SCIENCE - complete!

We’re looking into how bitter or astringent flavors interact with your saliva. There’s proteins in your spit that likely cause those astringent (dry, rough, constricting) feelings when you eat certain types of chocolate, tea, red wine, persimmons, and many other foods. We want to know what happens to those proteins as you eat those foods, and if we can change how those proteins work. Maybe if we can, we could make the “bad” flavors like bitterness and astringency weaker. Click here to learn about how drinking chocolate milk altered people's saliva!

You may have noticed that when you eat spicy foods, in particular, the sensation isn't the same on every bite. When the sensation is stronger than the last time, we call the sensitization. When it's weaker, we call it desensitization. This creates a problem for us at the SPIT lab, because we're doing a lot of research on spicy, stinging, and biting sensations! So, we ran a test with some spicy and carbonated beverages from the store. When we tested them, people did indeed rate them as weaker over the course of the experience (desensitization). However, we didn't see any of the reverse effect (sensitization). Check out the published article here.