Nutrient sensing: What can we learn from different tastes about the nutrient contents in today’s foods?

Abstract Tastes are often described as having a nutrient-signaling function eliciting expectations about the food and its nutrient content. The objectives of this work was to investigate correlations between taste intensity and nutrient content, to evaluate the impact of competing tastes on these relationships, and to know if the content in certain nutrients could be inferred from a combination of tastes. The Food Taste Database (Martin et al., 2014) and a French Food Composition table (ANSES-Ciqual) were used to obtain a dataset combining sensory and nutritional information for 365 foods. Our results confirm the existence of several taste-nutrient relationships previously suggested by other works. Among direct relationships (dose-response type), we highlighted correlations between sweet taste intensity and mono-disaccharide content, salty taste and sodium content, sour taste and organic acid content, and fat sensation and lipid content. A link between protein content and umami taste intensity was also found. We demonstrated that direct taste-nutrient relationships (dose-response) were not equally modulated by the intensity of competing tastes and that these interactions could partly explain why the association between some nutrients well-known for their taste properties and the intensity of the corresponding tastes is often of less good quality than expected. Finally, limiting our conclusion to the 51 nutrients and 365 foods studied, we demonstrate that the probability of finding nutrients was theoretically higher in fat, salty and sweet food products. However, this general statement needs to be qualified when considering the degree of food processing, in particular for ultra-processed foods.