Currently on the Cheerios website, General Mills claims their Cheerios varieties are a part of a healthy diet because they are low in saturated fat, naturally cholesterol free, can help lower cholesterol, are made with whole grains like oats, and provide essential vitamins and minerals.
L-glutamate, said Ikeda, is a fifth taste. When Escoffier created veal stock, he was concentrating umami. When Japanese made their dashi, they were doing the same thing. When you bite into an anchovy, they are like glutamate speedballs. They are pure umami, Jonah writes. Aristotle was wrong. Plato was wrong.
We've all heard that sweet, salty, sour and bitter are the only flavors and that they are the building blocks of complex tastes. But in 1909 Professor Kikunae Ikeda isolated a fifth flavor detectable by human tongues. He named it umami, from the Japanese words for delicious.