The “Five Flavor Conciliation ” and Nutrient Balance and Their Signal Transductions

The "Five flavor conciliation"is the most important theory and basic principle of Chinese food and cooking.Historically,it is considered that Chinese cooking was strived for satisfactions in look(color),smell(flavor),and taste(delicious),but did not pay much attention to nutrition.More and more studies on the interaction between flavor molecules(ligands) and chemical sensors(receptors) of taste and smell have shown that what our senses of taste and smell implicate is the essential nutrient requirements.So the "Five flavor conciliation"as a sensory system to sense nutrients is the very basis and mechanism of molecular structure recognition,physiological regulation of nutritional homeostasis and metabolisms within the body,and plays an important role in the regulation of nutrient uptake.Most taste and smell receptors are members of the superfamily of G-protein-coupled receptors and serve as the basis for the structure and function recognition,quantification and qualification of nutrients by the sense systems in the body.G-protein-coupled receptors responsive to a range of nutrients and other food components are localized not only to the taste buds of the tongue and nasopharynx,but also to intestinal chemosensory cells,eliciting hormonal and neuronal signaling to the brain and periphery.A large number of studies have demonstrated that a metaphoric tasting,,and smelling,,of the intestinal lumenal contents can be easily achieved through the expression of taste and smell receptors in the gut epithelium.In the olfactory system,the receptors are arranged in a combinatorial receptor coding scheme,,,in which one receptor recognizes multiple odorants and one odorant is recognized by multiple receptors.There is recognition progress and signal cascade from food visual,olfactory,and taste sense to ingurgitation,digestion,and absorption.