste and textures to come up with a complex sensation that
is processed in different areas of our brain.”
According to Duffy, we characterize supertasters, nontasters, and those in between
by their responses to bitter compounds, the number of taste buds on the tongue,
and genes. Differences in response to one bitter compound, propylthiouracil,
or PROP, were discovered accidentally in the 1930s by a chemist. Today we believe
that how bitter someone tastes PROP provides an indication of the complexity
of sensations from foods and beverages.
“That’s what’s so interesting. By measuring a single compound
like response to bitterness, we can explain complex behaviors like preferences
for food or intake, and health outcomes,” Duffy says. “If we learn
more about oral sensation, we can provide dietary selections for health that
are also what people like to eat.”
In one laboratory study, adults sampled green vegetables. Those who tasted PROP
as most bitter (supertasters) tasted these vegetables as most bitter, preferred
them less, and consumed vegetables outside the laboratory less frequently. Interestingly,
PROP nontasters tasted less bitterness but more sweetness from the vegetables,
preferred them more, and consumed vegetables more frequently.
In a pilot study, Duffy and her colleagues have found that among men, those who
tasted PROP as most bitter consumed vegetables less frequently and had a higher
number of polyps, a risk factor for colon cancer.
Duffy and her students are working with the Colon Cancer Prevention Center at
the UConn Health Center to expand this work to include females and additional
markers of variation in oral sensation, and the risk of colon cancer. They are
also testing whether asking people what they like to eat is a better indicator
of dietary risk of colon cancer than asking people to remember what they actually
ate.
And, while we are born with a sensory pallet, our oral sensations can also change
over a lifetime. These nerves are vulnerable to middle ear infections, upper
respiratory illnesses, and medication.
In a study sponsored by the American Diabetes Association Foundation, Duffy is
looking at ways to improve vegetable consumption of preschoolers by coupling
a fun educational program called “Adventures of Captain 5-A-Day” with
vegetable preparation techniques that mask bitterness and enhance sweetness.
She says, “With the support of family and the school environment, we can
reinforce these perceptions during early childhood.”
“Adventures of Captain 5-A-Day” is a collaboration between the Department
of Allied Health Sciences and the Connecticut Department of Public Health. The
program encourages children to eat fruits and vegetables and to be physically
active, while
providing dietetics students rich community-based practice experiences.
“A lot of what we like to eat is learned exposure, but if you’re
a supertaster and not exposed to vegetables in pleasant ways, you learn early
on that you don’t like vegetables,” Duffy says. “It generalizes
from one vegetable to the next.”
“I envision information about variation in oral sensation and differences
in preference to provide consumers with dietary recommendations that promotes
health and enjoyment of eating.”
For more information on Duffy’s research and the Captain 5-A-Day program
visit http://duffylab.ah.uconn.edu/ |
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