The perception of taste is a remarkably complex process, starting from that first encounter with the tongue. Taste cells have a variety of sensors that signal the brain when they encounter nutrients or toxins. For some tastes, tiny pores in cell membranes let taste chemicals in.
Such taste receptors aren’t limited to the tongue; they are also found in the gastrointestinal tract, liver, pancreas, fat cells, brain, muscle cells, thyroid and lungs. We don’t generally think of these organs as tasting anything, but they use the receptors to pick up the presence of various molecules and metabolize them, said Diego Bohórquez, a self-described gut-brain neuroscientist at Duke University. For example, when the gut notices sugar in food, it tells the brain to alert other organs to get ready for digestion.
Dr. Breslin likens the system to an airport preparing for a plane landing.
“Think about if a plane landed at an airport terminal that wasn’t ready,” he said. No one would be prepared to guide the plane to the gate, clean it up or unload the luggage.
Taste, he said, gets things ready. It wakes up the stomach, stimulates salivation and sends a little insulin into the blood, which in turn transports sugars into the cells. Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist who won a Nobel Prize for his studies on digestion in 1904, showed that lumps of meat placed directly into a hole in the dog’s stomach would not be digested unless he dusted the dog’s tongue with some dried meat powder to start things off.
Dr. Bohórquez was inspired to hunt for a gut-brain connection two decades ago, when he was in graduate school and a friend who had undergone bariatric surgery asked him why she no longer hated sunny side up eggs. Dr. Bohórquez thought that perhaps the taste receptors in her now-diminished gut were sensing that she wasn’t receiving enough nutrients and began signaling to her brain that, hey, eating runny egg yolks would be a good idea now.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
