*Adam Note: The picture in the article is a bittermelon, a popular Asian melon. It tastes pretty awful*
I, like many others start their daily ritual by brewing a cup of coffee before we start our day. Some add sweeteners and cream to improve flavor, while others have learned to savor the bitterness of the drink.
Bitter is one of the five tastes (Along with Sour, salty, sweet, and umami). Foods that taste bitter typically have an alkaline (basic) pH. If you’re interested in tasting something purley bitter, mix baking soda into a small glass of water and swish it in your mouth for a few seconds!
Many foods contain bitter compounds, like hoppy beers, tonic water, coffee, unsweetened chocolate, citrus peel, olives, escarole, broccoli, radish, kale, and turnips. But then there’s bitter compounds that are also found in many poisonous plants. Plants developed these bitter poisonous compounds as a form of defense against predators, in attempts to deter animals from eating them. (Although, coffee is going to have to try a lot harder before deterring me..)
Bitter=Poison
During animals evolution we have learned that potentially poisonous plants taste bitter, and poison is bad for health…so that must mean that bitter is also bad. Over time, humans have learned which bitters are safe, and which are not. Although humans evolved being weary of bitter, many cultures have adopted bitter food and drink to assist with digestion. (Though there is no proven answer to how these foods actually assist in digestion.)
Super Taster
Some may heard of the term “super taster”, and one could find out if they were one of not by tasting a piece of paper that has a specific bitter compound on it (6-n-propylthiouracial or (PROP)). If you taste something bitter, you’re automatically classified as a supertaster, and if you don’t taste anything bitter, you’re just a …normal taster. However, research done at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has shown that when asked over 1,000 subjects all with multiple variations of the bitter gene (or TAS2R38), they found that there is not simply a “Super taster” and “non supertaster”. Along with the variation of gene sequences, there is a variation of how strongly people taste bitter.
So maybe kids aren’t being picky eaters if they don’t want to finish their broccoli, they just have it ingrained in their hardware that bitter means beware!
Garneau NL, Nuessle TM, Sloan MM, Santorico SA, Coughlin BC, Hayes JE. Crowdsourcing taste research: genetic and phenotypic predictors of bitter taste perception as a model. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. 2014;8:33. doi:10.3389/fnint.2014.00033.
