Can You Taste Fat in Your Food?

The difference between skinny people and fat people may have something to do with how we taste food. More specifically, it's believed that slim people are more adept at tasting the amount of fat in their foods, while overweight and obese people may have become desensitized to the taste of fat, according to a study from Australia's Deakin University.

Researcher Russell Keast led the investigation, recently published in the British Journal of Nutrition, on oral sensitivity and its relation to weight. To do this, he tested 50 people on their ability to determine whether liquids contained fat or not using only their taste buds. What he discovered was that the sensitivity to fat for each participant seemed to be linked to their weight, and the higher the BMI, the less acutely they tasted fat. He also noticed that slimmer people consumed less of the products they were given when fat concentrations were high.

Our mouths are already able to detect five different tastes -- sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami (also known as meatiness). Now, Keast believe there's a sixth sense when it comes to our taste buds: The ability to taste fat, which he believes makes all the difference when it comes to the size of our waistlines.

So what leads some people to have more sensitive fat-tasting skills than others? "With fats being easily accessible and commonly consumed in diets today, this suggests that our taste system may become desensitized to the taste of fat over time, leaving some people more susceptible to overeating fatty foods," Keast said in a press release.

But could there be some sort of biological or even psychological reason for the inability to taste fats? "[We are] investigating the genetic versus environmental determinants of fat taste," he told That's Fit. "We do not currently know the answer. We do not know the mechanism at this stage, but we are currently studying it." Still, he admitted, "yes, fat does taste good and is generally appetitive," so wouldn't people who could taste fat then be prone to overeating as well? It seems that the theoretical desensitization to fatty foods is only part of the equation here.

What is sure is that the researchers believe that figuring out the mechanics of our fat tasting abilities could lead to a big impact on the obesity epidemic. "We believe [this] will lead to ways of helping people lower their fat intakes and aid development of new low fat foods and diets," Keast said.

Love the taste of fatty foods? You can cut the fat and keep the flavor with Recipe Rehab tips from Tanya Zuckerbrot.