Whenever a plate of food was served to my uncle, he would reach for the salt cellar and liberally sprinkle the food with salt. I always marveled at the ritual – how could he “know” it needed “extra” salt ? And why was he the only one in the family who felt the food needed to be doctored so, to make it palatable.
The standing joke around the table was that he couldn’t taste anything but maybe we were wrong.
Salt overloaders may not be driven by a liking for its taste but also by a need to drown out other tastes.
Research suggests – salt addicts fall into two categories
- supertasters
- non-tasters
The bitter truth about supertasters
Supertasters experience tastes more intensely. In particular they are supersensitive to bitter flavours.
A hunk of cheese is really a blend of dairy flavours from fermented milk along with a range of bitter tastes induced by the ripening process.
Typically salt is added to the cheese, to block these bitter tastes. If you’re a little surprised – check out the ingredients in your cheese. Number 1 is milk and number 2 on the list is salt. Yup, cheese is one of those foods carrying hefty amounts of “hidden” salt.
A supertaster finds low-salt cheese unpleasant not because the salt has disappeared, but because for them, the bitter flavours predominant leaving the cheese harsh.
The neon world of the supertaster
Being a supertaster is like living in a world painted with neon colours, as opposed to the pastel world of the “normal” food consumer.
Supertasting is not restricted to getting more buzz from bitter flavours.
Researchers have identified supertasters for a variety of flavours, for them
- table salt is extra salty,
- sugar is insipidly sweet,
- chilli peppers burn big time and
- carbonated drinks tingle beyond the standard quiver.
For a non-taster the world is grey
There are people who barely notice any taste. Non-tasters can exhibit a salt fetish because they need extra salt to get the level of taste to be equivalent to that of “normal” people.
Taste perception shows huge variablity
Our taste perceptions show just as big a variability as eye, skin and hair colour. So cut salt addicts a little bit of slack at the dinner table.
The salt habit is only an issue if you’re suffering from salt sensitive hypertension.
They are still working on a simple blood test to figure this out (it is coming) but in the meantime, a week or two of dietary experimentation will tell you if you are one of the unlucky few who needs to go cold turkey and eat the turkey WITHOUT salt.
PS. For the record, my uncle who added a least a teaspoon of extra salt onto his food everyday, was never diagnosed with high blood pressure.
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Further reading
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