Eating Habits

Modulating a Taste

The quest for flavor modulators began in 1996, when Charles Zuker realized that the prevailing literature on taste biology was potentially wrong. Human can sense five types of flavor: sweet, bitter, umami (sometimes called savory), salty and sour. Most of us in school learned that tongue is partitioned into regions that each detect one type of flavor. But work of Charles Zuker showed that taste buds across the tongue and mouth contain small groups of cells that enable each bud to detect every flavor


By MARIJA MITROVIĆ
from Belgrade, SERBIA


Eating habits of most of the world population has drastically changed during last few decades especially in western part of the world. Fast food fits in a fast way of living. The thing that makes fast food so desirable and tasty is a huge amount of sugar, salt and other additives like monosodium glutamate (MSG). If you eat a junk food you risk not only to became member of group of overweight people but also a person with serious health problems. Number of overweighted persons became one of the bigest health issue in developed countries. Changing bad eating habits is referred as one of the possible solutions of the problems.

The second solution came form Charles Zuker, a biology professor at the University of California, San Diego. If it is so hard to change people's eating habits, he reasons, then it makes sense to change their perceptions instead. Researchers in have discovered tiny compounds that make foods taste sweeter, saltier and more savory than they really are, which could reduce the sugar, salt and monosodium glutamate typically added. The idea behind the new science of flavor modulation is to see if a handful of tiny compounds could fool our brains into eating differently. By adding tiny amounts of these modulators to traditional foods, manufacturers could reduce the amount of sugar, salt or other additives needed to satisfy, resulting in healthier products.

The quest for flavor modulators began in 1996, when Charles Zuker realized that the prevailing literature on taste biology was potentially wrong. Human can sense five types of flavor: sweet, bitter, umami (sometimes called savory), salty and sour. Most of us in school learned that tongue is partitioned into regions that each detect one type of flavor. But work of Charles Zuker showed that taste buds across the tongue and mouth contain small groups of cells that enable each bud to detect every flavor. It was hard to believe that one cell would be responsible for detecting the presence of something good, like sugar, and something bad, like poison (usually bitter).

Actually Zuker and hist team found that every taste cell has specific sensors, or receptors, on its outer membrane for just one type of flavor. They detected receptors, or proteins, on the cell surface taken from the tongue of mice, and named them T1R1 and T1R2. Neither of these proteins functions as complete taste receptor. Zuker discovered that difference between nonsweet-loving mice and normal one was in gene that coded for protein T1R3. He discovered that each kind of receptor contained two parts. The sweet one consisted of T1R2 and T1R3; the savory comprised T1R1 and T1R3. Soon afterward, Zuker identified the bitter receptor units, too-all 25 of them-as well as the receptor responsible for detecting sour.

Discovering and identifying taste receptors allowed to Zuker and colleagues in Senmyx to engineer "robot taste tasters" which are arrays of thousands of artificial "taste cells". He then introduced thousands of potential flavor-modulating compounds to these high-throughput "robot taste testers" to see which ones interacted with which cells. Today Senomyx has a library of 500,000 synthetic and natural compounds. After identifying a compound that interacts uniquely with a taste cell, employees use the screening process to further improve its physical properties.

With the ability to test so many compounds, Zuker realized Senomyx could identify molecules that did not have any flavor on their own but interacted with sweeteners and sweet receptors to enhance the perception. They found compounds, modulators of taste, that makes sucralose four times sweetener. Soucralose is a low-calorie sugar substitute that has a bitter aftertaste at high concentration. Lowering a concentration of sweeteners in diet drinks, will make them more tastier and healthier. They also found a sugar enhancer that makes sucrose, or table sugar, taste more than twice as sweet. In this way, Senomyx could cut the calories in foods yet ensure that they taste the same. And diet foods could taste even better than they do now.

Senomyx is also developing bitter blockers that could broaden the use of soy proteins, as well as rid cocoa of its bitter aftertaste, lessening the sugar that manufacturers add to cocoa-based products. Such blockers could also aid drug companies that are trying to develop "pharmaceutical crops," such as rice and soybeans that contain oral vaccines for hepatitis B and other diseases.

Taste of the food we eat is very important its important property. Enjoying a meal and its taste without counting a calories is a dream of ate least 50% of the women in the world. If you are a hedonist that cares about his look, taste modulators are a good news for you.


(Published: 10.08.2008.)