We Taste With Our Nose?
Ever wondered why your food loses flavor when you’re sick? A lot of the time, it’s because of your stuffy nose. Between a quarter and three quarters of what we think of as taste is actually from our sense of smell. Our taste buds can only identify sour, sweet, salty and bitter flavors. The odor in food makes up the rest.
How It Works
There are about a million taste receptors in every person’s mouth. Each one responds to just one taste. But those flavors are pretty limited when it comes to what we really experience out of food. When you put a piece of food in your mouth, the odor molecules travel between your nose and mouth, and trigger the olfactory receptors at the top of the nasal cavity. When you’re sick, the molecules can’t reach those cell, so you don’t get any signals about the smell. Just about every thing you eat tastes the same, though you can identify temperature and texture. Our sense of smell is incredibly complex, with the average person being able to tell the difference between four thousand and ten thousand different types of odor molecule.
Some people don’t have a sense of smell. They suffer from a condition called anosmia, which prevents them from getting any of those subtle elements. For them, it’s like having a cold all the time. They can taste the burn of spicy food, but none of the associated “flavors” that most of us experience. Many people with this problem stick to really strong foods that they can get some kind of interesting sensation out of. Otherwise, they’re just limited to texture and temperature. Other people have disorders relating to just one taste, and may taste spicy food as bitter, or be unable to recognize sweetness. You can even be born with a sense of smell that influences how you taste, then lose it later in life, making your favorite foods boring.
What you can smell has a lot to do with what you can taste, and even minor differences in how your body is put together can make a huge difference in your preferences. That’s why some of us love to fill our coffee with sugar, and others like it black. It’s also why some people love richly spiced foods with strong smells, and other people think they’re overpowering. Smell and taste are inextricably linked! Next time you try your favorite food, think about how it smells. That’s a lot of why you enjoy it.
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