THE mere taste of crisps, cheesecake or croissants may be bad for your
arteries, according to US nutritionists.
Researchers led by Richard Mattes of Purdue University in Indiana asked
volunteers to swallow capsules of unsaturated vegetable oil, then chew fatty
food such as cream cheese for one minute and spit it out without swallowing any.
Within hours, levels of fatty molecules called triglycerides circulating in the
volunteers’ blood shot up. At four hours, the volunteers’ blood contained 65 per
cent more triglycerides than that of control subjects who had chewed very low
fat cream cheese, the researchers report in the June issue of the American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Mattes believes the triglyceride surge was triggered by the sensations of
taste and odour, which affected the metabolism and uptake into the blood of the
vegetable oil consumed by the volunteers. How this happens is unclear, as the
biochemical pathways linking taste buds to fat metabolism are not
understood.
Mattes was inspired by a similar study of laboratory rats, conducted a decade
ago by researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The rat
study produced similar results, but was never followed up. “I thought it was
time to do some more research in this area,” says Mattes.
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Doctors believe that high triglyceride levels are associated with an
increased risk of cardiovascular disease. “The health implications could be
significant,” says Mattes. Replacing fatty foods with low-fat substitutes may
have benefits that go beyond a simple reduction in fat consumption, he
suggests.
The next step in the research will be to vary the relative amounts of
saturated and unsaturated fat in the tasting samples and diet before measuring
triglyceride levels. The researchers also intend to investigate whether tasting
fatty food affects the amount of cholesterol circulating in the blood.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
