Abstract
Treats and Tricks: The Magic World of Sweetness
Highlights
Taste is one of the five senses, together with sight, hearing, smell, and touch
Molecules, that enter the mouth and are captured by receptors on the tongue, which tell the brain that their taste is sweet, bitter, sour, salty, or umami
Some sweet molecules are really big proteins that cannot enter the cavities of the receptor, but they can bind to the receptor by hugging it from the outside
Summary
UMAMI Umami is the taste typical of broth or meat and of many oriental foods; the word umami comes from Japanese and means delicious. RECEPTOR A protein on the surface of a cell that “receives” another molecule by binding to it and sending an electrical signal to the brain. How many different tastes do you think are there? There are so many different kinds of food that it seems obvious that there are many, many tastes. Judging from personal experience, you probably think that there are many tastes, perhaps as many as there are different foods. The complicated tastes of the foods we eat are due in part to the fact that we cannot separate smell from taste and, in addition to five tastes, there are hundreds of different odors perceived by the brain. The brain can interpret the combination of smell and taste signals as lots of different kinds of tastes
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