About 25 percent of the population qualifies as supertasters. Women are more likely to be supertasters than men.
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.
Men and Women Sense of Taste Differences
In fact, research from Yale University has found that women actually have more taste buds on their tongues. About 35% of women (and only 15% of men) can call themselves "supertasters," which means they identify flavors such as bitter, sweet, and sour more strongly than others.
The supertaster gene is a dominant gene, meaning only one parent needs to have it for it to be passed to the next generation. Supertasters don't just taste more intensely than other people, they also can detect bitter tastes that others cannot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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 – 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.
The results of our meta-analysis indicate that women generally outperform men in olfactory abilities. What is more, they do so in every aspect of olfaction analyzed in the current study. However, the effect sizes were weak and ranged between g = 0.08 and g = 0.30.
Sex Differences in Memory
Females tend to perform better than males in verbal-based episodic memory tasks, as opposed to spatial-based memory tasks [10]. Females generally access their memories faster than males [11], date them more precisely [12], and use more emotional terms when describing memories [13].
Our results showed that Hispanics and African Americans rated taste sensations higher than non-Hispanic Whites and that these differences were more pronounced in males. Understanding the nature of these differences in taste perception is important, because taste perception may contribute to dietary health risk.
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.
It would seem that super-tasters might have an advantage over everyone else in their ability to taste and enjoy food. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Because they are so sensitive to bitter they tend to be very picky eaters and dislike many foods.
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.
Numerous studies have since indicated that supertasters are particularly averse to bitter things like spinach, grapefruit juice, alcoholic beverages, carbonation in drinks, kale and coffee.
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).
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.
First and foremost, supertasters tend to eat fewer vegetables. Being sensitive to even slightly bitter flavors, supertasters are more likely to dislike the flavor of veggies and avoid them.
Supertasters tend to eat fewer vegetables because of their bitter taste and they consume more sodium to mask the bitterness. In my son's case, he prefers carbs to anything at all, and the less nutritional the better. But, that could be his age as well.
Research suggests 25% of the population are non-tasters, 50% are medium tasters, and 25% are supertasters.
The seven most common flavors in food that are directly detected by the tongue are: sweet, bitter, sour, salty, meaty (umami), cool, and hot.
Adults also preferred sweet more than salty29,34,55 Preference for sweet or salty tastes was generally reduced with advancing age until older adulthood was reached, when a preference for more intense flavours of sweet and salty emerged.
It is also known that gender affects taste preference, detection threshold, and reactivity to taste stimuli [5].