Humans have a guardian in their oral cavity, perhaps a bit coarse but effective. So you can see the thing evolutionarily anyway. The taste buds on our tongue distinguish whether it is sweet, sour, bitter or salty. Even spicy taste ("umami"), you may notice, possibly also the presence of fat. Ideally, with their information, they help us to inadvertently ingest toxic substances through food.
But not least the nose makes for the fun with the food. With the help of hundreds of different olfactory receptors on their mucous membranes, the body absorbs smells: Does it smell like lime, licorice or liver sausage bread? In the brain, so the previous assumption, the impressions of tongue and nose are then assembled.
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But researchers headed by Mehmet Hakan Ozdener of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, are questioning this model. In the journal "Chemical Senses" they report on a discovery that they have recently made. Accordingly, there are also on the tongue receptors for odors. And not only that: Apparently even a single sensory cell can sense taste and smell.
Just pretend sugar to the body
Perhaps already in the mouth in the interplay of taste and smell creates a first situation image of what we are currently planning to eat. In any case, Ozdener and his colleagues suspect this after experiments with mice and cell cultures of human taste cells.
"Our research could help explain how odor molecules affect taste," says researcher Ozdener. "This could lead to the development of taste-based flavor modifiers that could fight the ingestion of too much salt, sugar or fat, which in turn are linked to diet-related illnesses such as obesity or diabetes."
The idea is that with the help of a small amount of odorant, the body might be fooled into thinking that a particular food is sweeter than it really is. In that case, less sugar could simply be added. Whether this is actually possible, however, other researchers have doubts. It is too early to judge that, the British newspaper "Guardian" quotes Charles Spence of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the current research work.
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However, the experiments would help fathom some unexplained taste-related phenomena, Spence explained. For example, why subjects in previous tests could distinguish dishes that differed only in smell - even if they could not access the services of their nose. "There are some weird things that need to be explained," says Spence.