Abstract Taste perception plays a key role in determining individual food preferences and dietary habits. Individual differences in bitter, sweet, umami, sour, or salty taste perception may influence dietary habits, affecting nutritional status and nutrition-related chronic disease risk. In addition to these traditional taste modalities there is growing evidence that "fat taste" may represent a...

Taste receptor cells are the taste sensation elements for sour, salty, sweet, bitter and umami sensations. It was demonstrated that there are cell-to-cell communications between type II (sour) and type III (sweet, bitter and umami) taste cells. Serotonin (5-HT) is released from type III cells, which is the only type of taste cells that has synaptic process with sensory afferent fibers. Then, ta...

Understanding the influence of taste perception on food choice has captured the interest of academics, industry, and the general public, the latter as evidenced by the extent of popular media coverage and use of the term supertaster. Supertasters are highly sensitive to the bitter tastant propylthiouracil (PROP) and its chemical relative phenylthiocarbamide. The well-researched differences in t...

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...