Oct 31: The Sixth Taste Sense is not a sequel to the 1999 Hollywood thriller movie The Sixth Sense but is merely carbohydrates flavours being projected as the new taste sense after Umami was added to salty, sour, bitter and sweet in 2009, according to a Study in New Scientist last year, followed by another one this year in Australia, the results of which were released last week
If you read any old wine books for flavours, they would point out that the mouth can taste only sweet, salty, sour and bitter on various parts of the tongue. In 2009, Umami, a Japanese word for savoury taste was added and accepted as the Fifth Taste. Since then the word ‘oleogustus’, or the taste of fat and kokumi, describing a hearty mouthfeel, made an attempt to be included as the Sixth Taste sense. The word did not really stick but there was a new contender-the taste of carbs as claimed and reported in New Scientist according to a report in NYTimes last year.
“Every culture has a major source of complex carbohydrate. The idea that we can’t taste what we’re eating doesn’t make sense,” Juyun Lim, a food scientist at Oregon State University, had said as she attempted to isolate the taste of starchiness for the first time.
Her team tested this by giving a range of different carbohydrate solutions to volunteers who were able to detect a starch-like taste in solutions that contained long or shorter carbohydrate chains. “They called the taste ‘starchy’,” says Lim. “Asians would say it was rice-like, while Caucasians described it as bread-like or pasta-like. It’s like eating flour.” They could still make out this flavour when given a compound that blocks the receptors on the tongue for detecting sweet tastes. This suggested we could sense carbohydrates before they were completely broken down into sugar molecules.
“I believe that’s why people prefer complex carbs,” Lim said. Sugar tastes great in the short term, but if you’re offered chocolate and bread, you might eat a small amount of the chocolate, but you’d choose the bread in larger amounts.” She concluded that slurping down a bowl of noodles, had a scientific reason why they taste so good. The same could perhaps be said about Indian cuisine where Naan, paratha, roti and other Indian breads are savoured with food and are a staple part of the diet just like rice in other parts of the country.
New Study
Another recent Study published in the Journal of Nutrition, has challenged the idea that a craving for carbohydrates is driven by sugar, claiming that some people can directly detect the taste of starch.
It also found that people who are more sensitive to the taste had a larger waist circumference, which could explain why some are more likely to be obese.“We specifically looked at waist measurements, as they are a good measure of the risk of dietary related diseases,” said researcher Julia Low.“Those who were most sensitive to the carbohydrate taste ate more of these foods and had a larger waist.”
The research conducted by Deakin University in Australia studied 34 adults and found that the mouth could sense two common carbohydrates found in bread, pasta and rice. Study leader Professor Russell Keast explains that increased intake of energy-dense foods is “thought to be one of the major contributors to the global rise of overweight and obesity” and that while the findings were irrefutable the small sample size means more research is needed to identify the reasoning behind it.
It would be interesting if this ‘Sixth Taste Sense’ could be connected with wine. Umami taste has already been included in the wine vocabulary. Champagne has the typical bready taste that might perhaps be classified as the Sixth Taste in future.
Subhash Arora
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