“Super tasters" are people who experience more intense sensations than others. Dr. Linda Bartoshuk is a University of Florida researcher who figured out how to identify super tasters by using “cross-modality” testing. For example, subjects are asked to compare the sweetness of a soft drink to the intensity of various sounds. Linda attributes her interest in taste research to the experience of seeing her father and brother suffer from cancer, which prevented them from being able to taste or enjoy most foods.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965 my name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:37

Welcome to a bittersweet episode, also a sour and salty episode in which you will get a taste of a new method invented by a psychologist at the University of Florida. I'm Richard Miles. My guest today is Linda Bartoshuk, a researcher who discovered the concept of supertasters. Welcome to the show, Linda.

Linda Bartoshuk: 0:52

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 0:52

So Linda, I was going to offer you some Radio Cade coffee, but I'm suddenly afraid it will not measure up to your standards. So tell me, are people afraid when you come to their house for dinner? Do they order out all of a sudden? Is that a problem?

Linda Bartoshuk: 1:05

No, I never stopped to think about that. People do want to know if I'm a super taster and I have to tell them no, I'm not only not. I'm at the opposite end of the distribution.

Richard Miles: 1:15

So, so any listeners thinking of inviting Linda to dinner, you can relax and she won't show you up. So Linda, we usually start out each show by asking the inventor, entrepreneur or researcher to explain what the what is of what we're talking about. So why don't you give an explanation of what is a supertaster and how did you find out that they even exist?

Linda Bartoshuk: 1:35

Supertasters are people who experience more intense taste sensations than do others. That's the simple original definition of them. Then of course, we started to learn a lot about these people and one of the first things we learned was that they have more taste buds. Not surprising, I suppose more taste buds. They experience more intense taste , but not only do they have more taste buds, because of the anatomy of the tongue and because they're pain fibers in baskets around tastebuds , they also feel more pain in their mouth. And because the structures that hold the taste buds have touched fibers, they feel more touch. And one of the most important components of food is fat. And we perceive fat by touch. It's viscous, thick, creamy, oily. These are all touch sensations.

Richard Miles: 2:22

Do these people self identify? I mean, did you give surveys? How does somebody even know that they're super tasted ? Like most people think the way I taste or look as normal? How do they know that they're not normal?

Linda Bartoshuk: 2:32

That's an extremely good question because it gets to the heart of what was special about this work. How do we know if someone's a supertast