Credits: Social Media
Yes, your testicles have ‘taste receptors’… but they’re nothing like the buds of a tongue
People couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that some TikTok users indeed dipped their testicles in soya sauce and other food items to see if they could get the taste of it, under the impression that their junk has taste buds just like their tongue.
Blame it on misleading headlines or the ill-informed participants of the social media trend, the belief that one can taste things through their scrotum still exists, although that couldn’t be further from the truth.
No, testicles don’t have taste buds
A research paper published in 2013 dedicated to “taste receptors and sperm physiology” found out that several parts of the human body, including the testicles have taste receptors.
They can also be found in the lungs, stomach, urinary bladder, and pancreas. However, these are not the same as taste buds. Let us break it down for you.
Taste buds are the cells on your tongue that allow the brain to perceive different tastes, but the receptors are found within the taste buds and they can only sense sweet, salt, bitter, and more.
Although taste receptors were found to be present inside testicles, they don’t send any signals to the brain upon sensing any taste and it only means one thing – your scrotum can’t taste anything.
Food nutrition scientist, Emma Beckett explained: “Receptors present in the testicles dont connect to the taste center or the gustatory cortex in the brain.”
So, it doesn’t matter what taste or flavor you’re exposing your testicles to, it can’t tell the difference or help your brain recognize them.
Possible explanation for the wild claims on TikTok
The fact that testicles consist of taste receptors was found to be so amusing that some men on TikTok took to dipping their scrotum in all kinds of juices and sauces to sense the taste from their downtown.
Although soya sauce was the most common choice, you can find videos of men submerging their assets in other liquids too, and surprisingly, they even guessed what it was through the weird experiment.
One TikTok user was blindfolded when his partner gave him a glass of orange juice to dip his testicles in and it didn’t take long for the person to guess the right answer.
However, the correct responses weren’t the result of their testicles’ magical power to taste the juice or sauce, instead, it could be the nose doing its job.
Emma said, “Sometimes people in those videos guess the right food and think they are tasting, before adding that they’re “either pretending or just smelling the food.
We hope our story saves you the trouble of jumping on the trend to taste food from odd places in your body.
