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Scientists Identify Sixth Taste: Fat

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: July 24th, 2015, 2:00pm UTC

New submitter shuheng writes with news that a study out of Purdue claims to have identified the sixth distinct taste known to humans: fat. The scientists say it should be called oleogustus which means "fatty taste" in Latin (abstract). Professor Richard Mattes said, Most of the fat we eat is in the form of triglycerides, which are molecules comprised of three fatty acids. Triglycerides often impart appealing textures to foods like creaminess. However, triglycerides are not a taste stimulus. Fatty acids that are cleaved off the triglyceride in the food or during chewing in the mouth stimulate the sensation of fat. The taste component of fat is often described as bitter or sour because it is unpleasant, but new evidence reveals fatty acids evoke a unique sensation satisfying another element of the criteria for what constitutes a basic taste, just like sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Scientists+Identify+Sixth+Taste%3A+Fat%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1JjjIP0"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F07%2F24%2F1637223%2Fscientists-identify-sixth-taste-fat%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/07/24/1637223/scientists-identify-sixth-taste-fat?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/07/24/1637223/scientists-identify-sixth-taste-fat?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/b6-uwV5e_pk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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