At first glance, saliva seems pretty boring, but it’s just a convenient way to moisten your food. But as scientists are beginning to understand, the reality is quite different. Liquids interact with everything we put in our mouths and, despite being 99% water, have a huge impact on the flavor and enjoyment of what we eat and drink.
“It’s a liquid, but it’s not just a liquid,” says Guy Carpenter, an oral biologist at King’s College London.
Scientists have long understood some of the functions of saliva. Saliva protects your teeth, makes it easier to talk, and makes it easier for food to enter. mouthHowever, researchers now believe that saliva is also a mediator and translator, influencing how food moves through the mouth and how it stimulates our senses. Emerging evidence suggests that the interaction between saliva and food may even help shape the foods we want to eat.
There is almost no saltiness, and you can feel the saltiness of the potato chips. The sourness is not very strong, so a squeeze of lemon is very stimulating. Liquid moisture and salivary proteins lubricate each bite of food, while enzymes such as amylase and lipase initiate the digestive process.
This wetting also dissolves taste chemicals or tastants into saliva, allowing them to move to and interact with the taste buds. “We detect the chemical information of food, that is, the flavor and taste,” he said.
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Chen coined the term “food oral treatment” in 2009 to describe the multidisciplinary field that utilizes food. Food Science, Physics of Food Materials, Physiological and Psychological Responses of the Body to FoodAnd so on, a subject he wrote for the 2022 Annual Review of Food Science and Technology. When people eat, they don’t actually taste the food itself, but rather the mixture of food and saliva. Or you can recognize sour molecules. To do so, it must pass through the layer of saliva that covers the tongue.
It’s not taken for granted, says Carpenter, and flat soda tastes sweeter than carbonated soda. I thought it was essentially for distraction.But when Carpenter and his colleagues studied a sort of artificial mouth process in the lab, they discovered that saliva prevented the soda foam from flowing between the tongue and palate. , I believe these backed up bubbles could be physically block sugar from reaching taste receptor on the tongue. Flat soda does not create bubbles that block the sweetness.
