Is Fat a Newly Discovered Sixth Taste Sense?

I've never been a huge fan of sugar -- while the rest of my family relished in the occasional trip to Haagen Dazs as a kid, I would have gone for a plate of fries any day. The way some people like sugar, I like salt. The one thing my family always agreed on was dairy, high-fat dairy. I never gave it much thought until reading a recent story on Slashfood that reported a group of Australian scientists who now believe that fat may actually be a sixth taste sense.

So far we've got the commonly known sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and the newly much-touted umami, which Slashfood describes as "the ability to detect protein," and is a Japanese word meaning simply 'deliciousness.' It's also associated with meaty and savory stuff and is apparently the reason I feel the need to put parmesan cheese on just about everything.

Arun Gupta explains that certain foods are have a lot of umami-rich compounds like glutamate, inosinate and guanylate and these, especially glutamate, are in basically all the junk food and fast food you can think of — if they weren't before the discovery of umani, they are now.

But now, just as I'm beginning to wrap my head around the concept of umami, some scientists in Australia are claiming that fat itself is a taste we can detect. Here's how the study worked: 33 people were given fatty acids that were mixed with nonfat milk to hide the texture. What they found was that everyone could detect at least some degree of the fatty acids, Slashfood reports, but some of the subjects turned out to be much better at it.

Here's where it gets interesting: Those that were able to detect the most fat were the people who ate the fewest fatty foods and had the lowest body-mass index, according to their results. Dr. Russell Keast, one of the researchers told the Sydney Morning Herald that those who are hypersensitive to the taste have "a mechanism that is telling them to stop eating it," while the reverse would be true for the others, ''They are over-consuming and this is creating an energy imbalance, which is leading to higher BMI or development of overweight or obesity,'' he said.

While the discovery of umami has led to a boon for the junk food world, it seems that if they can figure out the very big 'why' behind what leads certain people to eat too much fat, it may have very big implications for how we treat obesity.

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