If taste buds are on the tongue, why is it that I can't taste food when I have a stuffy nose? (i.e. a cold)?

(i.e. A cold) Asked by Sokreteen2K 54 months ago Similar questions: taste buds tongue food stuffy nose cold Food & Drink > Food.

Similar questions: taste buds tongue food stuffy nose cold.

This may answer your question.... Tasting and Smelling Our sense of smell in responsible for about 80% of what we taste. Without our sense of smell, our sense of taste is limited to only five distinct sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and the newly discovered “umami” or savory sensation. All other flavors that we experience come from smell.

This is why, when our nose is blocked, as by a cold, most foods seem bland or tasteless. Our sense of smell becomes stronger when we are hungry. Smell and taste are closely linked.

The taste buds of the tongue identify taste; the nerves in the nose identify smell. Both sensations are communicated to the brain, which integrates the information so that flavors can be recognized and appreciated. Some tastes—such as salty, bitter, sweet, and sour—can be recognized without the sense of smell.

However, more complex flavors (raspberry, for example) require both taste and smell sensations to be recognized. The average human being is able to recognize approximately 10,000 different odors. Our sense of smell is so powerful that when you smell skunk, you are smelling 0.000,000,000,000,071 of an ounce of scent.

Dogs have about 200 million olfactory receptors. That is about 20 times the number of receptors that humans have. A larger portion of the brains of animals and fish are devoted to the sense of smell than that of humans.

Horses can smell water far away in the desert, salmon return across thousands of miles of oceans and rivers, drawn by the odor of the stream where they were hatched years and years before. Sources: library.thinkquest.org/05aug/00386/smell... .

Because flavor is mostly smell Oh, man, I'm writing a book on this right now. This question is so me it's not even fair. Most of your sense of "flavor" is really the sense of smell.

Your actual taste buds still work: you can tell that an apple is sweet, that salt is salty, that meat is meaty. But those are really coarse distinctions. The really fine distinctions are in your nose, which has far more kinds of sensors.

And if your nose is stuffy, the relevant molecules can't reach the sensors. The classic way to show this is with a slice of apple and a slice of onion. Close your eyes, pinch your nose, and taste each.

You can't tell that the onion is onion-y, and they both taste slightly sweet. Open your nose, though, and POOF the onion comes in at you, and the apple tastes like apple. (The experiment doesn't work perfectly because some things, especially the onion, actually get into your nose up the back of your throat.) Some people do the experiment with apple and potato, or with red (cherry and strawberry) Jelly Belly jelly beans.

(Not the cinnamon ones; they excite yet a third sense, "irritation", which you can sense even with your nose blocked. ) I asked the researchers at the Monell Chemical Sciences Center in Philadelphia why everything seemed to be in your mouth.Dr. Monica Pelchat (I love dropping names) compared it to vision. When you see something, it doesn't appear to be in your eye, it appears to be out there.

Your brain sense the food as where the food is, not where the sense organs are. Sources: The brilliant and deeply underpaid scientists at Monell .

Taste buds can only "taste" something that is salty, sweet, sour and/or bitter... A big part of taste is affected by our sense of smell. For example, some people will pinch their noses when eating or drinking something that they don't particularly care for. That helps to dull the total flavor because our brains can't combine the smell with the sweet/salty/sour/bitter our tongue senses from the food.

When we have a cold and a stuffy nose, at least half of our ability to "taste" is missing in action. Overall, the four tastes our tongues sense are even local to certain groups of taste buds (i.e. Something sweet is stronger on one part of the tongue than the rest)..

Smell plays a major role in taste. Smell is probably the most important part of taste. You can experiment on your own with this.

Eat something while smelling something totally different and see how that changes the way you perceive the taste. The two go essentially hand in hand. If you have a stuffy nose, your sense of smell is decreased which leads to decreased sense of taste.

The taste buds in your mouth tell you if something is sweet, salty, bitter, or sour (there are quite possibly other types of receptors). Think of it as the outlines in a coloring book. Smell fills in the color.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste .

Your nose is responsible for part of the tasting when you eat, some of teh food molecules, travel to the back of your throat were they are picked up by the nerve endings in your nose, and this contributes to the taste of the food. When you have a stuffy nose, the nerve endings in the nose are covered and thus teh taste is minimised. A good example of how the nose helps us to taste, is the reason behind, why cheese tastes better when it is grated.In fact, when cheese is grated, its surface area is maximised, and thus more molecules are free to escape and be detected by the nose...making it taste better.

Sources: tastescience.com/abouttaste2.html .

Does the heat or lack there of turn off certain taste buds?" "I have a really bad stuffy nose and I can't stop sneezing. What can I take for it? " "Food..." "Have a persistent cough.

Taking vitamin c cough drops, roof of my mouth very raw and tongue/taste buds seems swol" "What does cat food taste like? " "WOULD YOU BUY FOOD.

My pekignese has a stuffy nose whats best to give her.

I have a really bad stuffy nose and I can't stop sneezing. What can I take for it?

Have a persistent cough. Taking vitamin c cough drops, roof of my mouth very raw and tongue/taste buds seems swol.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.