"People Who Taste Too Much"

Neat article in the Wall Street Journal (by Sumathi Reddy) about people who are "supertasters."

A few highlights.

• Food that is very bitter to 25% of the world, who are often classified as "supertasters," is barely bitter to the other third.
• The rest of us fall somewhere in between. Such stark differences in how we perceive taste are programmed into our DNA.
• "Supertasters in general get everything more intense," says Linda Bartoshuk, a professor with the University of Florida Center for Smell and Taste and a pioneer in the study of supertasting. "When you put it all together we say that supertasters live in a neon food world compared to the pastel food world" everyone else lives in, she says
• A relatively high proportion of professional chefs are supertasters, Dr. Bartoshuk says. Also, supertasting abilities are more common in women than men, and in Asians and African-Americans than Caucasians. In the U.S., roughly 15% of people are supertasters, she estimates.
• Supertasters typically have a higher density of fungiform papillae, mushroom-shaped projections on the tongue that contain taste buds. Some experts say one way to tell if a person is a supertaster is to count the number of papillae in a small area after dying the tongue with food coloring, a test that can be done at home.
• Another common test, which can be purchased online, is to give people a particularly bitter chemical such as PROP or PTC, which are similar to a compound found in many dark-green vegetables. Most people find PROP and PTC bitter, but not unbearable, while others don't taste it at all. For supertasters, the experience is often nauseating.