5. Your Tastebuds Are Lying to You About Bitter Foods, Leaving You Unhealthier For it
Sour and bitter tastes are warning systems that protect you. Here’s why you should ignore bitter’s alarm if you’re looking to live longer and pandemic-proof your immunity.
Bitterness is the one-star Yelp review of flavors. For most, a hint of it generates a face like a melted kettle. Disgust. Yuck. Outrage as your entitled tastebuds are exposed to a flavor unbefitting of their high standards. Sound familiar? You’re in good company. A British survey found foods with bitter taste sensations, dominate the rankings of the most despised fares. Topping the list were Brussel sprouts, artichokes, celery, and eggplants. It seems people would rather punch themselves in the kidney than put tooth to turnip.
Bitterness has cultivated a unique narrative. You sidestep a bitter person. Going outside on a bitterly cold day is as fun as eating yellow snow. There’s sweet lies and bitter truths. Bitterness is code for badness. It shouldn’t be. You’ve been lied to but can learn to decode your thoughts to create a much healthier life.
Debugging Your Tastebuds
You’ve got a unique ability to taste and even enjoy bitterness, especially if you’re a Chivas Regal connoisseur. However, it’s these same flavor receptors on your tongue which are the most likely to make you spit like Billy the Kid before a gunfight. To appreciate how your brain reacts to bitterness, you need to understand the complexities of taste.
Start by knowing that sweet-umami-salty-sour-bitter taste tongue map you learned in school deserves little more than a golf clap. Like the idea that egg yolks are glacial pace murder for your ticker - we got it wrong. What’s more damning is that the tongue map was created in 1901. A time when ‘experts’ advised people to use X-rays to remove unwanted body hair. So, clear your thoughts, lift your pits, and keep reading to get a whiff of the drivel you’ve been fed about how your tastebuds really work.
Mechanisms Of Taste
While some parts of your tongue can latch onto tastes from that delicious Oreo, all the parts are equally gifted at figuring out what you’re tasting. One part of your tongue doesn’t tickle the Oreo’s creamy middle, while the other part grabs onto the biscuit. Sure, some sections, such as your tongue’s tip, can be more sensitive. However, the intensity of the sensations do not vary by enough to warrant the creation of a tongue topography.
You already know this because you love to lavishly roll that delicious Oreo around your entire mouth. You certainly aren’t playing tongue Tetris with the individual flavors. Despite your tongue’s intricate sensory skills, it wasn’t always evolved to detect bitterness. Prior to this adaptation, your biology had a costly flaw if you consider that most naturally occurring poisons are savagely bitter. Equally, many healing tonics are also very bitter, creating one of health’s great juxtapositions.
Protective Coatings
It’s thought your ability to sense bitterness showed up on the menu roughly 200 million years ago. Precisely how archeologists figured that out from mummified tongue jerky is a mystery. Your bitter taste detection does exist for a reason: to sense potential poisons and toxic chemicals. This is thanks to the TAS2R gene that gives you the ability to identify the unique bitterness in toxins, and cappuccinos.
Those unfortunate souls who didn’t make a splash in this gene pool were likely to have wolfed down all sorts of foods that slashed short their lifecycles. These early people may have seen a red berry which tasted squishy and bland, so they gobbled down handfuls of them. Sadly, not everyone survived this eat-everything approach. However, it did ensure that taste became a powerful weapon for sensing what was good or bad.
Super Tasters
Taste is now widely accepted as a sense that both heals and harms. There are super tasters who have a high level of sensitivity to flavors. It’s uncertain why, but possibly because they come from areas with a high variety of toxic foods. These super tasters enjoy an advantage to this day. A paper in JAMA Network Open found supertasters are less likely to get COVID-19 or become hospitalized if they did become infected. They appear to have an innate immune response that’s a forcefield to some pandemics.
Why and how this relates to your tongue is uncertain. While it’s tempting to envy a super taster’s unique ability to enjoy apple pie more than you, there are plenty of healthy foods that don’t even register as options for them. A grapefruit may seem particularly villainous. That said, they can still nurture an affection for bitterness through repeated exposure. A journey every Johnny Walker drinker had to ‘suffer.’
Heroes And Villains
Your sense of taste is not all about genetics. Research in Current Biology found while natural selection has favored super tasters, other elements such as your thyroid health and smoking habits may impact your ability to taste degrees of bitterness. That said, for most people, bitterness is an innate signal there’s an unpinned grenade in their kale salad. In act of indifference to this, many of the world’s healthiest foods remain bitter. Eat the stuff you hate. You’ll be better for it. The foods you love are seldom good for you.
You’re happy to accept a little yin and yang for most things in your life. You know there are good days and bad days at work. You might have moments where you hate the actions of your loved ones. Some days you serve aces, other days you’re double faulting. The only area we tend not to accept these variances is food. Why would you suffer through eating foods you dislike? Well, you should because eating the healthy foods you dislike gives offers very powerful rewards.
New Challenges
Nurturing an ability to find enjoyment in bitterness has become a serious health hurdle. Eating bitter foods until you can tolerate them isn’t necessarily the answer. Instead, generating a love for certain foods is rooted in a trifecta of factors that include personal perception, experiences, and emotions. These work together to form a triangle of taste reviews about foods that would make Rotten Tomatoes envious. This newsletter will teach you how to identify your taste triangle and learn how to use it to map yourself toward a leaner, healthier and better at pretty much everything.
Bittersweet Tip 7: Hardcore Eating
Apples may keep the doc away, but only if you eat apples the right way. This is the way your ancestors ate them in a whole food and whole taste fashion by eating the core and seeds. There’s plenty of hard science to support this because these are the benefits you’ll get when eating the entire apple.
Increased fiber for improved weight control
High antioxidants to fight free radical damage
Vitamin E for healthier looking skin
How to eat more? You don’t need to pull out the seeds and eat them alone. Apples were created to be eaten as a whole entity. To do this, flip the way you eat your apple. Use your teeth to attack it from the base, rather than from the sides. Eating from one of the ends will ensure you get a small portion of seed and core with a good chunk of apple flesh to counterbalance the seed’s bitterness. This may take a little getting used to, but you should end up with nothing to throw away. It means you get the maximum goodness from parts of a food that you’d normally just throw away.