A study on gustation of college students

Abstract

To carry out sensory evaluation of food products, it is necessary to use a panel consists of people with normal senses. The substance concentrations used in discrimination tests to screen for such a panel have been extensively studied in previous researches. The concentrations reported include values that are now around 40 years old. This study was carried out in view of the possibility that the changes associated with the diversification of food may have changed the gustation of young people and could change the concentrations used for panel screening. Accordingly, a study was made of college students’ taste discrimination ability using a triangle test with reference to previous research concentrations. The following findings were obtained. 1) Gustatory detection rates were 47.9% for sweet, 98.6% for salty, 47.9% for sour, 49.3% for bitter and 91.8% for umami. Gustatory recognition rates were 39.7% for sweet, 68.5% for salty, 34.2% for sour, 35.6% for bitter and 60.3% for umami. 2) In comparison of previous matching tests and the triangle test used in this study, both produced almost identical results for salty and umami, but results for sweet, sour and bitter in the triangle test were approximately 20-30% lower than that of previous matching tests.