Why do mints and toothpaste do this to your tongue?

Factual Questions
1

After eating strong mints my tongue gets kinda funny after, when I go to take a drink of water it gets that funny you-have-to-do-it-to-know-what-i’m-talking-about feeling. Similarly drinking orange juice after brushing my teeth produces an unusal, not entirely pleasant, taste in my mouth.
Not that I’m doing either of these things too often, but why does it happen?

Cheers
Pushkin

2

I think I get what you mean…

Cool tap water feels really cold after brushing my teeth. I thought it might be menthol (or something that has a similar “cooling” effect).

3

Is it possible the strong mint flavor somehow alters the trigger settings of tastebuds?

That seems to happen with other combos. Take a big drink of milk, then eat some grapefruit right away – everything’s normal. But eat some grapefruit and then take a quick swig of milk --eeeew. It’ll taste horribly off, to the point you wonder if it’s gone bad on you.

4

Toothpaste is a surfactant (detergent) which temporarily distrupts the functioning of the taste buds (disturbs the phospholipid membrane). This decreases your sweet taste and bitter becomes more obvious.

Perhaps methol in strong mints works in the same way.

Try eating something fatty to avoid this effect.

5

Actually, most but not all toothpastes contain a surfactant. The culprit is sodium laurel sulfate or SLS. It’s there as a foaming agent. It’s a mild irritant and promotes canker sores for those who are prone to them.

Haj

6

Yeah … I wasnt thinking of those hippy baking powder and tea tree oil preparations.

If only consumers could live without the need to see bubbles as ‘evidence’ that a product is doing its job.

btw one of my pet gripes is people who put as much toothpaste on a toothbrush as they do on the TV ad’s. You only need a tiny smear people. ehem…ok thats out of my system.

7

I remember reading a little about this phenomenon in a college psychology text during a summer course I took just after high school. I don’t remember exactly what the mechanism behind it was, but I do remember it mentioned the miracle berry as one of the more extreme examples of this phenomenon.