Taste varies with mood

Biestmilch often raises the taste issue in people. Some find it awesome, others find it awful. Then I always say, biestmilch is not there to taste well, but to make you feel better and healthier.

But what should one think about this? Red Bull for example, one of the most famous brands on the globe, failed in all taste tests which were performed by market research institutes prior to launch. One needs not to comment on this! Taste is probably one the most unreliable candidates to measure. Even in the same person, something can taste excellent one day, and can be disliked on another depending on the moods and the general condition the body finds itself in at certain time.

Yesterday I found a study in Nature News http://www.nature.com/news/ that tries to deal with this issue.

Mood makes food taste different*
by Kerri Smith

Your mood may actually change how your dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavours recede, according to new research. Especially anxiety is such a feeling.
It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower-than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both. Many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry.

To unpick the relationship between the two, Lucy Donaldson and her colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes. The drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, the team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience. The other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes.
Healthy people whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes.

Next the team plans to perform similar tests in depressed people, and in healthy volunteers given another brain chemical called tryptophan. This chemical would lower the healthy subjects’ levels of serotonin, as actually happens in depressed patients.

The work has also generated interest from flavour houses — companies that develop chemicals for the food and drink industry — who are interested, for example, in making foods taste just as sweet with half the amount of sugar.

Published online: 6 December 2006; | doi:10.1038/news061204-5

Implications for medical practice

This link between the chemical balance in your brain and your sense of
taste could one day help doctors to treat depression. There are
currently no on-the-spot tests for deciding which medication will work
best in individual patients with this condition. Researchers hope that
a test based on flavour detection could help doctors to get more
prescriptions right first time.

Testing sensitivity to sweet and sour tastes could potentially help
doctors to pick up on which chemicals are dipping, guiding them when
choosing which drug to rectify the problem.

Currently, doctors rely on physical and emotional symptoms to make a
best guess at an individual’s imbalance, prescribe a drug and wait
about a month to check on any improvement. Good doctors have about a
60-80% success rate in selecting the right drug the first time, says
psychiatrist Jan Melichar, a co-author on the paper. Are there any
decent tests for prescribing drugs for depression? “No. We do a best
guesstimate,” says Melichar. “I’m excited by this finding because in 3,
5 or 7 years we could have a simple taste test.”