Having food preferences is perfectly natural. Some prefer mild flavors to spicy ones; some have a sweet tooth while others crave salty foods. When your food preferences prevent you from enjoying foods outside of your comfort zone, you might be quick to label yourself as a picky eater. Picky eaters get a bad rap for having an underdeveloped palate, but a selective palate is really what it is—and there may be an explanation for your very particular likes and dislikes that’s out of your control. You just might be a supertaster, someone with a bit of a superpower when it comes to tasting flavors and ingredients.

Having a heightened sense of taste isn’t always a joyride for your taste buds, though. Supertasters—it’s a real thing!—may inadvertently limit their diets to avoid things they’re averse to, and many find it difficult to include a wide variety of foods in their overall diet—something that’s essential for getting a spectrum of nutrients and supporting a diverse gut microbiome.

What exactly is a supertaster, and how common is it?
“A supertaster is going to experience the flavors and aromas of any given food or meal more intensely,” explains Jenna Volpe, RDN, L.D., an Austin, Texas–based registered dietitian trained in supertasting—who happens to be a supertaster herself.

This super sense of taste is due, in part, to the sheer number of taste buds they have. Supertasters have significantly more taste buds than non-supertasters, usually referred to as non-tasters, though there isn’t an exact number. Having more taste buds makes flavors more intense, so supertasters are more likely to be sensitive to certain foods. Of the five tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami—supertasters can be sensitive to all of them to some extent, but they’re especially receptive to bitter tastes.

What’s more, a supertaster isn’t defined solely by their number of taste buds, but also by their genetics. Supertasters have a taste receptor gene called TAS2R38 that allows them to taste the bitterness of a chemical called phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) or a related substance called 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP), according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Technically, everyone inherits two copies of this gene, but supertasters have the PAV variant.

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Supertasters are more common than you’d think. About a quarter of people in the U.S. have the gene that allows them to taste the extreme bitterness of PTC, making a solid chunk of the population bonafide supertasters. Roughly half of Americans are medium or average tasters of bitter PTC, and another quarter don’t taste it at all. This varies greatly among racial and ethnic groups as well as between the sexes. Men and Caucasians are least likely to be supertasters, while women and racial minorities are more likely to have the gene, Linda M. Bartoshuk, Ph.D., a researcher on the genetic variations in taste perception, told the Duke Sanford World Food Policy Center. Now a professor at the University of Florida, Bartoshuk initially penned the name “supertaster” and pioneered much of the research on this genetic type in the 1990s at the Yale School of Medicine.

Which foods are supertasters most sensitive to?
Being a supertaster isn’t always cake walk. The smallest taste of the chemical PTC is enough to make a supertaster cringe while the average taster may only experience a faint bitter taste, per the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Even worse, to a supertaster, this chemical is a “ruin-your-day'' level of bitter, according to an American Heart Association press release.