We say a food suits our taste, or that something is delicious, as though we were describing the food. But few domains are as relative as taste. Sight and hearing have reasonably objective measures; taste is the most variable of the five senses — and understanding why changes how you read your own cravings. This article covers taste and the eight constitutions.
In Summary
- The same decoction produces sharply different reports. Yukmijihwangtang mixes sweet, sour, bitter and salty — and patients differ on which taste dominates.
- That suggests taste is operating selectively according to what a person’s body currently needs or currently has in excess.
- A bitter mouth during illness is the everyday version: taste responds more sensitively to internal state than to the external environment.
- Genetic sensitivity differs from birth. Variation in the TAS2R38 gene sorts people into supertasters, ordinary tasters and non-tasters.
- Hormones govern taste too. Higher leptin lowers sweet sensitivity; taste changes in early pregnancy show how dependent taste is on internal signalling.
- Taste exists to find what the body needs and to avoid what is harmful — bitterness generally signalled poison, sourness spoilage.
- But craving is not the same as needing. What ECM recommends for a constitution sometimes agrees with appetite and frequently conflicts with it.
- Beware addicted taste: someone with weak digestion instinctively fixates on quick-energy sweets, which further weakens the stomach.
- Research has reported that gut microbes can manipulate brain signalling to make a host crave particular foods for the microbes’ own survival.
The Same Medicine, Different Tastes
Taste is obviously subjective in ordinary life, but the place I have felt its variability most is in how differently patients report the same herbal formula.
Any Korean medical student knows Yukmijihwangtang (육미지황탕 六味地黃湯), built from six herbs including prepared rehmannia, cornus and Chinese yam. The formula carries sweet, sour, bitter and salty in a curious mixture.
What is interesting is that patients differ on which taste predominates. One finds it sweet; another finds it bitter. In my reading, this shows taste operating selectively according to the person’s bodily state — what they currently require, or what they already have in excess.
The everyday version is familiar: a bitter mouth when unwell, which KTM calls gugo (구고 口苦). Taste responds far more sensitively to the internal state of the body than to the external environment.
And sensitivity differs from birth. Anyone raising children notices that preferences and thresholds are innately different — one child detects the faintest bitterness in a vegetable and refuses it, which is not a matter of temperament but of receptors.
What the Science Says
The relativity of taste is not a mood. It is the result of biological mechanism.
Genetics
Variation in the TAS2R38 gene sorts people into supertasters, ordinary tasters and non-tasters. To a supertaster, the bitterness of certain vegetables registers many times more strongly than it does to others — a survival strategy our ancestors developed to avoid plants containing toxins, written into the genome.
Hormones
Our sense of taste is governed by hormones. When leptin, the appetite-suppressing hormone, rises, sensitivity to sweetness falls and food tastes less appealing. Altered taste in early pregnancy, driven by hormonal change, is another demonstration of how subordinate taste is to internal signals.
What Taste Is For
Why would the body maintain such an elaborate sensory system?
To find what it needs. Craving sweetness when energy is short, or salt when electrolytes are needed, is a homeostatic signal.
To avoid what is harmful. In nature bitterness generally means poison and sourness means spoilage. Taste is the body’s front line of defence.
So Is Everything You Crave Good for You?
Here is the point that matters for anyone following a constitutional diet.
What ECM recommends for a given constitution sometimes agrees with actual appetite and frequently conflicts with it. In the short term the food your palate wants may well be right. Over the long term it can deepen a constitutional imbalance.
The case to watch is addicted taste. Someone with weak digestion instinctively fixates on sweet desserts, which deliver energy quickly. But that is a pathological craving that leaves the spleen and stomach more sluggish still — the appetite is reporting a shortcut, not a need.
Recent research has reported that gut microbes can manipulate brain signalling to make their host crave particular foods for the microbes’ own survival. Which is to say: the taste you want may not be working for your health at all.
None of this means appetite should be ignored. It means appetite is evidence to interpret rather than an instruction to follow.
What This Asks of a Clinician
Understanding the relativity of taste shapes a useful mindset.
First, listen to the patient’s subjective report while reading the objective state of qi and blood behind it. A single remark about how the medicine tasted can carry information about psychological state or about excess and deficiency in the organs.
Second, distinguish physiological demand from pathological addiction, so that dietary guidance rests on a standard rather than on what the patient feels like eating.
Summary
Taste is a sensitive antenna through which the body communicates with the world, and it is also, at times, a trap that misleads you.
Rather than eating simply as the palate dictates, it is worth putting the question to your own body: why does this taste appeal to me today?
Related: Genes, Environment, and Constitution · Sweating Through Every Meal
