Fat Could Be the Sixth Basic Taste

Four basic tastes were thought to exist (sweet, sour, salty and bitter) and in 2002, receptors were confirmed for “umami” (first proposed by a Japanese chemist in 1908 and described as meatiness or savoriness) which was accepted as a fifth. But could fat be a sixth taste? Studies are increasingly likely to say that it is. “The take-home message is that we now know there is a fat-taste component, and we cannot dismiss it. It exists in humans, but how it influences behavior and fat intake, we still don’t know,” said Nada Abumrad, one of the authors of a new study and the Atkins Professor of Medicine and Obesity Research at Washington University in St. Louis. Journal of Lipid Research, March, 2012