Knowing that testicles have taste receptors, the next obvious question is why? “You can just think of them like any other receptor in the body that is monitoring the environment,” Emma Beckett, a molecular nutritionist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, told ScienceAlert. (Editor’s Note: Please don’t inject your testicles with soy sauce).
Unless you inject them with soy sauce, this viral challenge wouldn’t work. Besides, as far as scientists know, the taste receptors are on the inside of the testicles. So although the testicles do contain taste receptors, they don’t lead to taste because they’re not connected to the brain. Without the brain doing that translating, you don’t actually taste sweet, bitter, sour, salty, or umami flavors. The receptors send signals over nerves to the brain, and the brain translates the signals into flavors. They are actually present all over the human body, from toes to the mouth.Taste buds, which are found in the mouth and upper esophagus, are clusters of sensory cells with hair-like projections and thousands of taste receptors. Shamir Patel, a pharmacist and founder of Chemist 4 U, broke it down for .uk: ‘Testicles do have taste receptors, but these are not limited to the genitals. ‘Correspondingly, it appears likely that bitter receptors play an important role in sensing and avoiding toxins secreted by bacteria present in the female reproductive tract.’īut even if there are confirmed taste receptors on testicles, this doesn’t actually mean that you can experience what we think of as taste through the balls. The study concluded: ‘B itter receptors appear to act as defence mechanisms by sensing toxic substances that are invading airways. When these receptors were blocked in mice, it was found that it made them infertile, and the link is believed to be so that the receptors can protect themselves against ‘bitter’ – aka dangerous – substances.
The taste receptors found in the testicles – T1R and T2R – transmitted bitter and savoury tastes, and although the reason for them being there isn’t clear it’s thought to be something to do with fertility. Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University found that ‘taste receptors have been found in tissues other than the tongue, such as the digestive system, respiratory system, brain, testis and spermatozoa’. The revelation – or rather the interpretation of it – appears to stem from a research paper titled Taste perception: From the tongue to the testis published in 2013.
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