Missing ingredients: aging and the discrimination of flavor

An experiment explored how well young, middle-aged, and elderly subjects could discriminate the presence or absence of the spice marjoram in a soup prepared according to a published recipe. Whereas most young made the discrimination at a level above chance, most middle-aged and elderly failed to. A clinical test that entails odor threshold and identification revealed that olfactory ability also diminished with age among these subjects. Furthermore, the odor thresholds measured in the test correlated significantly with the subjects' ability to discriminate flavor. Subsequent testing wherein subjects sought to discriminate flavor with their noses blocked confirmed that olfactory ability largely underlay the discrimination. The results emphasize that losses in olfaction measured most commonly with environmental odors are serious enough to have an impact on discrimination of flavors in everyday foods, even among persons of middle age. Loss of such discriminative capacity may entail risks of avoiding dangerous and overlooking beneficial ingredients in foods.