• Hot chocolate tastes better in an orange cup

    By Tia Ghose, LiveScience

    Before snuggling up to a warm fire with a hot cup of cocoa this winter, you may want to take a second look at the cup holding the chocolate. The warm beverage may taste more flavorful in an orange cup or cream-colored cup, a new study suggests.

    The results add to past work showing how factors that have nothing to do with food preparation can affect the taste of food.

    "The color of the container where food and drink are served can enhance some attributes like taste and aroma," said study co-author Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, a researcher at the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, in a statement.

    In general, how people perceive taste is influenced by many factors unrelated to the actual food. Past studies have shown that the color of the plate, the price on a bottle of wine, and the verbal description of food can affect people's enjoyment of dishes and drinks alike. 

    To see how hot chocolate enjoyment was affected by cup color, Piqueras-Fiszman and her colleagues asked 57 participants to rate samples of the same delicious beverage in four colors of plastic cup: white, cream, orange and red. (All cups were white on the inside.)

    The participants said the drink was more flavorful when served in a cream- or orange-colored cup. Interestingly, participants rated the orange- and cream-colored cups of cocoa tastier despite the fact that participants didn't say there were any significant differences in sweetness or aroma between the colored cups.

    The new results may help restaurant owners and Martha Stewart types serve cocoa in a cup that maximizes the enjoyment of the hot drink.

    The findings were published in the October issue of the Journal of Sensory Studies.

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  • 'Supertasters' may also be better than you at fighting off infections

    By Trevor Stokes, MyHealthNewsDaily 

    People who find Brussels sprouts unbearably bitter may also find a health upside to their keen sense of taste. The ability to taste such bitterness may be linked with an increased capacity to fight bacterial respiratory infections.

    Bitter taste receptors were traditionally thought to be located only on the tongue; however, new research shows these receptors are also found in the linings of the nasal and sinus cavities. Additionally, the study showed these receptors are involved in activating the immune system's protection against common bacterial infections.

    The receptors work as "an early detection system," which warns the immune system about bacterial invaders and activates the body's defenses, said study author Dr. Noam Cohen, director of rhinology research at the University of Pennsylvania.

    But not everyone benefits from these receptors: nearly a third of people in Europe and the U.S. do not have the specific version of the bitter taste-receptor gene, called TAS2R38, that activates an immune response.

    The results could lead to new ways to treat the nearly 1 in 10 people in the U.S. who have chronic rinosinusitis, a condition of constantly inflamed and swollen sinuses, the researchers said.

    The findings appeared today (Oct. 8) in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

    In their study, researchers grew cells in lab dishes, forming structures that resembled the multilayered lining of the nose and sinus, to test out how bitter receptors affect the initial stages of the infection process. Results showed that chemicals produced by common bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa activated the TAS2R38 bitter receptor, and caused the hair-like cilia that line the sinuses to start sweeping away microbial intruders. The activation also resulted in the release into the sinuses of nitric oxide, which kills bacteria.

    The researchers noted that they looked at just one of 25 bitter receptors. It remains unclear if the other receptors affect the immune system, or how many bacteria may tip off the warning system.

    In the past, researchers have used the chemical phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) to identify people with functional bitter receptors. Those who can taste PTC are classified as supertasters, having functioning bitter receptors, while those who can't taste the chemical are non-tasters, lacking these receptors.

    People who would say that Brussels sprouts taste bitter are likely to be supertasters, having responsive bitter receptors, the researchers said.

    The new findings also suggest that supertasters may have a higher risk of chronic sinusitis, and that non-tasters have more upper respiratory infections. Upon testing nasal tissue samples from patients who had undergone surgery related to sinus problems, the researchers found that none of the 11 supertasters had Pseudomonas bacteria in their tissues, whereas seven out of 20 non-tasters had infections.

    "If you are a supertaster, it’s going to be very rare that you're going to get… sinusitis," Cohen said. However, the bitter-tasting ability doesn’t protect against all infections, he added.

    This research could lead to a nearly cost-free test that could distinguish supertasters from the more susceptible non-tasters, said Thomas Finger, co-director of the Rocky Mountain Taste & Smell Center, who was uninvolved in the research. 

    The new findings also suggest that certain bitter compounds could be used to activate the immune system. For example, a bitter nasal spray could be used to ward off an infection in the early stages, Finger said. However, such potential therapies are a long way off, he said.

    Next, the researchers will look at whether genetics plays a role in people's responses to sinusitis treatments, Cohen said.

    Pass it on: An ability to bitter foods may be linked with an increased immune system response to certain bacteria.

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  • Wine goes with cheese because of something called 'mouthfeel'

    Wine goes with cheese. Meat sandwiches go with a pickle. Green tea goes with Asian food. Sushi goes with pickled ginger. Oil goes with vinegar. Soda goes with chips. Many of the world's most beloved food combinations pair an astringent food, which causes the mouth to pucker up, with a fatty food, which makes the mouth feel slippery.

    But why? "The kernel of this idea of pairing astringents with fats is found in gastronomies all over the planet, but it's never been clear how or why these pairings work," said Paul Breslin, an experimental psychologist at RutgersUniversity and Monell Chemical Senses Center who studies taste perception.

    In a new paper published online Oct. 8 in the journal Cell, Breslin and colleagues propose a theory of food pairings that explains for the first time how astringent and fatty foods oppose one another to create a balanced "mouthfeel."

    Because fat is oily, eating it lubricates the mouth, making it feel slick or even slimy, Breslin said. Meanwhile, astringents, chemical compounds such as the tannins in wine and green tea, make the mouth feel dry and rough. They do this by chemically binding with lubricant proteins present in saliva, causing the proteins to clump together and solidify, and leaving the surface of the tongue and gums without their usual coating of lubrication. [Tip of the Tongue: The 7 (Other) Flavors Humans May Taste]

    We don't like slimy, but we don't like puckered up, either. "We want our mouth to be lubricated but not overly lubricated," Breslin told LiveScience. "In our study, we show that astringents reduce the lubricants in the mouth during a fatty meal and return balance."

    Although this food-pairing idea had been proposed before, it was a mystery how that balance might actually be struck, because wine, green tea and the other widely consumed astringents are only mildly astringent. No one knew how they managed to cut the fat as well as they do. [Will People Really Be Forced to Stop Eating Meat?]

    The researchers discovered that astringents have a stronger effect each time the mouth is exposed to them. Every time study participants took a sip of green tea, for example, they perceived it to be more astringent than during the previous sip, indicating that the astringents were reacting more strongly with the lubricating proteins in their mouths upon each exposure. This growth in astringency is why, even though tea and wine have only a weak effect at first, sipping them throughout a fatty meal eventually enables the astringents to counterbalance the strong lubricating effect of the fat.

    A second experiment supported this conclusion. When the study participants alternated their sips of tea with bites of salami, the perceived slipperiness of their mouths (caused by the fatty salami) gradually decreased as they took more sips. When they sipped water, by contrast, the slimy feeling in their mouths continued to build.

    The importance of repeated exposure explains why we don't tend to gulp down an entire glass of wine then eat our entire steak. Nor do we polish off our whole pickle before setting into our sandwich. The new research justifies the widespread use of astringent foods as "palate cleansers" that people sample throughout a meal.

    This general principle of yin and yang food pairings goes part of the way in explaining gastronomy, but what about the specifics? Why do we pair sushi with pickled ginger rather than with a soda, despite the fact that they're both astringents? And why does cheese seem to taste better with red wine than with green tea?  As Breslin put it, "Is there something to the idea that a particular astringent and a particular fatty food go together?"

    The famous pairings could simply be cultural accidents — a matter of which foods were available in which regions. But Breslin said it's also possible that cultures have unknowingly worked out the most balanced pairings based on the chemical properties of the foods.

    "Different kinds of astringents give rise to different rates of growth of astringency. As you repeatedly sample them, one will have a steep rise and the other a shallow rise," he said. "It could be that there's a particular mixing of an astringent and a fatty food that determines how strong the astringent is going to be and how quickly it gets there. This is a mystery of gastronomy."

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  • Why do so many of us hate black licorice? A few theories

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    By Meghan Holohan

    When the American Licorice Company announced on Wednesday it was voluntarily recalling its black licorice Red Vines because of high levels of lead, about half the country paused and thought, “Wait, people eat black licorice?” The other half (presumably mostly curmudgeonly grandfathers and uncles) became disappointed to learn it would be harder than ever to find the sweet treat.

    Licorice, which comes from the root of Glycyrrhiza glabra plant, flavors what we call black licorice (which is redundant), liqueurs such as Jagermeister, and medicines such as NyQuil, which relies on the pungent flavor to mask the medicinal taste. Even though it commonly appears in products, licorice seems polarizing.

    “People either love it or hate it and, as far as I can tell, it’s not a learned like or dislike,” says Marcia Pelchat, an associate member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a nonprofit center, which researches taste and smell.  

    “I don’t know a specific gene that is associated with liking and disliking licorice. [But] it does seem to be something that people are born with.”

    While experts haven’t conducted much research on licorice preference, Pelchat — who dislikes the flavor but is married to a lover of licorice — shares a few theories as to why licorice divides us between the lovers and the haters.

    When we eat, we use both the sense of taste and smell to detect flavor. Taste includes sweet, bitter, salty and sour. When we bite into a piece of licorice, we taste glycyrrhizin, a natural sweetener in licorice root, which can taste, to some, like saccharin, the artificial sweetener found in Sweet 'n' Low. With licorice, this sickly sweet lingers, causing some to wrinkle their noses in displeasure.

    “What this suggests to me is maybe liking and disliking licorice is related to liking and disliking saccharin,” Pelchat says.

    Licorice also contains anethole, which is aromatic and plays on our olfactory sense. Anethole also occurs in anise and fennel, both of which licorice haters might find more tolerable. (Anise and fennel flavor absinthe, for anyone who thought it, too, might be a licorice liqueur.)

    “[Taste] seems to be built-in; it doesn’t require any learning,” she explains, adding that people can train themselves to like spicy foods, or even cilantro. “However, responses to smells seem to be learned.”

    While this means people might dislike licorice because it reminds them of the smell of NyQuil, or another malodorous memory, Pelchat suspects that it’s really the taste, not the smell that turns people off.

    “There are lots and lots of genes involved in the perception of [flavor] and of aroma and we probably all have relatively unique sensory worlds. So that’s just something to keep in mind in talking about individual differences in preference.”

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  • Who hates cilantro? Study aims to find out

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    By Cari Nierenberg

    To a very vocal online contingent, cilantro is the very worst.

    On "I Hate Cilantro" websites and Facebook pages they gripe that the herb tastes like soap, mold, or dirt. Cilantro haters not only despise its flavor, they also detest its smell. Stories in publications as serious as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and, yes, even msnbc.com have even covered the sharp divide in taste preferences when it comes to this particular herb.  And when a study of identical twins found an aversion to cilantro stems from a genetic glitch, the herb's bashers finally had a good reason why they found the leaves of the Coriander plant so offensive.

    But who are these people in the anti-cilantro community? No one had a clue -- until now.

    There has been no attempt to quantify which people hate the herb until two nutrition experts from the University of Toronto took a stab at it. They recently published their findings in the journal Flavour. In the study, they surveyed nearly 1,400 young adults ages 20 to 29 in Canada. 

    Volunteers completed a 63-item preference checklist in which they rated each food on a 9-point scale from 1 (dislike extremely) to 9 (like extremely). They could also select "never tried" or "would not try."

    Researchers found an aversion to cilantro ranged from a low of 3 percent to a high of 21 percent among six different ethnic groups.

    Young Canadians with East Asian roots, which included those of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese descent, had the highest prevalence of people who disliked the herb at 21 percent. Caucasians were second at 17 percent, and people of African descent were third at 14 percent. 

    Among the herb's fans, the group with the fewest number of people who disliked cilantro were those of Middle Eastern background at 3 percent, followed by those of Hispanic and South Asian ancestry at 4 percent and 7 percent respectively.

    Exposure to the herb at an earlier age and with greater frequency in Mexican, Asian, and Indian cooking likely helps shape a positive flavor preference. Another possibility is that genetic differences among the cultural groups might influence someone's taste perception of the herb.  

    Although researchers have yet to evaluate all 63 items on the food-preference checklist, study author Ahmed El-Sohemy, PhD, is sure of one thing: "Cilantro is perhaps the most polarizing with large numbers either loving it or hating it." The paper calls this the "unusual divisive nature of cilantro."

    "People who dislike cilantro extremely describe it very, very differently from those who love it," explains El-Sohemy, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Toronto. The reason? "These individuals live in very different sensory worlds and are not perceiving the same thing," he says.

    As for El-Sohemy's opinion of cilantro, count him among the lovers. "I remember loving the taste as a child," he says. "I distinctly remember my mother's Egyptian cooking, which used cilantro frequently."

    The study is a first step in determining how widespread a dislike for cilantro is, at least in a sample of young Canadians. It's unclear whether older Canadians feel similarly or how much the herb is despised by people in other countries.

    Eventually, the Toronto scientists hope to pinpoint the genetic basis for why cilantro is an herb some people love to hate.

    Chef Ina Garten, aka "Barefoot Contessa," talks about her decision to become a chef after a career at the White House, her favorite fall meal and which pesky ingredient she despises.

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  • Why room-temperature coffee tastes so bad

    By Natalie Wolchover
    LifesLittleMysteries

    "My coffee has become tepid." To a coffee drinker, is there any realization more sigh-inducing?

    It is strange, when you think about it, that a piping hot cup o' joe can be so delicious, and that iced coffee can be very nice, too, but that between those temperature extremes there lies an unpleasant no-man's-land of bitterness. Room-temperature coffee is regularly tolerated by us all — ok, us "addicts" — because we can't function without the caffeine. But why does it taste so bad?

    Biologists have only recently started getting a handle on how and why temperature affects the taste of food and beverages, and no research has been conducted specifically regarding coffee. But there are three main theories; the first holds that lukewarm coffee tastes bad because cavemen  didn't have refrigerators. Allow us to explain.

    Karel Talavera of the Laboratory of Ion Channel Research in Cuba has studied the way that taste receptors inside our taste buds respond to molecules at different temperatures. He and his colleagues have found that certain taste receptors are most sensitive to food molecules that are in the 20 to 35 degree Celsius (68 to 95 degree Fahrenheit) range — in other words, molecules that are at or just above room temperature. The taste receptors in question don't always register molecules that are much hotter or colder than this range, and thus we don't taste them.

    "This is still an obscure phenomenon that we cannot explain, but that could fit to the fact that taste perception does decrease above a certain temperature," Talavera told Life's Little Mysteries. In short, hot coffee (around 170 degrees F) may seem less bitter than room-temperature coffee (73 degree F) because our bitter taste receptors aren't as sensitive to bitter molecules in the coffee when those molecules are hot. [ Coffee's Mysterious Benefits Mount ]

    What does that have to do with cavemen? According to Talavera, biological processes such as our sensory systems tend to be designed by evolution to perform most effectively at the temperatures we are typically exposed to. "Our ancestors did not eat food at extreme temperatures," he said. Their meals consisted of mostly foraged berries and freshly hunted meat in the 20 to 37 degree Celsius range — almost exactly the window in which our taste buds are most sensitive. Because piping hot or ice-cold coffee falls outside this realm of maximum taste, our taste buds don't sense the drink's true bitterness.

    However, the temperature-dependence effect observed by Talavera and colleagues is more pronounced for sweet taste receptors than bitter ones, and so it may not be the only factor at work. Some researchers think tepid coffee's bitterness has more to do with smell than taste. "Odors influence coffee flavor very strongly, and it is easy to go from sublime to horrible," Paul Breslin, an experimental psychologist who studies taste perception at Rutgers University, wrote in an email. Even very bitter coffee, such as espresso, tastes great when hot because of its pleasant aroma, he pointed out.

    And according to Barry Green, a taste perception scientist at Yale University, hot coffee releases more aromatic compounds than room-temperature coffee, so it has a greater chance of impacting taste. He also said that milk, coffee's frequent companion, tastes worse at room temperature, and a combination of these factors probably explains the nearly universal opinion that lukewarm java leaves something to be desired. 

    One last theory holds that hot coffee's heat could be distracting us from its strong flavor. As Breslin put it, "It is possible that an attentional mechanism is at work. You do not think about how bitter or sweet [coffee] is when it is hot or cold. Hot coffee may force you to think about temperature, which is a bit of a distraction from its bitterness."

    None of the researchers profess to fully understand coffee's temperature-dependent deliciousness, but it seems to be at least slightly a matter of opinion. In a small survey of 42 people by Life's Little Mysteries, 79 percent said they like hot coffee best, while 19 percent prefer iced coffee. Though one survey respondent said she would "rather eat glass" than drink room-temperature coffee, another person actually reported liking lukewarm coffee best of all.

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  • Your cilantro love -- or hate -- may be genetic

    Whether you love or loathe cilantro, guacamole wouldn't be the same without it.

    By Melissa Dahl, NBC News

    Cilantro: delightful element of delicious tacos and pico de gallo -- or horrid herb of death that smacks of soap? Like Facebook's Timeline and every episode of "Glee" ever, there's an undeniable "love it or hate it" quality about cilantro.

    Actually, the haters are backed by some respected culinary tastemakers: Ina Garten (aka Barefoot Contessa) and Top Chef Fabio Viviani are the latest celebrity chefs to side with cilantrophobes, as they recently told our TODAY.com team. And Julia Child confessed to Larry King in a 2002 interview that she if she ever sees the herb in something she'd ordered, she would pick it out and "throw it on the floor." Harsh. 

    On Team Cilantro: behavioral neuroscientist Charles J. Wysocki, of the Morell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Wysocki has been attempting to pinpoint the polarizing nature of coriander leaves -- better known, of course, as cilantro. Wysocki has studied preferences for cilantro in twins, both fraternal and identical. In identical twins, if one twin hates the smell of cilantro, the other is more likely to hate it; the flip side is true, too -- if an identical twin loves the smell, the other will likely love it, too.

    "That does not hold for fraternal twins," explains Wysocki, adding that these findings "suggest very strongly that whatever it is that people underlies the preference is genetically determined." 

    Cilantro: Love it or loathe it?

    But what is it about cilantro that some people find so intensely offensive? To begin to find out, Wysocki has used gas chromoatography, a contraption that uses heat to separates a complex mixture of molecules -- like cilantro -- piece by piece, allowing researchers to identify each individual compound, by using both the instrument and their own noses. The GC, as it's called, warms the cilantro, and as it heats up, that "soapy" smell is released. About 10 minutes later, the pleasantly herbaceous cilantro smell is emitted -- but the typical cilantro hater still can't smell it. 

    "What we think might be happening is the person who hates cilantro is, in fact, detecting the soapy odor. But what they seem to be missing is the nice, aromatic, green component," says Wysocki, who thinks the smell of cilantro is quite pleasant. "It’s possible that they have a mutated or even an absent receptor gene for the receptor protein that would interact with the very pleasant smelling compound."

    Hear that, cilantro haters? You're mutants, says a scientist. (We kid, we kid.)

    As the theory goes -- and Wysocki is quick to remind that this is still speculative -- cilantrophobes may not be able to pick up the scent of a compound called dodecenal, which gives the cilantro that lovely fresh scent we cilantrophiles know so well. It's even possible, Wysocki allows, that those soap-smellers may have something called specific anosmia, which is the lack of perception of an odor for a specific compound, when the smell is otherwise intact.

    Readers, what about you? Whether you love cilantro or can't stand it, make your case in the comments. If you hate it -- is it because of the soapy smell/taste, or something else? 

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  • Eating something gross makes you more judgmental

    By Cari Nierenberg

    Having a bad taste in your mouth from food or drink can lead you to making stronger and harsher judgments of other people and their behaviors, suggests new research.

    In the study, after participants tasted something they considered physically disgusting, they were more likely to think something was morally disgusting. Interestingly, this effect was significantly stronger in people who were politically conservative than in those with liberal views.

    The experiment, published in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, was the first to examine how taste perception affects moral judgments. It recruited 57 college students (41 women, 16 men) and asked them to drink a bitter-tasting liquid (Swedish bitters, an herbal remedy for digestion), a sweet beverage (berry punch) or a neutral fluid (water). Students drank one swift shot of the drink before doing a moral judgment task and had a second shot halfway through it so the liquid's taste lingered in their mouths.

    During the task, participants were asked for their impressions of six morally murky behaviors, from a man eating his dead dog (!) to second cousins sleeping together to a lawyer trawling for potential clients in a hospital. They rated their opinions on a scale from 0 meaning "not at all morally wrong" to 100 for "extremely morally wrong."

    Scientists found that volunteers who drank the disgusting, bitter beverage also expressed the most disapproval of the moral situations. Their average rating for the six scenarios was 78 (out of 100) compared to 62 in those who downed water and 60 in folks who threw back sweet shots.

    "I was a bit surprised that the sweet beverage did not elicit significantly kinder judgments when compared to the water condition [which was the control]," says Kendall Eskine, a doctoral candidate in the psychology department of Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, NY, and the lead author of this study. "I was hoping that sweeter beverages would make people sweeter," he says, but it did not perhaps because the berry punch was more tart than sweet, something Eskine plans to change in follow-up research.

    Even so, Eskine says that our sensory experiences, such as taste, play a very important role in our cognitive lives, even in areas like morality, which have typically been considered "reason-based" fields. These bodily experiences, he suspects, might be biasing people's thoughts and judgments.

    Although physical disgust appeared to influence a person's moral disgust, scientists don't yet know how long the effect lasts. "That's one of our top questions going forward," Eskine says.

    Researchers also asked study participants about their political leanings. They found that conservatives were significantly harsher in their moral decision-making after the bitter drink than those given the sweet or control beverage. Other studies have suggested that people with conservative views are more sensitive to disgust than liberals.

    One of the moral foundations conservatives rely on is "purity," explains Eskine. If conservatives care more about purity than liberals, then "inducing disgust [in conservatives] will activate their purity norms, which in turn can influence their perception of moral events," he says.

    What's unclear, says Eskine, is whether liberals have a similar purity foundation but in different domains, such as the purity of their food.

    What do you think of this research, readers? (Before answering that -- maybe take a gulp of some sweet soda or juice.)

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