“Spice tolerance: Is it nature or nurture? As with most things, it’s a little bit of both. To really understand how spice tolerance works, you have to know the basics of taste perception. ‘What people call taste is actually flavor,’ explains Dr. Bruce Bryant… Flavor has three components: taste, olfactory sense, and trigeminal sense. The various tastes that the body senses are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and possibly fattiness. These work in conjunction with your olfactory senses to produce the sensations people mistake for one-dimensional taste. ‘A fruit is sweet and/or sour, but the inherent fruitiness is your nose smelling all the compounds,’ Bryant says. ‘It’s your nose that allows you to tell the difference between eating an apple and a pear.” w/ photos
