BACKGROUND Smoking is the cause of inducing changes in taste functionality under conditions of chronic exposure. The objective of this study was to evaluate taste sensitivity in young smokers and non-smokers and identify any differences in the shape, density and vascularisation of the fungiform papillae (fPap) of their tongue. METHODS Sixty-two male subjects who served in the Greek military f...

Marmite is a popular food eaten around the world, to which individuals have commonly considered themselves either “lovers” or “haters”. We aimed to determine whether this food preference has a genetic basis. We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for Marmite taste preference using genotype and questionnaire data from a cohort of 261 healthy adults. We found 1 single nucleotide poly...

Investigations on the relationship between sweet taste perception and body mass index (BMI) have been inconclusive. Here, we report a longitudinal analysis using a genetically informative sample of 1,576 adolescent Australian twins to explore the relationship between BMI and sweet taste. First, we estimated the phenotypic correlations between perception scores for four different sweet compounds...

Genetically mediated sensitivity to the bitter taste of 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) has been associated with greater acuity for bitter and for some sweet tastes. Thus far, few studies have explored the relationship between PROP taste sensitivity and hedonic responses to bitter and sweet. In this study, 87 normal-weight young women were divided into PROP non-tasters (n = 18), regular tasters (n ...

Notable progress has been made relating individual differences in bitter taste sensitivity to specific alleles and TAS2R receptors, but psychophysical evidence of reliable phenotypes for other tastes has been more elusive. In this issue, Wise and Breslin report a study of individual differences in threshold sensitivity to sour and salty taste, which, though failing to find clear phenotypes, exe...

Taste perception is controlled by taste cells that are present in the tongue that produce and secrete various metabolic hormones. Recent studies have demonstrated that taste receptors in tongue, gut, and pancreas are associated with local hormone secretion. The aim of this study was to determine whether there is a link between taste sensitivity and levels of circulating metabolic hormones in hu...