How well do you taste?

Knowing your taster status could help you assess how much you need to stimulate your taste sensations, and the best foods to choose — or to avoid. It can also give important clues to other health risks.

A Yale University team used a prescription-only drug in their research on super-tasters. But here's a simple test you can do at home, based on their experiments. You will need:

• a thick piece of paper and a hole punch or a paper-reinforcement ring
• a cotton swab
• blue food colouring
• a magnifying glass.

• Punch a tiny hole in the paper and cut the paper around it so that it measures about two centimetres (about one inch) square.
• Alternatively, and this is easier if you have one, use a paper-reinforcement ring — the sort you stick around hole-punched paper to prevent the hole from tearing in a ring binder.
• Dip the cotton swab into the food colouring and swipe it onto the tip of your tongue.
• Place the paper with a hole in it or the reinforcement ring over the coloured area. You will see that your tongue has gone blue but has pink spots — these are the papillae that contain the taste buds, which do not take up the dye in food colouring.
• Use the magnifying glass to count the number of pink spots within the paper hole.
• If you have between 15 and 35 pink spots you are a normal taster — like around half of the population.
• Fewer than 15 spots and you join the one in four people classed as non-tasters, whereas more than 35 and you are in the other quarter of the population who qualify as super-tasters, people who are born with more taste buds than average.
• Who knows, if you are, maybe a new career as a wine-taster — or a chocolate-tester, if you prefer — could open up.