Next time you’re stuffing fistfuls of delicious bacon into your mouth, you might want to consider sticking a piece or two of crispy goodness into your crotch, then up your butt for good measure. No, I’m not suggesting you develop a kinky bacon fetish (although experimenting with bacon condoms is always a good idea), I’m just a firm believer in enjoying the maple-hickory goodness with all of your body’s taste receptors. Including the ones chilling on the tops of your testicles and at the entrance to your anus. Yeah, you read that right: if you have testicles, you also have a gorgeous set of taste receptors right at the tippy tops of your gonads, just waiting to approve or disapprove your flavored condom choices. The same goes for the neat cluster of taste receptors sitting just inside your anus, although we feel kind of bad for that particular part of your anatomy . . . something tells us Nature gave them the sh*tty end of the stick.
If you’re worried that taste is about to become more of an anal and testicular than an oral pastime, don’t be — the taste receptors in your anus and testicles aren’t likely to overwhelm more traditional forms of taste any time soon. In fact, your non-oral taste receptors (which, by the way, are also present in your stomach, intestines, pancreas, lungs, and brain) are pretty much limited to tasting sweet and umami flavors (like the kind contained in bacon, for example). None of your non-oral taste receptors come close to the tasting power of your tongue, however, so you probably won’t be tasting your toilet paper.
At this point, though, you’re likely less concerned with where the funky taste receptors are and more curious about why any possible evolutionary process would slap some taste receptors where the sun don’t shine. Unfortunately, science doesn’t really have an answer. . . yet. Scientists discovered the unusual taste receptors while studying fertility in rats, and they know that taking away male rat’s testicular taste receptors rendered them permanently sterile. So we know that, somehow, tasting the delicate bouquet of ball sweat flavors is vital to the reproduction process, we just don’t know why. Researchers will continue to study the link between flavor receptors and reproduction, and we’ll continue to pretend we don’t know any of this information. At least until the next time we grab some bacon-flavored condoms.
silly
LOL
A load of Crap(pardon the pun). Thought scientists had better things to study than that.
I was enjoying a bottle of Cabernet up my ass while spreading a nice Gorgonzola on my balls, when suddenly out of nowhere, the maître d’ asked me to leave the restaurant…
Kraft Cheese should name a spread after it… Uranus Spread or
Ballsy cheese spread… .O)
No words…
I’m always appalled at the poor quality of reportage on science in the popular press. This is a prime example of a person with no scientific background not reading/understanding a journal article. The study published in the July “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” was about creating a breeding strain of rats that kept all the same chemical receptors normally found in the mouth, but eliminated them elsewhere, to study oral taste only. This elimination by genetics or chemicals resulted in sterilization. The original study of chemical receptors was done in our mouths for obvious reasons. Those receptors located there are called ‘taste buds’, so the original researchers created acronyms for each chemical group,ie: bitter, T2R, where the T&R stand for taste receptors. Since these same chemical receptors occur throughout the body, scientist just refer to them as TBs, or taste buds as a shorthand notation. Those have NOTHING to do with our sense of “taste”. For example, there are T1Rs(sweet) receptors in our duodenum. They detect sugars in our digestive tract, and trigger incretins which signals the pancreas to release insulin and send the resulting glucose to our muscles/liver so we have energy. These are the identical receptors that in our mouth say something’s sweet. We don’t ‘taste’ the same food a second time hours later. The difference is they send the same signal to different parts of the brain…big difference in perception and reaction! The author of the original article for one of the major news exchanges, AP, UPI, etc.., was clueless and every other reporter showed a lack of critical thinking and journalistic laziness in repeating this drivel without checking the facts. So this false news story, from a ‘reputable'(??) source has gone around the world as fact. Something to remember when you read the news. It was heartening to see how many here had the common sense to detect BS in this story…something the news media often lacks.
The one valuable point from the actual study, not reported was about ‘statins’. They were used on the rats to try to turn off the receptors outside the mouth. They used high doses and caused sterility. Statins are the popular human drug used to lower LDL, the bad cholesterol. 25% of people over 45 use them. There have been numerous reports of bad side effects such as memory loss, confusion, diabetes and muscle wasting from statins. This study may explain some reports of fertility loss in men. Likewise, it may be a new avenue of research into a male contraceptive. This is how seemingly obscure research leads to new discoveries in the unexpected side results.
You gotta LOVE science!