The Reason Toothpaste Makes Orange Juice Taste Bitter

How can brushing your teeth make something as good as orange juice taste so bad?

The tongue is equipped with around 10,000 taste buds and each of those buds has 100 taste receptor cells. The taste buds are designed to detect five different types of taste.

1. Salty
2. Sweet
3. Sour
4. Bitter
5. Umami (pleasant savory taste/meaty)

Taste receptors are designed to match up with specific molecules and ignore all others.

In most toothpastes, there are four main ingredients.

Water, which adds the squishy body to the paste.

Abrasives, to scrape off the plaque from your teeth.

Fluoride, which helps to prevent cavities

…and lastly-brace yourself…detergent! This makes the foamy bubbles.

The compound is Sodium Lauryl Sulfate(SLS). Yes, this is the same compound that is found in your dish washing liquid, shaving cream and soap. If you have ever accidentally gotten dish washing liquid in your mouth or ever had your mouth washed out with soap, you know that SLS has strange effects on your taste buds.

SLS suppresses the “sweet” receptors on the taste buds and destroys the phospholipids on our mouth, which actually inhibits our “bitter” receptors. So, any bitterness that is filtered out can get through to our taste receptors. This, along with the sweet receptors being turned off makes orange juice an unpleasant experience right after brushing our teeth.

The post The Reason Toothpaste Makes Orange Juice Taste Bitter appeared first on Gentle Dental.

Source: http://www.gentledentalgroup.com/2013/07/the-reason-toothpaste-makes-orange-juice-taste-bitter/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-reason-toothpaste-makes-orange-juice-taste-bitter

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