Non Tasters Report

Introduction Do you feel miserable every time you eat cabbage, broccoli, kale or even spinach? Stop being hard on yourself, it just might be your genes playing around with your sense of taste. This statement is based on the discoveries made in 1931 by a chemist named Arthur Fox. He accidentally blew some powered PTC to the air and a colleague standing closed to him tasted bitterness coming from the powder. Fox did not taste anything, so they performed a quick experiment by tasting the crystals. The results were the same (Fox, 1932). This discovery inspired a series of tasting experiment with more people; leading to the conclusion that the difference between tasters and non-tasters was not related to gender, age or race. PTC or Phenylthiocarbamide is a bimodal genetic trait, which means
This step was necessary in order for the test subjects to eliminate any flavor from previous food they might have eaten. Then, each one of the participants was provided with two strip papers; the first one contained the control tasteless paper and the other one was the PTC paper. The use of the control paper was effective in guaranteeing that each individual was reacting truthfully to the PTC effect on them. For the first half of data collected, participants rated each strip of paper from 0 to 10; with 0 indicating tasteless and 10 extremely bitter. The second half of the data came from their rating of Brussel sprouts’ taste using the same scale. An important assumption made during both halves of the survey was that: for a rate of 5 and above on the scale, the individual was considered a taster, below that number subjects were considered non-tasters, and between 9-10 supertasters. Those that found Brussel sprouts extremely bitter or bitter were classified then as tasters and those who did not find it bitter were called