How Smell Affects Taste Essay

We have little, hairy bumps called taste buds on our tongues that let us taste things. Our sense of smell works with our sense of taste. Our tongues can only taste five flavors which are: sweet, salty, bitter, umami, and sour. Many foods are a combination of these flavors.

The human body is very unique and amazing. Everything that we do in our daily life has a process that our body goes through just to make these things happen. It is so many elements phases that our brain goes through for our body to smell or taste something. So let’s explore this journey of smell and taste.

There are complex molecular mechanisms involved in the sensation of taste, also known as gustation. They are specific to the five differing taste qualities. Taste transduction involves taste cells of varying structure and function. These taste cells comprise of type I glial like cells, type II receptor cells, and type III pre-synaptic cells. Through different mechanisms, the taste receptor cells detect a respective ligand of sweet, bitter, umami, sour, and salty tastes. It has been suggested that type I cells are involved in detection and transduction of salt through an ion channel. Type II cells operate through G-protein coupled receptors that belong to the T1R and T2R families. Neuron synapses and ion channels aide in the performance of type III cells. Gustatory receptors play an essential role in the detection and perception of tastes within the oral

The sensations to taste (gustation) food has evolved in order to provide important information of the nutrients and possible dangers from ingesting potentially harmful food (Barlow et al., 2015; Feng et al., 2015). This signal recognition is conserved in many species including humans to protect the host from detection of bitter substances that are recognized as acidic, toxic, poisonous, noxious, fermented and spoiled food (Barlow et al., 2015; Feng et al., 2015). The ability to feel pleasure or reward for nutritious or high caloric containing foods when food is scarce was useful to our ancestors. The ability to detect bitter chemical compounds that cause nausea or death is postulated to have evolved in our lineage as an innate defensive mechanism

The aim of this experiment is to determine how the loss of smell can effect the taste of the food.

(Vancouver, British Columbia) The human brain is capable of processing approximately 10,000 scents in an area no bigger than a postage stamp. Each scent it processes triggers a neural response and draws forth memories and emotions. For this reason, a business needs to ensure their workplace invokes the desired response from the clients and AromaTech can be of help with this. AromaTech produces a range of oils and diffusers to provide an area with a pleasing scent to those who visit.

It communicates sensory data to the brain, and it shelters the sense of smell. Within the nasal cavity, the nerve's olfactory receptors, are found inside the mucosa. Different to many other nerves, CN1 does not have two trunks. Rather, its sensory fibers range through the ethmoid bone's cribriform plate. Once aerial substances and particles enter the nasal cavity, they interact with these neural receptors.

There are 10,000 tastebuds on the surface of the tongue, cheeks, and soft palate that help humans take in stimuli about what they are eating. These tastebuds are responsible for interpreting six different types of information on food: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (umami). Sweet food is an indication that the food is high in sugar and its derivatives fructose or lactose. Sour food is mostly acidic and includes things like lemon juice or organic acids. This sensation is caused by hydrogen ions. Food containing table salt is perceived as salty, but presence of potassium or magnesium can also cause a salty sensation. A bitter taste is a response from the body that the food being consumed is poisonous and dangerous to survival. Most bitter tastes come from poisonous plant roots. Lastly, the savory taste, or “umami” taste, comes from amino acids such as glutamic acid or aspartic acid. High amounts of glumatic acid can be found in cheese, ripe tomatoes, and meat. (“How Does Our Sense of Taste Work?”,

That being said, smell and taste do work intimately together. The sense of smell can reach the olfactory sensory neurons via two different means. The first is via the nose, and the second is via a “channel” which connects the “roof of the throat to the channel”. If the pathway is physically blocked (ie: You have a cold) then the odorants are unable to reach the sensory cells and your perception of the “flavor” of your food is also diminished. Per a study conducted by Small et al, these sensory components are “functionally united when anatomically separated.”17 She writes, “flavor perception depends upon neural processes which occurs in various parts of the brain (anterior insula, orbitofrontal cortex, cingulate cortex and frontal operculum).”17 Furthermore, Small goes on to say that “the

This topic is important because it shows how people are able to recognize a certain smell much sooner than other. This experiment will show how one scent might have a higher odor threshold than another scent. The question that is being answered is how does the human nose recognize a specific smell and why people smell so many different scents. From this topic one can learn which scents have a higher or lower odor threshold and knowing which scents of smell the human nose recognizes much easier than others. This paper will include information on how your nose functions and why the nose is able to recognize different smells in the air.

This study investigated the effect of colour on perceived sweetness ratings. An experimental design was used with independent variable: liquid sample colour and the dependent variable: perceived sweetness rating. Participants were 95 undergraduate students taking a 100-level psychology paper. The study found that light red samples were perceived as sweeter than dark red, and that light green samples were perceived as sweeter than dark green. These findings suggest that colour does have an effect on the perception of taste.

FIGURE 1.1: This image shows how the linkage of smell and taste in the human body brain is and does it work.

In conclusion, the sense of smell end the sense of sight tends to affect a person’s taste. If a person were to see a ripe apple and a rotten apple they would choose the ripe one because of the way that it looks and the way that it smells. The mouth has many parts, the soft palate, hard palate, tongue, and sinuses. The mouth merges with the nose; they often affect each other when one becomes infected. The science of medicine sometimes cannot tell the difference

The sense of smell is a chemical sense. It is called chemical sense as it detects the chemicals in the environment and it works on larger distances. The sense of smell is a primal sense for humans as well as animals. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is one of the most ancient of senses. Smell (or Olfaction) allows vertebrates and other organisms with olfactory receptors to identify food, mates, predators, and provides both sensual pleasure (the odor of flowers and perfume) as well as warnings of danger (e.g., spoiled food, chemical dangers). For both humans and animals, it is one of the important means by which our environment communicates with us (John & Leffingwell, 1994)

The realization of this experiment had as main objective to show the relationship between the bitter flavor in spinach and the bitter flavor in Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC). In many past studies about this relationship the results have shown that there is a significant difference between the bitter taste in some vegetables and the bitter flavor present in PTC (Sandell & Breslin,2006). In order to approve or disapprove this hypothesis 19 students in the same class were tested to see if they tasted the bitter flavor in spinach. The spinach leaves were blended with mango juice using a blender machine. The result of this part of the experiment were recorded in a table to be analyzed. The results showed that 26.3% of the subjects were “super tasters” of the spinach (indicating that they tasted the bitter flavor). In contrast about 73.7% of the same subjects were considered to be “super tasters” for the PTC (grading the bitter flavor 4 or 5 in a 5 scale; being 5 the maximum for bitterness). In conclusion it can be say that this two results were not very related. This experiment can be used to further analyze how some vegetables may have bitter flavor and not be correlated to the bitter taste in PTC.