OWN CORRESPONDENT, San Francisco | Sunday
TWO party-pooping California researchers have found that the familiar tingle on the tongue caused by the fizzy drink revellers love to guzzle as they toast the New Year is no pleasure at all.
In fact, the fizz of champagne can be downright painful.
”The tingle you get from a chilli pepper is working on the pain system,” said Michael O’Mahony, a food scientist at the University of California, Davis, who co-led the study. ”But it also turns out that the fizz or the carbonation you get from a fizzy drink works on the same system.”
The research helps to show that these sensations may be an important part of food flavour, alongside taste and smell, even though they deliver messages of pain to the brain, O’Mahony said.
He added that most cultures had their own foods that hurt, with examples ranging from strong malt vinegar on fish and chips and pretzels crusted with salt to spicy curries.
”The pain is giving you the message, watch out for this stuff, be careful,” O’Mahony said. ”We are interested in the mechanisms of how pain and irritation work in the mouth.”
The two researchers compared the effects of capsaicin, which gives chilies their burn, with nicotine on nerve activity in rats. When dripped onto the tongue, both the capsaicin and nicotine caused a firing of trigeminal nerves, the first pain relay on the way to the brain.
But if the capsaicin was stopped for a few minutes, the nerves became desensitised and the response decreased – which is like eating a spicy meal and finding the food less hot the more you eat.
”If you walk into a smoky room, you immediately have an irritating sensation in the eyes, but you quickly become desensitised,” added Earl Carstens, who co-led the study.
But for carbonated drinks, like soda, sparkling wine and, of course, champagne, blame the bubbles. The fizz in those drinks are made of carbon dioxide, which produces the carbonic acid that hurts the tongue, the researchers said.
The researchers say the same principal applies to any drink that gets its fizz from carbon dioxide.
”If you stick your tongue in carbonated water for a few seconds, that gets painful,” Carstens said.
One way to avoid the pain, however, was to drink Guinness beer instead. That liquid gets its frothy fizz from nitrogen, which produces a different, smoother feel in the mouth, the researchers said. – Reuters