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Dipping Your Testicles In Soy Sauce? How This Started On Social Media

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This article is more than 4 years old.

The words “testicles” and “having no taste” may go together in more ways than one.

People, more specifically men, have posted videos on social media of them dipping their testicles, or more exactly their scrota, into soy sauce. Yes, you heard that correctly. Not dumplings. Not chicken nuggets. Not rice balls. But other kinds of balls. The kinds of balls that usually, typically, traditionally do not go into soy sauce.

Were these men horribly off-target while eating? Were they sitting at the dinner table incorrectly? No, they were trying to see if their testicles could actually taste the soy sauce.

Now, not everyone has taken medical school anatomy. But somewhere along the way, someone probably told you that it’s your tongue that does the tasting and not your testicles. Your testicles do have other purposes. For example, they can give you something to adjust and shift periodically. And you can tell others how big they are when you are feeling small in other ways. Why then would anyone believe that testicles can taste?

Well, it all seemed to start when a TikTok-er named @cryinginthecar, who calls herself Regan, announced: “Did y’all know that if a dude puts his balls in something, he can taste it? He can taste it!” She also shared a 2013 article in the Daily Mail article entitled “Testicles have taste buds that can detect sweet flavours - and they're vital for fertility.”

Did anyone have the balls to test this statement? Yes, in more ways than one. Here is one example or maybe two:

And this radio show was on the ball, so to speak, with this challenge:

Even the Howard Stern show was “balling” as well:

There are other videos out there, but you may not want to see them. Some on social media called all of this the “soy sauce challenge,” but not everyone used soy sauce:

Not exactly a Whiskey Lullaby.

Of course, it is not clear how many of the men, and they were all men, actually believed that testicles have taste receptors before dipping something other than their toes into this challenge. After all, science is not typically the chief driving factor for many men when it comes to that part of the body. You don’t tend to see guys citing scientific journal articles when mentioning their genitalia.

Speaking of scientific journal articles, take a closer look at the scientific paper that was the subject of the Daily Mail article, which caused some on social media to go nuts. Did the study published in a 2013 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) actually say that testicles could taste?

By the way, PNAS is pronounced exactly how you’d expect it to be pronounced. As Regan Bailey, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., a Professor of Nutrition Science at Purdue University, pointed out on Twitter, the pronunciation of the journal name is quite ironic given the subject matter at hand. Dr. Bailey also emphasized that she is not the Regan on TikTok who supposedly started the whole thing.

Well, back to the matter at hand, or wherever they may be. First of all, this scientific paper entitled “Genetic loss or pharmacological blockade of testes-expressed taste genes causes male sterility,” which is not scientific-speak for “dip your testicles in soy sauce,” mainly reported experiments done in mice. And unless you have huge whiskers and are covered in fur, you are probably not a mouse.

Secondly, the study did not show that mice can taste with their testicles. Instead, the publication described how TAS1R taste receptors and their associated heterotrimeric G protein gustducin, which normally help with the sensing of sugar and amino acid in taste cells, can also be found in testis and sperm. This does not mean that such receptors can help you taste things with your testicles, even if you were a gigantic mouse. Molecules and structures that serve a certain function in one part of the body do not necessarily serve the same exact function in another part of the body. For example, if someone were to toilet paper your house, that wouldn’t mean that you’d have to immediately roll down your pants and use the toilet paper how you’d normally use it in the bathroom. Remember, location, location, location.

Instead, the researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center (Bedrich Mosinger, Kevin M. Redding, M. Rockwell Parker, Valeriya Yevshayeva, Karen K. Yee, Katerina Dyomina, Yan Li, and Robert F. Margolskee) determined that these receptors may assist with sperm development and maturation in mice. They found that lack of functional TAS1R3 and GNAT3 impaired sperm formation. Again this is not the same as showing that your testicles can taste soy sauce.

Thus, this is a case of not really looking at the PNAS article before deciding what to do with the testicles. The original point of the study clearly got lost in translation. Really lost. As in what-the-heck-did-Bill Murray-say-at-the-end-of-that-movie lost.

Let’s get some sense back into this testicles-tasting “soy sauce challenge.” The PNAS study did not prove or even suggest that your testicles are taste-icles. Even if you feel that you can taste soy sauce by dipping your genitalia in it, it doesn’t necessarily prove that you can taste with your testicles. Your sense of smell and the power of suggestion could convince you that you are perceiving a certain taste when your testicles aren’t really doing anything except getting dirty. More real scientific studies would be needed, rather than guys on social media turning their testicles into dumplings. For now, unless real science proves otherwise, dipping your genitalia in soy sauce may just be a tasteless endeavor.

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