ON THE TIP OF MY TONGUE

What's that taste? It's on the tip of my tongue.  Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.  Doug Larson, author of Green For Life.   I have often noticed that when I have a cold, flu or stuffy nose, my ability to taste seems dulled. Nothing tastes good to me, or I reach for all the sweet goodies I don't need to eat. Our sense of taste is linked to our sense of smell. Cold, flu, or sinus or throat infections affect our airways, so there's a good chance our sense of smell and taste will be affected. Use of tobacco products can affect our sense of taste. A deficiency of vitamins like B-12 and zinc can dull our taste, as can some medications or cancer treatments. Poor oral health can cause problems, too. A dulled sense of taste is a common symptom. So if you experience a problem with taste, your dentist could be a good place to start. Another reason could be damaged taste buds. But just what is a taste bud? According to information on the website of the National Library of Medicine (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), taste buds are our taste organs. They have many sensory cells that are connected to many nerve fibers. Each taste bud has between 10 and 50 sensory cells that form a capsule shaped like a flower bud or an orange. At the tip there is a pore that works as a fluid-filled funnel. The funnel contains thin, finger-shaped sensory cell extensions called taste hairs. Proteins on the surface bind chemicals to the cells for tasting. The taste buds are in the walls and grooves of the papillae, which are wart-like bumps under the mucous membrane of the tongue. They work to magnify the effect of taste on the tongue. There are three types: Fungiform: As the most common type, there are 200 to 400 bumps spread all over the surface of the tongue. They are found mostly at the tip and edges. Besides detecting taste, they also contain sensory cells for touch and temperature. Circumvallate: These are very large and located at the base of the tongue, where the throat begins. They are round, raised and visible to the naked eye in the shape of a V. They are surrounded by a trench containing many glands that "rinse" taste-producing substances into sensory cells. Foliate: These can be seen with the naked eye on the rear edges of the tongue, where you can see several folds close together. Adults have between 2,000 to 4,000 taste buds in total. The sensory cells in the buds are renewed once a week. But there are also cells that detect taste elsewhere in the oral cavity. That includes the back of the throat, the nasal cavity and the upper part of the esophagus. The final step in perceiving taste is transferring the message to the nervous system. That occurs in the lower section of the brain stem or medulla oblongata. There, taste is combined with smell, which is also important in the enjoyment of food. A recent study by food scientists at Cornell University found that people with a diminished ability to taste food choose sweeter -- and likely higher-calorie -- fare. The more they were sensitive to sweetness, the more sugar they wanted in their foods. It has long been suspected, they say, that there is a connection between diminished taste sensitivity and obesity. In a blind taste test, researchers dulled the taste buds of participants and had them sample foods of varying sweetness. Without realizing it, the participants with their taste receptors blocked began to prefer higher concentrations of sugar. Now, while that's not always the case when someone is overweight, the research showed that those who do have a diminished sense of taste can and probably will begin to seek out more intense stimuli or flavor to attain a satisfactory level of taste sensation. Knowledge is power, as the saying goes. Will this knowledge make us thinner? Who knows. But it could give us something else to blame a weight issue on besides genetics and inactivity.