Gustation / Tastants
Tastants
- five sensations, each associated with a critical body function:
| Sweet | nutritious food |
| Sour | H+ |
| Salty | Na+ |
| Bitter | toxins |
| Umami (savory) | nutritious food |
- any tastant (not just bitter compounds) can be associated with symptoms of poisioning, in a phenomenon called conditioned taste aversion
- broadly speaking, conditioned taste aversion occurs when the consumption of a particular food is temporally correlated with nausea and/or vomiting (the food doesn't have to be the cause of the illness)
- conditioned taste aversion is a particular problem for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, due to the highly emetic nature of those drugs