ARE YOU A SUPER TASTER?

Your sense of taste could affect your weight, your eating habits, and possibly even your risk of COVID-19. By understanding taste sensitivity, you can influence your eating behaviours for the better

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Around 10 years ago, Kavita Favelle, a food blogger from Wales, was enjoying a beer-tasting event when she and the other beer enthusiasts were each given small pieces of paper to put in their mouths. The bite-sized paper contained a sample of a bitter chemical called phenylthiocarbamide and, by needing to spit it out, the 52 year old had revealed herself to be one of the 25 per cent of the population known as supertasters.

“Your taste type is determined by how strongly you perceive this bitter taste,” says Andrew Costanzo, lecturer in food and nutrition at Deakin University in Melbourne. “Supertasters find it highly distasteful, normal tasters who make up around 50 per cent of the population don’t mind it and the 25 per cent of non-tasters can’t taste it at all.”

Which of these three groups you fall into can playa role in what you choose to eat—and how much of it—with knock-on effects to health.

Supertasters, like Favelle, tend to avoid foods that they consider taste bitter. On the positive side, this means they are less likely to smoke or drink alcohol. On the negative side, they tend to shun brassica vegetables like kale, cabbage, broccoli and Brussels sprouts that are high in bitter compounds—but also contain cancer-fighting compounds. Originally this was thought to be why supertasters have around a 40 per cent higher risk of some cancers than non-tasters, “but the issue is more that it’s not just bitter foods that super tasters avoid,” says Dr Costanzo. “They have generally less diverse diets possibly because they are more cautious about trying new things.”

And this could lower their general level of nutrition and exposure to protective compounds in fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices—and even coffee. Supertasters also tend to add more salt to their food, as salt disguises bitterness which might also have negative health effects like raising blood pressure.