Actually, the claim that water tastes like nothing is not true. In fact, Peter Cameron, a biologist at the University of California, has shown that some insects, such as the vinegar fly, have a gene that makes a protein – PPK28 – that serves only to taste water in taste cells .
In the case of humans, the matter has not been sufficiently investigated, mainly because the vast majority say that water is insipid ; Another thing is that the different varieties of water taste different to us due to their mineral content.
What has been known since the 1920s is that the taste of water depends on what we have eaten before , something that psychologist Linda Bartoshuk systematically demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s, when she published a series of articles on the aftertaste or aftertaste of water. For more than thirty years, the dogma about it was this: water has flavor, but only as an aftertaste after having tried something else. However, at the beginning of this century some scientists began to rethink this statement when they discovered that certain parts of the brain respond specifically to water .
Scientists at the University of Utah have discovered that mammalian taste cells create proteins called aquaporins that serve to transport water across membranes. These aquaporins, which are found in other cell types, could be key to the vital fluid stimulating taste cells .
Sidney Simon, a physiologist at Duke University, in the USA, has found specific cells for water in the gustatory cortex of rats . Since other scientists have not found them, the swords are still held high. The truth is that most neuroscientists think that the mechanism that makes insects taste water does not appear in mammals. Now, if 75% of the planet and living beings is water, it is not unreasonable to think that we should have evolved our sense of taste towards it.
