British scientists’ new research shows that mood may actually change how one’s dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavors recede.

In a new research to unpick the relationship between the chemical balance in brain and sense of taste, scientists at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes, The Nature reported Wednesday on its website.

The scientists found that the drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, while the other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes.

In healthy people, volunteers whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes. ” What hasn’t been done before is to look precisely at which tastes are affected in depression. Now the results are in. We can discriminate between the chemicals and the tastes that seem to be altered,” Lucy Donaldson who led the research was quoted as saying.

It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower- than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both, and many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry.

The scientists plan to perform similar tests in depressed people, and in healthy volunteers given another brain chemical called tryptophan which would lower the healthy subjects’ levels of serotonin, as actually happens in depressed patients, according to the report.

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