If you have more than 30 tastebuds in a space on your tongue that is the size of a hole from a hole punch, you'd be considered a supertaster. The average person has 15 to 30 and those with fewer than 15 would be considered non-tasters. Those non-tasters may need more spice and flavour to make food taste good.
Testing a person's sensitivity to a bitter chemical called 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) is a more definitive way to determine if he or she is a supertaster; non-tasters can't taste PROP, but supertasters can and really don't like its bitter taste!
This increased sensitivity to bitterness and texture shows up in strong opinions about certain foods. Supertasters are less likely to enjoy leafy greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, dark chocolate, dark roast coffee, spicy peppers (capsaicin causes physical pain), creamy or especially sweet desserts.
How to find out if you're a supertaster. Swab blue food colouring on the front of your tongue. This allows you to see the fungiform papillae (they don't stain as well as the rest of the tongue, so they look like lighter circles against a darker blue background).
Dye the tip of the tongue with blue food coloring and count the bumps inside a circle the size of a paper hole punch. People with more than 30 fungiform papillae are supertasters; average tasters have 15 to 30 fungiform papillae.
Punch a standard notebook hole into a clean piece of plastic or wax paper and put it on the front part of your tongue. Then, count the bigger taste buds—called papilla. It's actually pretty tricky to spot, so if you want to be more accurate, be sure to drink some red wine beforehand to stain your tongue.
The supertasters
Having more tastebuds means there are also more pain receptors, and that's why supertasters often can't handle spicy foods and generally avoid anything bitter. As a result, they are often seen as picky eaters.
Supertasters – people who taste flavors more acutely than the rest of the population – tend to have diets that are high in salt, a new study has found.
For supertasters, sugar is sweeter, sodium is saltier, and bitterness is almost intolerable. Coffee, hard liquor, sweet desserts, and green vegetables often make supertasters turn up their nose.
Women are more likely to be supertasters — experiencing tastes more intensely — than men. One study, cited by University of Florida Center for Smell and Taste professor Linda Bartoshuk, estimated that 34 percent of women were supertasters, while only 22 percent of men were.
Non-tasters, on the other hand, often prefer spicy foods and typically add seasoning to enhance the flavour of their food. They have been found to exhibit a higher preference for high-fat, high-energy, and strong-tasting foods; when unmanaged, this can lead to obesity as well as other health problems.
Why 'Supertasters' Can't Get Enough Salt Contrary to what scientists expected, it turns out that people with stronger taste sensations, called "supertasters," love lots of salt. The new findings help explain why some have to work harder than others to cut back their sodium intake.
About 25 percent of the population qualifies as supertasters. Women are more likely to be supertasters than men. On the opposite end of the taste spectrum, non-tasters have fewer taste buds than the average person.
'Super tasters' eat less food overall
Super tasters instead appear to eat less food overall — be it high-fat foods or healthy, bitter vegetables, according to preliminary research. Tepper's study, which awaits publication, found super tasters had an average body-mass index of 23.5.
Supertasters are particularly known for disliking bitter foods like kale and other veggies, but they also seem to be more sensitive to sweet, salty, and umami flavors. They're also more likely to find spicy food painful, since pain receptors surround taste cells on the papillae; more papillae mean more pain receptors.
Supertasters are born with a dominant variant of the TAS2R38 gene, which makes bitterness more severe, but there are also other ways your genetics can affect your sense of taste. For example, people who are born with more taste buds than the average person have a strong sense of taste.
Also, supertasters tend to crave neither fats nor sugars, which probably helps explain why researchers have found that supertasters also tend to be slimmer than people without the sensitivity.
Supertasters tend to eat fewer vegetables because of their bitter taste and they consume more sodium to mask the bitterness.
Girls are more likely to be super tasters than boys. This probably means that all the taste receptors including sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami (savory), will be experienced with much more intensity. So, yes, many super tasters are picky eaters, and fussy about food.
It's no secret that tap water contains contaminants that can flavor (often in a very bad way) the taste of water. If a supertaster has hypersensitive taste, then he/she could be experiencing the flavor or chlorine, for example, at an above average intensity.
But in fact, because of their extreme taste sensitivities, supertasters often find many foods and drinks unpleasant, including alcohol. Supertaster's can be especially resistant to structured, tannic wines. Think Cabernet Sauvignon, or Syrah.
Tasters have the genotype TT and the non-tasters have tt. The ability to taste PTC is a dominant genetic trait, and the test to determine PTC sensitivity is one of the most commonly used genetic tests on humans.
As a professional taster, you know what you like, but it's also important to stay in touch with what consumers are demanding. “In this role, you must regularly talk to consumers about their taste preferences, learn how they cook, and what new foods they are interested in,” says Freiman.
They also seem to have a heightened sensitivity to other types of sensory stimuli—like smell, sound, and texture. Not surprisingly, this heightened sensitivity shapes supertasters' food preferences.
"Taste is a product of our genes and our environment," says Leslie J. Stein, PhD, from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "Our food preferences are determined by multiple factors, including genes, experience, and age."