Bitterness is generally viewed as an undesirable attribute of foods and beverages, yet segments of the population regularly ingest items with a prominent bitter taste. The influence of taste sensitivity, exposure, selected personality traits (i.e., neophobia, variety seeking, sensation seeking) and pharmacological reactivity on alcohol and caffeine consumption, two widely consumed bitter substa...

Fat and salt are a common and attractive combination in food and overconsumption of either is associated with negative health outcomes. The major aim was to investigate contributions and interactions of salt and fat on taste pleasantness and perception. The minor aim was to investigate individual fat taste sensitivity (detection threshold of oleic acid [C18:1]) on pleasantness for fat. In a com...

A growing body of evidence suggests that individuals who differ in taste perception differ in lingual tactile perception. To address this issue, spatial resolution acuity was estimated for 83 young adult females (52 Asians and 31 Caucasians) by their ability to examine with the tongue and identify embossed letters of the alphabet. Ratings of the magnitude of the bitterness of 0.0032M 6-n-propyl...

The elderly people have various physiological dysfunctions and the high morbidity rates as well as a high risk of malnutrition with many diseases. Gustatory dysfunction is also observed as a usual clinical problem in the elderly. In the elderly, elevation of the gustatory threshold for umami taste, as well as for salty, sweet, sour, and bitter tastes, has been confirmed. Glutamate (Glu), one of...

One or two bottle preference tests, i.e., relative fluid consumption, constitute the primary methodology for determining acceptance or rejection of tastes in animals other than humans. These tests require organisms to initiate and maintain drinking behavior, and, therefore, can not be applied to preparations which do not eat or drink spontaneously. The taste reactivity test, a new method for as...

Adult Fischer 344 (F344) rats fail to display any preference for NaCl solutions at concentrations typically preferred by other rat strains. To determine whether this behavior is due to a strain difference in NaCl detection threshold, a conditioned taste aversion (CTA) was first established to a suprathreshold concentration of NaCl (0.1 M). Then, a series of dilute NaCl solutions, ranging from 0...

Cancer patients often face enormous and unbearable psychological pain during the treatment process. This paper uses data collection, online questionnaires, interviews with their families other methods to carry out in-depth research on cancer patients, learn subjective feelings of families, analyze main factors that cause patients' suffering. Through survey data, it is found proportion greater t...

Several hundred taste buds develop and mature in the trench walls of the rat's vallate papilla during the first 3 months after birth. The objective of this investigation of taste bud development was to determine: (i) whether the vallate papilla has local growth zones where new taste buds form, (ii) whether new taste buds arise by the division of mature taste buds, (iii) how many days are requir...