Black Taste Buds

In honor of the inauguration of the first black President, when many banquets and parties will be held (as well as Martin Luther King Day), we present the following information: we know that Blacks have different immune systems from Whites, now it turns out they have different taste buds too.

It turns out that people of African ancestry are more sensitive to bitter tastes, but of course, African Americans are like our new President Obama?they’re “mutts” (the same as most of the rest of us). In New Scientist, Ewen Callaway quotes geneticist Sarah Tishkoff as saying, “If they have more genetic diversity, there’s more variation in their ability to taste.”

But there is great diversity among Blacks in Africa as well. Africans have the greatest genetic diversity in the world, since human life originated there. How did this adversity to bitterness start? Neuroscientist Paul Breslin speculates that compounds that cause bitter tastes can also be damaging to the thyroid. A diet high in iodine, which is common in people who live along ocean coasts, protects them from thyroid damage (which is why we have iodized salt), but our intake of iodine drops off when we move away from the sea.

Scientists are still trying to figure all this out. Callaway quotes anthropologist Theodore Schurr as saying, “We’re surprised at the amount of diversity we see?We’re trying to figure out what this means.”

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk

If YOUR sense of taste has gotten you in trouble and one of your New Year?s resolutions is to lose weight, you need to know that there’s a FREE diet book right here on our website? To read it, click here and scroll down to What I Learned From the Fat Years. Anne Strieber, who used to be a diabetic, created this diet herself, using scientific principles, and lost 100 pounds by following it?and you can too. And if you want to know what the future will bring (besides a slimmer you), subscribe today so you can chat with our resident prophet John Hogue on February 7 (AND subscribers get to chat with Dannion Brinkley on January 31)!

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