Ologies with Alie Ward - Gustology (TASTE) with Gary Beauchamp

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Sweet! Salty! Umami? What’s up with MSG? Why do you like your coffee black? Come down to flavortown and let’s talk tongues. Gustologist Dr. Gary Beauchamp is a chemosensory scientist and an expert in taste. We chat about tastebud flim-flam, celebrity grade hot wings, MSG research, excitotoxins, weaning off sugar, the worst soup on the market, what countries have salt restrictions, why you lost your taste with Covid, how much taste is smell, artificial sweeteners, acquiring a taste for foods, and how a sweet tooth may affect your booze consumption. Delicious facts, served up hot. Visit Dr. Gary Beauchamp’s Research and Career Highlights and ResearchGate profileDonations were made to the Monell Center and Philadelphia Young PlaywrightsMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Diabetology (BLOOD SUGAR), Felinology (CATS), Biogerontology (AGING), Environmental Microbiology (TESTING WASTEWATER FOR DISEASES), Glycobiology (CARBS), Laryngology (VOICEBOXES), Radiology (X-RAY VISION), Indigenous Culinology (NATIVE COOKING), Foraging Ecology (EATING WILD PLANTS) with @BlackForager, Alexis Nikole Nelson, Black American Magirology (FOOD, RACE & CULTURE), Gastroegyptology (BREAD BAKING), Entomophagy Anthropology (EATING BUGS), Mixology (COCKTAILS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, stickers, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Mark David Christenson Transcripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's that cup of tea that you forgot about. And now it's exactly the right temperature, and it's me. I'm back at Sally Ward. Hi. So, what a month or so it's been. If you're like, what, what, what happened? So very quickly, I was in the hospital three times. I had pneumonia, and then I was forced by my doctors, and my loved ones to take some time

to stare in an ocean. And now I'm back. I'm healthy. I'm feeling refreshed. I've been told I'm glowing, and I'm doing hella better. So I'm feeling refreshed. I've been told I'm glowing and I'm doing hella better. So victory is ours. I could taste it. So eating of taste, let's get into it. So your tongue's just sitting there on standby to talk or to tell you if you should swallow or spit or gag or lick. It's just like a disgusting naked muscular drill sergeant that lives in your mouth.

So we're going to talk to one of the most celebrated experts on the study of taste, who is a delight to talk to, and handled my thousands of questions with a plum. So I got myself to Philly to do this keynote earlier this summer, and I managed to record 11 interviews for various episodes and then, unshockingly, after that, I came down with pneumonia, just immediately upon my return.

So lesson learned. But while I was in Philly, I got myself to the Monel Chemical Senses Center, which you can locate in Philly via the giant gold nose and mouth sculpture on the exterior steps. As one researcher told me, it's a good thing that they're not a proctology center.

So I went in with my ears open and my appetite big for gastology, which is a real word. It comes from the Latin for tasting or flavor. But first, from my mouth, a quick thank you to patrons of the show at patreon.com slash allergies, who have been supportive since before episode one six years ago, and without whom the show would not exist. And thank you to everyone on Patreon who responded to my video about taking a break with such

love. I'm so lucky to have you all as a community. I just love you. You can also support the show with merch from oligiesmerch.com or just by leaving reviews and rating because I read all the reviews and then I pick an oven hot one to read each week like this one was certain by Happy Worldwide who wrote the show is also very good and that the example I was setting by taking a vacation was also great. So thank you, Happy World Blind.

Thanks for everyone who left for views. When I was out, I caught up. I loved them all. Also, we had a little glitch with running some silence bits this past month because of an ad error, but it's all fixed. Our bad, it's all good now. Okay, on the episode in which we will chat about celebrity grade hotwinks, excitortoxins, umami, medical textbook, flimflam, gag reflexes, cats on pixie sticks,

weaning off of sugar, the worst soup on the market, which countries have salt restrictions, why some people like IPAs and some don't, artificial sweeteners, and aging, and more with absolute gem of a scientist and gastologist, Dr. Gary,. Champs. I don't know something, something. Yeah, I just kind of hold it and talk into it like an ice cream cone. Imagine if you're just on a stage talking to people.

Seeing songs. Yeah, exactly. You're Linda Ronstadt. Right. First name is Gary. Last name is pronounced poorly for the French. It is pronounced beechum. Is it really beechum?

Yeah. I definitely would have said booshul. Of course. Of course. I was in a ceremony a few weeks ago where one of the winners was French. And the first thing she did is chew me out for the way I pronounced my name. Wow. Chewing out a taste expert. We are off to the races.

Did you say it's your name? You could say however you want. That's right. Actually, it's a very, very well-known name in Britain. Do you have a lot of doctors and scientists in your family? No. No? Really?

Were you the first? Well, my father was an engineer. I guess that's kind of a scientist. But before that, they were just farmers and working people. OK, so it may not have been handed down to him, but he has two sons, one's a playwright and one's a scientist. So when it comes to careers, they all have great taste. Did you always have an inclination toward that? My story is that when I was three years old, a butterfly flew into my ear, and I caught

it, and I was taken by it and from then on I was pointing toward biology. Did you start getting interested in how different animals experience different chemicals? Was insects, mouth parts, something that's parking? I was interested in different animals for sure and I caught and collected animals for many many years but I don't think I had a real interest in their sensory capabilities until I was in college. And it was focused on how animals engage in the world, and it really wasn't until I came here to Monel that I focused on the chemical senses, because that's what the institute was

going to be doing. When it comes to the way that humans experience chemical and sensory information versus other animals, is there a big difference when you jump from invertebrate to vertebrate how we experience and understand the world? The founder of this institute, the guy in Morley Care, he used to say, and he was famous for saying it, as was Vince De Teer, who's another famous person in our field, every animal lives in its own sensory world. And that is true. Some of them are more similar to others, some of them are more different. It's amazing in some ways how similar in terms of at least sensory responses, some insects are humans.

So take for example the teeny tiny dross philia, which is a common research focus. It's the humble and fascinating fruit fly. And so fruit flies are an interesting and valuable model for understanding how tastes and smell work and what they do in the environment. But there are other species that for example have no ability to taste or no ability to smell or both. And of course there are blind animals and whatever. So there's a huge variation. There's no general rule you can make about it. So it's really based on need and what they've adapted to? What I would say that the sense is most important for us, getting food, getting enough food, is mating,

for reproducing. It depends on what they need. So I can take an example right off the bat, which is one of my favorites since we worked on for many years. I studied cats and their response to various tastes and flavors and smells. And we discovered, which was a big controversy in the literature of somewhat of a controversy, which was literature at the time, that they didn't seem to respond very particularly well

to sugars like we would. And so we actually found that was true with our domestic cats. And so I went to the zoo Which is six blocks over here and we tested lions and tigers and leopards and jaguars and What we found was that those animals loved things like fat loved amino acids, which was part of protein But as far as we could tell they had no interest whatsoever in sugar or anything sweet I'm not really a dessert person. The way we did this, we had these long pans, we stuck under their cages, they couldn't get too close to them.

But we proposed, and this is in the late 1970s or the 1980s, that in fact, maybe an animal which is an obligate carnivore, which cats have to have protein, those animals no longer are not able to detect sugars. That would be the easiest way to explain our behavioral results. But there was no real easy way to test that at the time, until around 2002, 2001, when everybody, including us, discovered something about what the actual case receptor was in the time of humans, of mice, or most of it was done first. So we knew what the receptor was.

It's a protein that binds sugars, and then sends a message to the brain and says, this is sweet. And another part of the brain says, this is good. And what my colleagues found, I'm not a molecular biologist, but what my colleagues found, is that if you could look at the structure of that receptor, that they lost function of that particular receptor. And so, none of those cats could taste sweet at all. One of the most interesting things is that we looked at then many other carnivores that

were obligatory that only ate meat. And they all had some change in their sweet receptor. They'd all lost, almost all lost it. Independently, not one event, but independently in all of these species, presumably based on the fact that their dietary needs no longer drove them towards carbohydrates, which is what the sugars are arriving for,

the good source of calories. But for cats or for many other of these kind of ors, they don't respond to it. In fact, they can't even handle it, it makes them sick. Really? So, if you were to feed your cat friend, a diet that was very high in sugar, if they would eat it, they would be sick. Because they don't have the mechanisms like which they can break that down into

something that they can use, which would be glucose. Glucose is also a taste, and they use glucose, of course, for their bodily functions, but they don't taste it. They have to make it. For more on cats on keto, you can see the study, cats and carbohydrates, the carnivore fantasy, from the journal Veterinary Science in 2017, which stated, evolutionary events adapted the cat's diet

to one strictly composed of animal tissues and led to metabolic peculiarities of carbohydrate metabolism. And though a cat's body needs glucose to function, it's not being absorbed from the gut, rather it's produced by the kiddie body via gluconeogenesis, which means making glucose. So cats lack some enzymes to even break down carbs, which explains the paragraph in the study that reads, high carbohydrate intake in cats, therefore increases adverse digestive effects,

such as diarrhea, flachelence, and bloating. Smelly cat, what are they feeding you? Carbs. It's carbs. Hitties plus carbs equals farts. I asked our Philanology guest, Dr. Michael Delgado about this and she said that they do have a special taste receptor for adenosine triphosphate, which is basically a signal for meat. True killers, she says.

What about dogs? Dogs are a little different. Dogs are much more Catholic in their interests. And some people say they'll eat anything. They'll just gobble it down, which is what it looks like sometimes. But dogs have not lost their ability to taste sweet. So I think if you go to most pet foods and you look at what they actually made out of,

the ones for cats don't have anything that would be resembling a sweetener, the ones for dogs have carbohydrates that might be sweet. It's of one reason the cat foods are more expensive than dog foods. I have no idea. So yes, the 2007 study, cats lack a sweet taste receptor. Says verbatim that dogs prefer natural sugars and overall cats and dogs respond very differently

to sweet tasting stimuli, although both species belong to the order carnivora. So I'm sorry, cat people, science has proven that yes yes dogs are sweetie peedies, but I'm not biased. All right. You know, I wasn't planning on asking this, but as long as I got you here, I have a tiny cuter-dorbal daughter. She's a dog. And whenever she tastes something that she's never tried before, like a tiny bit of mango juice, or maybe a little bit of a type of ice cream, If we let her have a little taste she does the singular she goes ma-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah-mah That's her way of getting a better sensory response when my other areas is olive oil and there's this it's like wine too

You know the tasting. I mean if you if you do that you're getting it you're driving it more up Actually, that's more of an old faction probably than taste But you're driving up to the old factory receptors and particularly for something novel It's very very wise for an animal including Including humans to be at wary because the real world is really dangerous. From what you eat, most things out in the real world are boys and are semi-boys and because they're defending themselves. And so, you know, people always complain about babies don't like vegetables or whatever. Get out of my side.

But there why is not the wife of me right at first? Because all through revolution, until how many, a few hundred years, a few thousand years ago, that was the real world and one had to be very careful when put it in the mouth. And from what I understand, we lose taste buds as we age. Is that correct?

Can you walk me through the mind field, in your field, that is taste buds? Like what are they doing? Who tastes what? What's going on? Yeah, well, so what you just said is controversial the best. Yeah, good, good, correct us. Well, many studies suggest there is a loss of taste buds.

Taste buds are these little bumps in your time. You can just look at them in the mirror. Although the ones you see that are taste and the ones that do other things are very hard to tell the difference when you're in the mirror. But on those little buds are taste receptor cells and they respond to sweet sour, salty, bitter, umami, which is a amino acid perhaps, and maybe a few other things.

The counts of those like everything else with aging, I have to say, which I'm doing, is downhill. But the evidence that older people really don't respond well to tastes is very, very poor. And I would say, I have a story about this that is almost one of my favorites. And it involves my father-in-law. So my father-in-law was getting older. He was 92 years old, and my wife and I had to take him and put him in a nursing home, the most horrible thing. And so we got calls a little bit later from the nursing home saying that he wasn't eating

and they were worried about it. And we knew we ate well because I fed him. And so I went to the nursing home and spoke to the people and they said, yeah, he just won't eat this food. And I said, well, I'll try it. So I went in to his lunch and I started eating the food. And it was terrible. It was terrible in a very specific way that I think I was particularly able to discern, which was that it was no salt whatsoever, no salt. And so one of my real expertise is in salt. So I went to the person who was in charge of the food and she said, well, you know salt causes hypertension. And my response was, you know, this man is 92 years old.

He has no high blood pressure problems whatsoever, and I know that he loves salt. Please, please put it into the food. So your health may vary and ask your doctors about how much salt is right for you, especially since some studies have found that the older you get, the more you might gravitate towards saltier foods. And according to this 2022 study out of Japan, older adults perception of taste intensity increases slowly after they take a bite, but it remains lower than that of young adults. So it takes a minute before they're like, okay, but it's still lower than when you're

younger. And this study suggests that older adults savor and chew sufficiently during eating to optimize their perceived salty taste. So give it a good chew, because it might take a second before it tastes good. And I'm sorry, I have one million questions for this man, and I want to move forward, but something was nagging at me. So he got to go back. And I want to circle back really quick, because I'm dying to know, when you were feeding

sugar to lions, what was going in the pan? Was it in a cotton candy, jelly beans? What were you feeding to? Yeah, well that's a great question, what we were feeding them is what scientists do, which is not such a great thing. We were feeding them sugar and water. So we were giving sugar water or salt water or amino acid water, fast and a little bit tricky. So we were trying to get a liquid fat that was in the same kind of format at least. But it's a real good question. Thank you.

Because when this paper was published, and we were on in PR a few times about this, the claim was, this is a long time ago, and I'm sure and I'm not true anymore, that they got more responses to this particular issue. You don't know almost anything else. We were getting people calling. They say, my cat loves ice cream.

My cat loves cake. Oh. And. There's so much fat in there, though. My cat loves ice cream. My cat loves cake. Ah. And. There's so much fat in there, though. That's so much fat. Absolutely. You got it right away. The one problem I had was with marshmallows.

Oh, yes. Because to me, there's nothing much there, but a structure and sugar. And it turns out that one of the one group of animals that have no interest in sweets are in the alligator crocodile family. And yet I've watched them eat marshmallows. And so I don't quite know what's going on there. It's a mystery. But for the most part what you said is right, the ice cream, the cake, those kinds of things are really the path they're responding to. I mean, if I were a big lizard looking beast and someone threw something made out of horse

gelatin that looked like an egg at me, I think I'd be like, I'll take another one of those. Well, that may be, at your point, maybe actually true that what they're responding to is the visual signal, maybe not the sensory signal at all. Although the tactile thing may have something to do with it as well. Oh, boy, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What about you personally? Do you have a sweet tooth or a sweet taste bed? Yeah, sure, everybody does.

I mean, almost everybody does. In fact, there's almost no evidence. There's some genetic evidence that we differ a little bit in our responses to sweets. But I would argue that it's the most profound innate stimulation that humans and many other species respond to. It's immediate, it's right, it's birth, it's before birth, it's the most profound innate stimulation that humans and many other species respond to. It's immediate, it's right, it's birth, it's before birth, it's working, and we all have

it almost. So I like sweets in some certain circumstances. I'm not a big sweet fan. If I had to make a judgment reviewing sweet and salty, I'd usually go salty. Okay. But some people claim that there's, they're characteristic sweet lovers or salt lovers, but the evidence is, I think it's more depending upon what they've been eating,

what they've recently had, and what they've had over their lifetimes. We call this in my family, the onion dip test, where would you rather have a piece of cake or the onion dip, and my sister cannot fathom wanting the cake. She's like, I would eat a whole bowl of onion dip with a spoon before cake. She's like, I would eat a whole bowl of onion dip with a spoon before cake. And I'm wondering about how we acclimate to certain tastes. If you put a lot of speed

during your coffee every day, chances are you are used to that. But if you never have your coffee sweet, a little bit probably tastes like a lot. So what's happening between receiving the chemicals from our taste buds to our brain saying too much too little. Okay, so you jumped one step ahead. Okay, tell me what the middle step is. So the one step ahead you jumped is your assumption that we like what we're used to or whatever is reasonable. It's valid and it's mostly true.

But it's not so clear that it's true. So I mean you're asking questions that are so much in my belly wick that I'm not even too embarrassed to try to answer them. But go back to salt. So during the 60s and 70s there was a real concern about consuming excess salt. And the question was why do we do it? And I can remember going to meetings and the Poo-Bas of the blood pressure group said, well, you just stopped eating food with salt in it. I didn't. It was no problem. But it is a problem.

And the question is, to what degree do we come to like the amount of salt we consume? And so we got interested in this a long time ago, not even because of the health reasons, but to see what effect it would have if people who were eating, say, normal levels of salt were put on a really low salt diet, would they acclimate to that? The study was a very small study at the time. We took students from the University of Pennsylvania here, and maybe not the average person, but that's what we had. And probably at the time we put them in the hospital so we could really control what they

ate. I A major dinner. And we lowered the amount of salt in the foods. Sometimes we did it with people from outside too. And we tested how much they liked salty foods. Basically what we measured was if you were looking at, say a cookie or some sort of cracker, we got somebody to manufacture the crackers with different levels of salt. Oh nice. So we can look to see which ones they like best. And we made soups and we were the world's largest consumer at the time of Campbell's

low sodium and vegetable soup, but nobody else would eat it. And we used that as the base and we made the levels of salt and so we tested them beforehand before they went on low salt diets. And what happened, of course, was that when they immediately went on these low-sauce onium diets, they were miserable. They hated them. They needed it! But turned out they gradually came to sing. They were okay. And when we tested them, we found indeed the same thing.

They liked the level of salt which surprising, surprising, Campbell's soup put in it in the soup. But after a while, that was too salty And they began to like less salt in it. And the same thing with the crackers. And it turns out, of course, that we were not making a novel discovery. There were two other classes of discoveries that we found that had already been done this. One was an article explorer named Stephenson. Oh, wow.

I can do a whole episode about this, dude. But let me throw down bullet points, okay? So it's the early 1900s. There's this young explorer by the name Wilhelmir Stephenson, born in Manitoba to Icelandic parents, and he's leading an exploration in the far north. He hires an Inuit guide and a seamstress.

He gets very romantic with the seamstress who goes by Fanny Pendingo-Block and they have a son. Later in life, he would have another affair with a who goes by Fanny Piningo block and they have a son. Later in life he would have another affair with a different woman named Fanny and maybe Fanny was like the Brittany or Jenny at the time I don't know that's a lot of fannies for one man But back to 1913 so he studies inuit populations and diets and that year his ship gets marooned in sea ice and he says to the crew Hang tight Chill on the boat play some cards cards, whatnot, nobody panic.

I'm gonna go ashore, I'm gonna honest and meet. But then, as he's ashore, he's like, psych, smell you later. And he leaves the ship to sink. 17 of his crew members were killed. Such a party fell, Villthummer. It's eight years later, and he has an understandably sketch reputation.

But he bounces back and people keep giving him chances and money, not much has changed since then. And he decides to colonize an island off the coast of Siberia. And Russia is like, that's ours. And Britain, meanwhile, goes, we're so sorry about this Canadian guy. We don't know what he's doing to ignore him. Four out of five of the researchers on the expedition die, guess who doesn't, Wilhelm Er, and his new, annuit, seamstress, who knows what the fuck is up and knows how to survive

in Siberia. Also, their cat named Vic makes it out alive, probably cost it several lives though. Later, Wilhelmmer really botches a plan to domesticate Norwegian reindeer. The reindeer are like, get bent, we hate you. Excuse me, what does this have to do with anything? Let's get us on track.

So Stephenson did make notes and found that the Inuit diet had a really meaty base of the food pyramid, with about 90% of the food being meat and fish. Pretty much doing keto or zero carb for much of the year. And when eating like this, all of even the non-native explorers, they were in great health. Everyone doubted him because he was dubious as hell. But at some point later in his life a study was conducted. It was funded unsurprisingly by the American Meat Institute, and it found that when Wilhelmmer and his cohorts ate only fatty meat, they had no deficiency problems, and their health seemed to be great.

In fact, even their stools were smaller,, quote, did not smell. But then, when they ate lean meat, Vilhelmir got the runs wicked bad and then couldn't poop for, like, a wofold 10 days. I bet he wrote poems about it. So that is who Dr. Beecham is talking about. This guy named Wilhelmir Steffensen. Who, it turns out, I did a little more digging, he was not born. Wilhelmir Steffensen. Rather, his name was William Stevenson and he changed it for optics.

He was also said to have been, quote, the greatest humbug alive. Real rap scallion, this guy. And they ate raw fish and other things. And when he got there, he was miserable because he wanted more salt. He wanted more salt on it. And he didn't have any with him. So he reports that after one, two, three months, which is exactly the same amount of time we found with people here,

he began to think that Los Al was okay. Even better, in one of Gallover's travels, Gallover goes to a Los Olium country and he's miserable with the food and he just almost can't eat it. But after two or three months, it's okay. When he comes out of that Los Oli sodium food country, everything tastes too salty. So we were just proving something that everybody already knew.

But it turns out that our little study has been replicated now many times with much bigger studies. And forms the basis for the FDA and CDC recommendations that companies, the uniformulation lower the amount of salt they put in food, they say gradually, some people, they really need to go on a little sort of impact, but the epidemiologists tell us, and I certainly believe them, that the best way to do this is to get everybody to shift downwards. And so, this is of course very controversial.

I was on a national academy, a committee that recommended the government enforce this by law, and isn't forced by law in some other countries now. Oh wow. By the way. Have they seen any benefits in health? They claim they have in both Finland and in the UK. Okay, so news to me, but according to the World Health Organization's Sodium Country

Scorecard, over 25% of the world's humans live somewhere with a mandatory sodium reduction plan, and I can list them all, but no one wants that. But I did find that some nations even have implemented attacks on sugary or salty foods, including the country. Hungry. But what you should know is that most populations are eating around 9 to 12 times the amount of salt that we need, and that reducing salt and diets is apparently the most cost-effective way of reducing non-communicable diseases because you're cutting down on cardiovascular

diseases and strokes. And some people are like, you can pry the salt shaker from my cold dead stroke afflicted cardiovascular failed hands. But the biggest daily culinary offender are daily bread. So a lot of mandatory sodium cuts are to breads. So you can lower your salt intake and then layer mustard and salami and pickles on top of it. And that shrug because, hey man, you tried. But in the population as a whole, you can see decline in blood pressure related diseases. Sweet. So yeah. And so step forward to now.

The question is the same thing true for sugar. And we are actually, as we speak, finally conducting a study to look at this, much better study with collaboration with USDA, where we are taking people and putting them on low-sweet diets. Well, low sugar diets with them without non-nutrient sweetness, so we can see if it's the sweetness that's involved. This study should have been completed about three years ago, but just as we were starting COVID hit. And so we're now up and running as of this month.

I'm suspicious that it's going to be harder for sugar, but we'll see. I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you. Well, I'm so curious because I feel like I read a long time ago that if you have a diet soda with a meal, you'll end up eating more. Yeah. Okay. So that is one of the, again, controversial issues.

The idea there is that the sweetener should stimulate release of hormones that are involved in appetite. And if the sweetener is, say, a carbohydrate, which has calories, then that makes sense. The body recognizes that and uses it appropriately. But if it has the sweetness, but not the carbohydrates, it really compuses things,

and maybe makes people more hungry or makes them eat more. There too, the evidence is very controversial. Okay, quick, quick, quick. Insulin is squirted out of your pancreas and it clears glucose from your blood. And the hormone grellin is known as the hunger hormone. And it can influence insulin secretion

and back and forth, and if you have something sweet without actually increasing your blood sugar at all, some researchers think your appetite gets wonky, like in a 2016 article that found artificial or non-nutritive sweeteners kicked off a sweet versus energy imbalance and fruit flies in the study experienced hyperactivity, insomnia, glucose intolerance, and a sustained increase in food and calories consumed, all of which just reversed when they kicked the sucrose. Also, what does a hyperactive fruit fly even look like?

To be a fly bouncing off the wall in that laboratory. Anyway, there are a ton of studies on this. Some that say you'd need to eat 20,000 servings of splendor before a ghrelin was affected. Others that say not so. There was a 2021 Polish study titled Aspertaim. True or false, narrative review of safety analysis of general use in products in the journal nutrients. And it stated that aspertaim use has also been associated with increased risk of type

two diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, microbiome disruption, hormone-related cancers, and is suspected of causing behavioral disorders in humans, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, and brain tumors. And in July of this year, researchers via the World Health Organization said that there was limited evidence that aspartame caused cancer in humans, but they classified it as possibly carcinogenic. Yet, if you were to saunter over to the Wikipedia page titled Aspertaim Controversy, the first paragraph says that, quote, potential health risks have been examined and dismissed.

Did a diet coke write that? We may never know. I do have to be careful because it's not just controversial. There's people that are very seriously angry about it if you take one side of the other. Really? And I'm a sensory person. I really stay away as far as possible from the medical thing. But of course, we're talking about things that are medically important. But from the sensory point of view, we've got to get the studies right. And then the physicians can tell us, as my doctor said the other day, we are not scientists, we are physicians.

Oh! That's a great line. Okay, so the distinction is research, essentially. So most researchers have a doctorate, a PhD, but not all MDs or medical doctors have done lab research. It's linguistically very confusing, and it's like a deep-cut, blue-ray nerd humor. but not all MDs or medical doctors have done lab research. It's linguistically very confusing, and it's like a deep cut, blue ray nerd humor.

It's very cute. You mentioned, you know, about 90 days to ween off of sodium. Is it similar if you are going for a no sugar diet? Is there something about that amount of time to make new connections in the brain? Well, we don't know. And that's a big problem with our studies, because how long do we have to go to see whether it might work.

I mean, the only thing really that we had for humans was salt study. So ours is going three months. And if it takes longer for sugar, we won't see it. So that's probably the other part of your question, which is the more profound one really though is, where is this happening and how is it happening? I mean, one presumes it's in the brain somewhere. But exactly where these effects of experience happen and how they modify their structures, we're going to need an animal, good animal model to study that.

Maybe with FMRI you could do something with it. Just nobody has worked on that. I have something called post-prandial reactive hyper-installemia. Oh, that sounds very official. Isn't it? Which just means that I sugar crash more so than most people. So I had a no sugar diet for a long time. Oh yeah.

Yeah, I fell off the wagon horribly. But did you, as I'm describing it, did you have this effect? When you first went back on it, it was too strong or... I think that what happened was my brain knew that I wasn't allowed to eat it. And so when I ate it, it was like, oh, go to town. It was so forbidden that when I did have some, it was like, I couldn't stop.

It was like a dog with a toy, just like, ah. And so my relationship to sweets became more psychological. For more on insulin ups and downs, you can check out the recent on-core episode with diabetologist and type one diabetic, Dr. Mike Natter. Also some people take umbridge to the term diabetic as a noun. Others prefer person with diabetes, so I took a poll via Twitter or X or whatever, and three to one people with diabetes preferred the term diabetic because it's such a large part

of their lives and their identity. So don't come at me for that. And Dr. Natter responded, I prefer the term, my busted pancreas pieced out. But yeah, either way, my pancreas is a little bit of an overachiever in the insulin department, causing some blood sugar crashes and then sugar cravings and may, like me, one day burn out. But that's really interesting, you say that, because there's anecdotal reports of exactly the same thing where those people really had no exposure, all their lives.

This is anecdotal, and I'm trying to remember it from some other time. But the sugar one, as I recall, was very quick. It was a tasting, and maybe even even it was a spinning out at first, but then quickly realizing, wow, this is something. Have you had to look at any studies of how to get off of sugar? Like we can tell that pancreatic illnesses and insulin responses and type two diet, BDs definitely having some problems there.

And I know for me personally, my life would be better if I did not eat sugar. And yet, every day, I put a little sugar in my coffee this morning. So, do you have there been any studies out there of trying to break that? Well, that's what I study at the school. I'm telling you what I study is about. Let me know if you need any subjects. But I study actually comes back to you.

Do you think you have to be sugar or is it any sweetener? I feel like when I get acclimated to sugar in my coffee or sweetener in my coffee like a Splendus situation, I'm used to it and I expect it when I drink it and the less I put it in the less I want it. I do feel like I've weaned off at a little bit at least. One of the things that's interesting about the sweetener response, at least from the sensory part of you, which is what I know about, is that, as I said in 2002, we, and it's happened so many times, five other groups at the same time, discovered what the receptor was.

Very exciting time. I think we were first, but we didn't get to be published first. It's another story. But the other sweeteners are discriminable from the carbohydrate sweeteners. That seems pretty clear. But the carbohydrate sweeteners like sucrose, fructose, glucose, from the sensory point of you are taste identical. But there turns out to be another receptor, another class of receptors that is particularly

responsive to the small molecule carbohydrate receptors, mainly glucose, that goes through a different pathway that we may or may not be conscious of. And so there are ways to discriminate that our body discriminates between these, and maybe we don't discriminate up here. So the tongue is kind of a sweet, happy bimbou saying, yum yum yum, love it. But our body has all kinds of tubes and goop that knows what the fuck is up on a molecular level. Speaking of talking in tongues.

Well, I'm curious a little bit about our taste buds themselves from what I understand. And maybe this is outdated, but look kind of like an orange with sections for different receptors for bitter in umami instead of having a bunch of bitter taste receptors in the back of your tongue and some on the side. When you're looking at a taste bud, the ones that are detecting salts and carbohydrates and maybe proteins and amino acids, is that what's happening? Little tiny orange sections that are tasting different

things? Yes. Okay. But they're not, again, this is one of the sort of the things that drive people in our field nuts. Was this drawing in all the medical textbooks showing in the back as bitterness? The front is sweetness, the sides are salt, they didn't pay attention to amino acids. And of course, that's not true. They're distributed all through the tongue and the palate, actually, and actually fairly far back. But what is true is that you're sort of more sensitive to more bitters in the back, and maybe more sensitive to the good things in the front. And so there's a little bit of truth to that. And again, it makes kind of sense. If you think of what the bitterness is for, this is even controversy, but I still totally

believe it, that the real evolution of bitterness is to make sure you don't kill yourself with poison. And you think the last chance to stop for me eating something is if you get it here and can get rid of it. And when you look at baby's response to bitterness, newborn babies, you see this very distinct facial expression when it rast through the same thing. You're trying to get rid of it. And the negative things are much clearer than the positive ones.

People claim that babies smile when they get sugar right at birth. I don't believe it. But they certainly are calm and they certainly appreciate it by sucking on it. So there is something to that that there's this differential thing, and particularly for very bitter things that they're avoiding. But the idea that this only in these various parts, but each taste cell, presumably, this is also a little controversial, each taste cell responds to only one of these tastes. As described in the paper, taste buds, cells, signals, and synapses.

So in mammals, each taste bud is this compact cluster of cells. It kind of looks like a garlic bulb, they say, with 50 to 100 elongated cells. And in general, they're the most type 1 cells, and fewer type 2 and type 3 cells. But their concentrations differ in different parts of your mouth, where a lot of people's mouth provided that the person is a mammal and has a tongue.

Unlike the olfactory system, the smell system, there really are these sort of basic fundamental things, which I've argued, and many people have argued not just me, that they're really case system is designed as the most important sensory system we have, and I can defend that if you let me. The most important sensory system we have, because this is a thing that's gonna protect us, help us decide, is this something I can put in my body, or is this something that I should not put in my body?

Don't put that in your mouth. I mean, if you can't figure that difference out, you're dead. Yep. And so, if you can't figure that difference out, you're dead. Yep. And so I do think that that kind of carries over to solve, too. If you're sodium deficient, which is humans are never so deficient and ask this, everybody has plenty of solve.

OK, so I look this up. And even in countries reporting the lowest sodium intake, Kenya and Malawi, folks there consumed about five times with an active, healthy human needs to survive in terms of sodium. But during evolution that wasn't true. And so finding salt was really, really important. And I think we're built to find salt, and we've respond particularly when we need it. There's a lot of study on Lord sodium and how that rast in particular responds to it, and not so much in people, of course. So yes, both medical doctors and scientists don't let gastrologists deprive human test subjects

of regular soup for too long. They're like, we know you hate it. Here's the regular soup. Thank you for participating. Amino acids is a little different story, and that's a long and weird history about what the amino acid taste really is and whether umami glutamate our mechanisms underlying our ability to detect and respond to protein. But certainly under certain circumstances the amino acid glutamate, which is the main one for MSG, is highly attractive to children and to adults. And it is in fact true that if you substitute monocytic glutamate with pure salt,

you can reach the same level of liking with lower total sodium. Because the glutamate part stimulates presumably another receptor and that compensates for the lower salt diets. And so that's one of the recommendations, actually, from the CDC, I think, to use that substitution for some folks. That won't work for everything. And it only reduces the maximum of being 40, 50%. But that's substantial if people use it.

So salt is a very, very interesting substance, for sure. And just a side note on how this works. So glutamate is an amino acid and it hops into the receptor on your tongue that's primed for umami and it tells your brain, yum yum yum yum. Now if you combine glutamate with a nucleotide like anosinate or guanulate which is in beef and fish and packaged foods and fermented veggies, then it heightens that umami flavor by extending the taste sensation. And yes, MSG got a real bad rap in the late 1960s when one dude, one dude, wrote a pissy letter to a science journal about his own woes with a condition he dubbed Chinese restaurant syndrome, and then the Western world just freaked out

in a misplaced gesture of bloated panic and just straight up xenophobia. Now, in reality, bound glutamate is in a ton of foods, naturally. A bunch of protein sources and free glutamate, like what's in MSG, also naturally occurs in cheese and seaweed and tomatoes and peas, cow milk, human milk, and in additives labeled, auto-liced yeast extract, and such. Now, for more on this, you can see the annals of nutrition and metabolism

2022 study called glutamate, a safe nutrient, not just a simple additive. However, some neurobiologists have looked into the relationship between free glutamates and specific medical conditions like fibromyalgia, OCD, and what's called Gulf War syndrome. But more studies may need to be done on that. And this was surprising to me, but I'm actually a podcast host.

I'm not a medical doctor. So you can just tell that to your lawyers in terms of what you should eat. And I was going to ask, where does capsaicin and excitotoxins like monosodium glutamate, where do they come into this? Okay, so first of all, I wouldn't put those together at all. Okay, yes, yes.

So let me go back in history. If you look through all of history and you look at different cultures around the world, everybody agrees that these basic tastes are sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and something, one or two things that are irritants, like capsaicin. And of course, they have a different pathway, different mechanism, they don't go through the taste system at all, they're pain.

So the capsaicin literally has the same set of receptors that if you put a burning match in your throat, it would do it. I mean, it really is burning by our language. So Dr. Mjemp did a study on this in 1996. It was titled Ethanol consumption and taste references in C57BL-6BYJ and 1-29J mice. I linked that so you don't have to Google it. But he found that no mice did not like the solution that was liquid del scorchohot, which is why in the chickenology and squirrel episodes, we talk about lacing bird seed with hot pepper to keep the rodents out of your feedbacks, because birds don't give a shit about spicy.

They can't taste it. They don't hate it. But in the same study, Dr. Petron McColley's also found that in rodents, they drank more of a boozy solution, possibly because of ethanol's sweet taste, and that, quote, the proclivity to drink alcohol is associated with elevated sweet preferences. So if you got a sweet tooth and a drinking problem, or you quit drinking, and now you're reaching for candy, perhaps something to look at. It even happens to rodents. But yes, our main tastes are sweet, sour, bitter,

salty, and umami. And then the burning hot, out tongue stuff is just in its own painful joy. She sickos. So they have those seven or six, and they are universal. Only four or five of them are taste, and the others, but you could see why nobody would know. They don't know the anatomy. And they're universal. Only four or five of them are taste, and the others, but you could see nobody would know.

They don't know the anatomy. And they're in the mouth. Now of course you put Capsis in your eye or your nose or other places that will burn there too. Down south. And it won't taste sweet if you put it in your eyes. That's a little bit different. So it's not the same thing exactly.

But MSG is different and I've studied MSG a lot and I particularly think that it's not the same thing exactly, but MSG is different. And I've studied MSG a lot, and I particularly think that it's a useful and good substance if not consumed in excess. Again, I don't like to speak on the medical side because I didn't do any work in there. But I'm pretty convinced that the studies that show it has any negative characteristics when eaten in reasonably low concentrations,

that the evidence is not good. Other people would disagree with me probably. But if you took MSG, the glutamate, glutamate is a brain receptor. It is a toxin in the way you were using the word. But in order to get toxic consequences in your body, you have to inject it or put, I mean, the original studies were actually putting in the brains of monkeys, literally right in the brain. And of course, literally right in the brain. And of course, that really messed things up.

And those studies were, I think, used to sort of make people worry about it, but through the oral cavity, not much. Let's go back, though, and get another helping of hot sauce. God help us. The really interesting question is, why in the world do people love to consume something that hurts? It's a great question. Have you ever seen hot wings on YouTube? Hot wings is a show where it's just like a guy Interviewing a celebrity and they have a range of hot wings. Oh, no, I've never seen that

Oh, and I mean it goes from mild all the way up to like call the paramedics level and To watch people go up and up and up and see how hard I mean, it goes from mild all the way up to, like, call them hermetics level. And to watch people go up and up and up and see how hard I mean, I'm like gushing tears. What the fuck is? Are you someone that puts a lot of hot sauce on things? I do, but I'm not a fanatic. I'm not a fanatic. My actually my son is born fanatic than I am. So I don't know what that shows or anything.

I'm not sure if this is the scientist one or the artist, but if I had to put money on it, I would say the playwright, because pain is beauty. Drama, delicious. Do people do that a lot when you come over for dinner parties? Are they like, well, he is an expert in taste. There's better be good murderer.

I try to avoid that. And people that know me well know that I know no specialists. You're not a food snob about it? I don't think so, no. No, you don't strike me as such. But what about just like if I'm eating a pear, but I have a nozzmia, my friend Micah lost his sense of smell as a baby when he had a fever? It's still gone.

It's still gone. Yeah, which is great if you need to fart around him. Nobody's gonna know. They're going to know. How would they know? But other than that, it's not good for him. But we've often wondered like if he's having an apple or a peach or something, how much of it is he tasting and how much of it is he missing because he just doesn't have a sense of smell. Yeah, well, he's obviously missing all the all the good parts. Yeah, yeah, except for the sugar. Right. Those things all have sugar.

Okay, so there's this oft-sided statistic that 80% of what we think is taste is really just smell. Though many chemosensory scientists are like, no, they're quick to point out that that is flimflam, never been substantiated. But they do agree that some of taste is in fact smell. And my friend's lack of olfaction caused Gary at this point to just shake his head and look down to the ground.

The chemosensory scientist Rufl. And he lost it as baby. I think people, you know, COVID, COVID is awful. It's a disaster. The one person, the one group that's good for was the people that study smell because there was this initial smell loss. It was very characteristic. It was much better than its temperature as a diagnostic for the original COVID.

We had a lot of people interested in that. I think people that lose as adults, or at least later in life, they're able to sort of kind of remember what it was. And so the disturbance is when it happens right away and when it keeps going forever. My son did a really, you know, my scientific study did a really interesting experiment or study where he looked at complaints about Yankee candles. Oh, oh, I love that study. You know, that's my son at this. You're kidding me.

Ah! Is he a smell scientist? No. He's a big data scientist. Oh. But I think he has an interest in chemical sense because he's brought up in it for all his life. That's one of my favorite things that has happened

in the history of humanity. Now, for the full report, you can see the 2021 paper titled, This Candle Has No Smell, Detecting the Effect of COVID Anosmia on Amazon Reviews, using Bayesian Vector Auto Regression by the Department of Political Science at Northeastern University Professor Dr. Nick Vicham, yes, his son.

And he tweeted this belated hat tip to both Terry draw stuff and Kate Petrovah citing the particularly great work Kate Petrovah did. And I'm just tickled by this. I'm so glad that they followed the data trail and sniffed it out. Yeah, well, you know what's kind of too bad about it? No, it's not too bad, it's good. Is the subsequent variance of COVID,

the smell loss is not so prominent. Interesting. But it looks as if whatever it was that differentiates the first COVID, the first year or so, and the subsequent ones that seem maybe not to be so bad or maybe just because most of us have vaccinations that have had it already, the smell loss is still there and taste loss, by the way as well. But I think that the consensus really now is that the smell loss from the original COVID is due not to an effect on smell receptor cells themselves, but to cells around it that swell

up and block the odor from getting to the receptor. So that's so interesting from the mechanistic point of view of smell. I mean, obviously, you know, when you have a cold view, it's just that's for a while. And it's just because it's blocked up. So that may be not so interesting. What about the taste part of it? Taste part is a little puzzling to me exactly. There's demonstrations that some of the receptors involved in COVID are on taste cells as well. And so that may be a receptor effect. The taste was not so prominent in the original publications, but there's good evidence that the taste and smell are both affected. So this freshest health study came out in the journal of laringoscope literally a few

weeks ago and it was titled, Smell and Taste Loss associated with COVID-19 infection. And it found that about 60% of COVID patients experienced a loss of taste and smell, and the severity of the infection correlated to the amount of taste and smell loss. Overall, 70% of people recovered their smell and taste, and on the other side, about 3% just did not. That is if they survived, which over a million Americans have not. So far. But from infections to inquisitions, I asked listeners if they had anything to ask you.

But before we do, let's give away some cash. So one donation is going to the Monal Chemical Census Center, which is the world's only independent, nonprofit scientific institute dedicated to basic research on the senses of taste and smell. Their world-class scientists, including Dr. Beachham, are unlocking some of the most fundamental mysteries of what makes this human. So that donation went to monel.org, and we're making a secondary contribution in the honor of Gary's wife, Fay, who works with the Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which brings

playwriting into classrooms and community settings with these intensive writing residencies, providing literary skills, creativity, communication, and collaboration. And the great news about visiting PhillyYoungPlayWrites.org is that you do not need to know how to spell Philadelphia on the first try, which I did not. Correctly.

So links to those orgs are in the show notes and the donations were made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, we are at the Patreon questions part of the show, and some folks wanted to know about the awkward after-party that's happening in your face. A couple very smart listeners have this question, Zombaut, Lisa, and Niko Prince. Lisa wants to know, what causes there to be such a difference

in phases of taste they want to know about after-taste? What's going on with taste versus after-taste? Yeah. Okay, that's a great question, And actually, COVID really comes to the fore there, because one of the treatments for COVID, of course, was this pexlovin, this drug, the people took, and I took it, because I older person, I was able to get it right away. And I guess it worked, I don't know, but I had the rebound effect, so I'm not so sure. Oh, I had a friend that had the same thing, yeah. The greatest thing. But in any case, the most striking thing to a taste person was the aftertaste.

It was just awful. Oh, no. No. Horrible. And it was really profound. Was it in tablet form or how did it take? Yeah. So that's the interesting part because it was in tablet form.

So that drug was made up of two different drugs, one which was the antiviral, and the other was a drug that I think I was told made it last longer. And what we think is going on is that that drug is somehow going through the blood system to saliva and is being excreted in the mouth on the tongue. We have a colleague here who's looked at the receptor. He even knows what receptor, there's 25 bitters. He knows which receptor it's being responded to. I wanted my chemist friend here to take my saliva and see if they could see the drug and presumably COVID in my saliva. He wouldn't touch it because of course and presumably COVID in my saliva, he wouldn't touch it because of course it gets sick. That was pretty stupid of me to what I do that.

I love where his head was at. I'm not going to lie. So I think the main mechanism for the aftertaste for a lot of things is coming back. Some of it can be regurgitated from the gut, but some of it gets into the blood. And there's medical practice, I don't think it's probably done anymore. Something to do with your heart function, and they would inject saccharin into your veins. And time how long it took for you to taste sweet. Oh, wow. And so that's really shows that it is going through the blood system and presumably celebrate

a system because the taste buds are all covered with blood vessels. If you've cut your tongue, you don't believe like a banshee, but so I think that is the pathway for most after taste. Although some of them are coming also more quickly from the gut and from gas coming up. Well, Kate Haltman had a question, how does chemo affect your taste buds? If you get, say, like, a metallic taste or my friend Simone had a brain tumor in radiation and she said the metallic taste was something that was really difficult for her. Are those chemical? Are they

structural? What are those tastes? Yeah, well again there's a complicated story but I think some of the ones who are the people who are describing the metallic taste probably are doing what just what I suggested that the drug itself is being somehow brought to the saliva and it's causing this taste. The idea of metallic taste has been very controversial over the years. Really? And some people claim it doesn't even exist. Other people say that's crazy.

Well would it be a salt taste because sodium is a metal and potassium? No. Potassium is possible. Potassium is a salt taste because sodium is a metal and potassium? Potassium is possible. Potassium is bitter taste. But I mean, there's some people that tested metallic taste by putting nickels in water and showing that it had a taste. Oh, thank you. One of my colleagues claimed it was almost all smell. I don't know.

I don't know about that. But the other thing about radiation, of course, is that if the radiation is up here around the neck, head and neck radiation often destroys the taste and smell receptor cells. So it's truly a loss of smell. And particularly the taste loss, and this is another reason that I argue that taste is really important. Very, very rare for people to lose their sense of taste. Losing sense of smell is pretty common.

Okay. The sense of taste is very rare, but the one place that happens or it has happened in the past, I think they're getting better at it now, is in head neck radiation. So this is called radio surgery, and we cover it with Dr. Varsana Guvasami, and I'll link that in the show notes. Also, a huge shout out to all the radiology techs out there in the world, also doing important work. And when Dr. Peter mentions getting better or more precise with the radiocirgery,

that's in part due to just better imaging technology, which allows doctors to pinpoint tumors and zap them via Lynax, which is linear particle accelerator methods or the very super heroicic sounding gamma knife. But yes, it may affect adjacent taste receptors and not being able to fully enjoy your boba sounds like not a bad deal in exchange for zipsapping cancer. However, it can be so bad that people literally stop eating, it can be a killer actually because it's so difficult. It is

incredibly difficult to eat food if you don't have a sense of taste. There's some rast studies now that show that this is true as well that rast just stopped eating and they die. Even when the food is there in front of them. Let's talk about craving dirt. This one really, I had this question, I wasn't sure if any listeners wanted to know this, but Becky this ACC grass scientist asked, what is the deal with Pica? Is it just a brain mix up or is it a taste bud mix up too? And I know that you also like to study moths and butterflies who are out for salts in the rainforest a lot.

Is there something that happens to the human brain when we're low on minerals where we like the taste of dirt? So I can say it's extreme. If an animal, even a mammal, but certainly insects as well, our blow or need sodium, they have the ability, most of them, to detect it immediately. They go after it. They consume it. And when they consume it, they stop because they get enough of it So there really is a pathway very very profound pathway in Needing salt and detecting it the human literature is much much more complicated and Story that people always go to which is horrible story which I believe one of the greats in our field the many Richter published this a child who had adrenal insufficiency, profound adrenal insufficiency. And basically in order to keep that at bay,

needs to consume more salt. And no one knew this. His parents took him to the hospital three or four years old, I think he was. And the hospital did exactly what my father-in-law's feeders did, put this child on a very low salt diet. Child died. I don't know. And but before that, the child would climb up on top of the table to get it salt, would chew bacon, uncooked bacon to get it salt. Retrospectively, this was found.

But, you know, they thought that was just wrong. And so they prevented it. So those with adrenal insufficiency, they could retain more fluid, which waters down the blood, and it leads to something called hyponotremia, which is a low level of electrolytes in your blood. And thus, tons of salt cravings.

And I read one study about a 50-year-old woman who experienced a lack of appetite, malaise, unintentional weight loss, and the study continues, the patient also recalled developing an unusually strong craving for pickles. Now, if you're eating for two and you have a human critter growing inside of your body. Why would you want pickles also? Are your adrenal glands on strike because of your new residence? Nope, just 26% of you growing another person have decreased salt sensitivity. And hence, you become a pickle hound in case you are wondering, patrons. KJ, Kelsey Lour, Audrey Pearson, Amelia Frank's pregnant friend, Analyia Eliasin. Now on the topic of development, Patron Shailthacker asked,

how long does it take to develop a taste for something? And fellow Patrons, Marin Profit, first-hand question asker, Madeleine D, Nico Price, Alia Myers, Colle Turnbull, Melanie Metzger, Will Clark, Timon Ashley Flintoff, and Espartfast. Well, what about people who want to acquire a taste

for something? Do you have any tips for someone who maybe doesn't like black coffee or doesn't like vegetables? Any tips on learning to like something? Yeah, my tip would be just what you suggest to yourself, which is to gradually increase it over time. Yeah. I presume it works. I'm drinking black coffee here. Some people can't say how I can stand it. I can't stand the idea of putting milk and sugar into it. Did you know that if you drink your coffee like a baby with lots of milk and sugar, you're not pretty and weak.

You might just be a super-taster. So 25% of you out there are better at tasting. And thus, things like coffee beer and gin and black coffee and kale and Brussels sprouts and grapefruit juice might be gnarly to you. And you might even like salt more than sweets. Why are you so good at tasting? Might be a genetic thing. You might just have more taste buds per square centimeter of tongue or it might be a combination. So if you want to brag about being a super-taster, get yourself some super-tasting strips, and then you can pass them around at a party

and see who gags at the bitterness, and who says, this just says paper. And I love my coffee black. Hey, pass the grapefruit and kale gin cocktail. Now, is a person who tastes less stronger than you for drinking bitter things? No, their taste buds are just like a 2005 Honda Civic, and you sipping a Milky Latte are like a tongue Ferrari.

Now what we did find profoundly, and this is I think maybe the most, the best discovery we ever made here, and the student of mine at the time, that if you can expose people, and we were talking about people that are babies, to a particular flavor very early in life, maybe even in utero, because we can show that at least the smell of parts of flavor get into a mnatic fluid.

So the babies are being exposed to this. Their sensory system is presumably working, at least the last trimester for sure. But the experiment that we did first was to take some others, three groups of others. One group was fed caratuse during prenatal and postnatal life. Second group was caratuse during just prenatal life, no caratuse postnatal life, up to about four or five months,

I think. And third group was the reverse. OK, so some babes got it in and out of the womb, others got it only when in and others got zero carrot juice. The two exposure groups responded very, very positively to the flavor. Oh. And the other one didn't.

So we know that they can get information about foods and flavors. It probably smells, but maybe tastes. But the other one that's almost even more dramatic is in baby formulas, typical formulas, milk formula. But for infants that for some reason or other don't handle those very well, they make hydrolyzed casing formulas. And these are widely used all over the world. When I first got into this business, I was having pediatricians come to me and say, we can't get the babies to take these formulas. I think some of the better

pediatricians who tasted themselves said, and I agreed that they're terrible. And the mothers would say they're terrible. And is there some way you can fix them? And I had no idea. But it led to the idea that maybe we ought to look at when it is there, fed them. And it turns out that this is an incredibly dramatic example of sort of imprinting learning. If you feed these babies, these formulas, which to me and you at the time at least, I think they've gotten better, but at the time, just tasted horrible.

They were bitter, but they also had a really hideous off smell. And what that was was the protein is broken down into amino acids or peptides. But it's also broken down into volatile things that the receptors can detect. Receptors can't really detect protein for the most part. But they can detect the breakdown products. And these breakdown products were horrible. No question.

But if their babies were fed these beginning early in life by three or four months, they were fine, with no expression of negative response. And they continued to be fine. And we have some evidence that they continued to like these flavors into a delvedere. But if you waited till four or five months, oh, they couldn't get them to do it.

Wow. Something's happening around three to six months of age about the sensory system and how it's processing these things. Again, you can make a tealological argument when the baby is born, whatever the mother's eating must be okay because the mother wouldn't be able to have a baby if it didn't work. So the babies are potentially programmed to respond positively to what the mothers were eating,

even if they don't know what the mothers were eating, even if they, you know, know what the mothers were eating, that matter, what they ate, but they respond positively to that situation. And so presumably it's the best predictor of what their baby is going to be eating when it grows older. Oh my gosh, no wonder why my mom, I think, drank a lot of diet soda while I was just praying with me, and there we go. After this interview, I decided to cold turkey it, and I am now proudly six weeks without a diet soda.

So please give me a hearty pat on the back, I've been through a lot. And usually I ask your favorite and least favorite thing about your job, but since this is one about taste, what's the grossest thing you've ever tasted before? Or what's your least favorite thing to eat? Okay, so these formulas, as they were made at the time, when I started this work, were

probably the worst things I ever did. And in fact, we had some people that threw up when we were testing them. Oh, these people. They were really, really. Oh my god. Finally awful. What about, do you have something that you crave a lot, your favorite taste, and do you over-analyze it while you do?

No. I really don't think that I do. I do think that there is times when salt is better than sugar, and other times when sugar is better than salt. What about a favorite thing about your work? Is there something you love about this work? Well, I think the most interesting thing about it is that it is something that everybody thinks they know a lot about.

And most people do, actually. Most people do. But there's a lot of things we don't know. And I think that the idea of trying to express really the importance of what we do. Gary pointed to the full scholarly bookshelf behind him up to a row of leather-bound volumes. And so there's vision, hearing, whatever. Taste and smell is a very small piece of those books. And that's because humans are arguably, and reasonably,

much more interested in vision and hearing. Losing your smell, not so bad, using your taste doesn't happen much. And so I think that we are a very minute piece of the animal world. That book was written by cats, dogs, or moths, or whatever. You'd have a very different, different-sized volumes of each one.

Well, this has been an absolute joy. Thank you so much for letting me ask you so many questions. And if people want to find more about your published work, they can they can go to, obviously obviously the site for Monel, they can go to Research Gate, we can pour through all of your study ideas. Oh, I love it so much. Thank you so much for doing this.

So ask very smart people tasty questions because it's really less embarrassing than you think trust me and usually they love it. There are links to the Monel Center in the show notes. Thank you so much, Gary, for being on. We also have tons of research and links at alliwar.com slash allergies slash gastology. That's linked in the show notes. And for a full menu of all of our episodes by topic over 300 of them, just go to allegis.com. We have them all listed and categorized. Smaller Gis are also available. They're shorter, kid, and classroom-friendly episodes if you need them. Thank you Zee Rodriguez-Thomas, Jared Sleeper, and Mercedes-Mateland for working on those.

Thank you Aaron Talbert for admitting the allergies podcast Facebook group. Emily White of the Wordry makes our professional transcripts. No well-dill worth works as our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director and fact-checker. Also does merch. Additional editing is by Mark David Christensen, and lead editor is Mercedes-Mateland of Mateland Audio. And these are all people that I'd call my taste buds. They're pals. I love them. Nick Thorburn made the theme music, and if you stick around to the end,

I divulge a secret. And this week, I'm gonna give you a little bit of behind the scenes action, because it's so exciting. So when I arrived at Manel for this interview, I was greeted by their lovely communication specialist, Ahmed Barakot, who in the three minutes from greeting me and taking the elevator up to Gary's office, happened to mention that...

One of my friends who is a squid scientist... Wait, what's her name? Sarah M. Melty. He just came from her house. That's so funny. I'm staying in her guest room right now. You're kidding. So thank you to two-thology guest and squid expert Dr. Sarah Mackinolty, who runs SkypeAsscientist.com, which pairs experts with classrooms and book clubs and scout troops and such. For free, SkypeAsscientist.com is amazing. Thank you, Sarah, for being my pal and hosting me for that fun, filled week and filly.

The day after we recorded this, me, Anomet, and Dr. McAttack all ended up playing Wingspan at a friend's house. And while I was there, I went to flush their toilet and I accidentally doused my crotch with their bidet. Absolutely soaking wet, just right in the crotch. And I came downstairs and they said it happens a lot. So, all right, Ahmed won Wingspan. Okay, bye bye.

Hackadermy College, Mamiology, Doseology, Wink's band. Okay, bye bye. That's just a taste.