7. You've Been Tricked into Disliking the Bitter Foods That Heal You
Learn why you’re designed to taste bitter foods and unpack how to differentiate the taste of poison versus nutrition
Bitter is the Google Earth of flavors. This software offers a planet to explore. The first place you visit? Your house. Reapply your globetrotting zoom skill to your kitchen, and you’ll find bitter foods you never considered eating. Incredibly nutritious items are left untapped. Celery leaves. Carrot tops. Peach pip kernels. Bitterness is everywhere. You’re just tossing it out. But is there a tipping point of too much bitterness? Sure!
Bitter foods may be dangerous, but only if you inject your piehole with industrial sized over-indulges thereof. An apple has seeds. Don’t eat them. You’ll cultivate a tummy tree. Unlikely. Still scary to the three-year-old you. Age into a taxpayer and you may learn apple seeds have trace amounts of cyanide. Yikes! Keep away. What you’re not told is that there’s cyanide in many healthy foods. Almonds. Spinach. Soy. So, does a whole apple a day keep the doctor away or in play?
Bitter Goodness
If apples are good enough to get the drop on Newtonian physics, they’re good enough to explain dietary best practices. An apple’s seeds offer 0.6mg of cyanide per gram. A lethal dose of cyanide is 50-300mg. This means you’d need to scoff apple carts of apple seeds on the daily to get poisoned. Whole apples are perfectly safe. Crunching into their cores serves your digestive system an internal six pack.
A paper in the journal frontiers in Microbiology found a single apple has 100 million bacterial cells. Most of these cells get their microscopic wiggle on inside the seeds, which improve the health and quantity of your gut bacteria. Take home message? Eat a whole food diet. Stop being picky. Not all the parts of a food will be the Gucci prime cuts. Fortunately, these beta cuts usually roll with alpha levels of nutrition that’ll see you minimize food waste and maximize your longevity. An improved food budget is just a bonus.
Eat To Give Back
Snobbish eating habits relate back to preventable diseases, which are becoming dead easy frags for the Reaper. It’s clear that when it comes to our diets, we’ve added the wrong things and taken the good stuff. The additions? Fried and processed foods. The subtractions? Whole foods. That’s not just unprocessed or additive free stuff. Instead, it’s the throwaway bits: seeds, leaves, skins, offal, and cores. To fight preventable diseases, we’ve even cooked up counterbalancing nutritional strategies. Paleo. Vegetarianism. Carnivore. They are all based on how we think most people ate centuries ago.
Compared to the average western diet, these retro-eating strategies are powerful health elixirs that will make you leaner and healthier. A glaring omission from these trendy diet strategies? Anyone living centuries ago would have eaten their pineapple core. Mango skins. Broccoli stalks. Cucumber skin. To previous generations these were all perfectly acceptable menu items. These throw-away parts left you fuller and made foods more complete in nutrition and flavor. Just as nature intended. And she is a lot smarter than you.
Complete Foods
A great many foods are healthier when eaten in their entirety. Eggs are yet another prime example. They’re the gold standard of food, yet you’d never eat the shell, a savagely rich source of calcium. Even kindergarteners know humans need calcium for strong bones, right? Nope. As much as 40% of adults don’t meet the calcium requirements from diet alone. These same people lob their eggshells in the trash. They’re happy to let their bones become brittle enough to be victims of words instead of sticks and stones.
This attitude is the dollar store version of self-care. Look, you don’t need to cook bleeding gum omelets. However, grinding and eating bitter eggshell powder adds to their nutrition badassery. The eggshell dilemma shows we’d rather be deficient than be inconvenienced. The convenience of getting calcium in a pill, coupled with an aversion to bitterness has set the collective common sense to airplane mode.
Protein Shifts
Your butcher will also tell you some sharp truths about the consumer demand for bitter foods. Less than 50 years ago, people weren’t dining on the feather-light taste sensations found on the ends of today’s steak knives. Your grandfather probably ate the animal proteins today’s supermarkets sell as Fido food. It’s called offal and it’s naturally more bitter but, in most instances, it is less calorific and far more nutritious than the average T-bone. Our pre-packaged world has been curated to recoil at the more intense flavor and texture of offal.
Offal are the most nutritious parts of the animal. Yes, organ meats like liver and kidney process toxins. However, this just means you should always go for free-range, organic, hormone and antibiotic-free. Think of it as a warning shot for you not to get too obsessive with low quality bitter foods. A little is good. Eat them in proportionate sizes to the seeds of your apple. The bitter apple seeds are a smaller serve than the apple’s flesh. Don’t ignore them, but don’t overdo your commitment to this flavor or any other for that matter. Balance is the best way to flex.
Purpose in Bitter
What about fruits? Pre-sliced mango is an easy sell. These brightly colored sugar balls create a cerebral sleight of hand that lures you into a symbiotic arrangement. The mango tree has seeds it needs to distribute. It wants a favor from you, where you eat it elsewhere, and so you spread the seeds. Quid pro quo. A new tree grows elsewhere, and you get to enjoy more mango in years to come.
Vegetables are more self-serving entities. They’re the cats of the plant world who care little about you. Botanically speaking those with seeds - such as peppers, squash, or cucumbers - are fruits while those without seeds are vegetables. It’s a broad, and often flawed classification system. However, many vegetables (and even nuts) are relatively bitter. Why they taste this way is debatable. One certainty is that vegetables are key to helping you live longer and healthier. The purpose of bitterness in many foods is far ranging and here’s the best theories on the topic.
Bitterness Captures Goodness
Distill your nutritional needs to periodic table-level basics and you’ll find yourself held together by Ca, aka calcium. Without it your meatsuit would be unable to sit to read this sentence. It’s so innate that a bitter flavor is due to the unique nutrients in vegetables. When 24 of some of the most eaten vegetables were ranked according to their calcium content, there was an agreement between high calcium and high bitterness, found a paper in the journal Appetite. It’s possible the taste of calcium distributes bitter pitchforks to the villagers that are your tastebuds.
What about the sweet taste of milk? Milk has sweet sugars that mask its bitterness, and it isn’t the calcium cash cow you think it is. A paper in the British Medical Journal found women who drank the most milk died sooner, had more bone fractures and higher levels of osteoporosis, the bone weakening disease. A one off? Nope! There are more studies that suggest diary fails to guard your bones against factures, than there are studies that say it strengthens bones. High levels of calcium and bitter flavors go together like Ben and Jerry’s.
HIDDEN HELPERS
Plants are the blinking Las Vegas Strip of the natural world. Their attractive colors are thanks to phytochemicals that contribute to their taste, and smell. These complex phytochemicals can’t be tethered to a neat little four-tiered macro scale. Instead, there are thousands of them in a garden variety tomato and we’re only beginning to understand how beneficial, or harmful they are likely to be for your health.
It’s these unique combinations of phytochemicals that not only lower your risks of cancer and cardiovascular disease, but they are responsible for creating the bitter taste, found research in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. These researchers noted food manufacturers often remove these compounds to reduce the bitterness. In doing so, they often teleport health out of most processed foods. So, if you find kale chips that taste better than potato chips, there’s a good chance they’re a droid of their former selves and are not even remotely good for you.
SALT LEVELS
Salt makes your eggs the high-water mark of breakfast foods and is also a bitter taste influencer. A paper in The Journal of Neuroscience discovered salt levels influence bitter taste. This remains an outside theory, but if you look at vegetables with naturally high salt levels, such as celery, chard, and spinach, the link is clear. Salt has never been your enemy. It was so imperative to health that it was traded as money and even taken as a health supplement.
Fortunately, a paper at McMaster University discovered most people don’t need to curb their salt intake. This is except for those who are scoffing more than a whopping 5 grams a day. The scientists suggest if you’re eating healthy quantities of fruits, veggies, and other potassium rich foods, then you’re good to go with the shaker. On a side note, salt probably got a bad rap because it rolls with the juju of drive-thru food and became guilty by association.
GLUCOSINATES
Broccoli needs some truth because it smells of boiled farts. Mysteriously, this smell often dissipates when it nears your grill. This aroma could be behind its bitter taste. Glucosinolates are sulfur-containing compounds in cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts) that contribute to that guff smell and bitter taste. Once you get past it, you’ll be gratuitously rewarded with health thanks to this elite vegetable.
The bottom line is that bitter foods are not something you are hardwired to eat. Oddly, their flavor is often attached to very beneficial compounds needed to improve your health. If that’s a bitter pill to swallow, then it’s one worth pinching your nose and embracing the suck.
Numbing The Bitterness
Fortunately, bitterness is something you can condition yourself to love. A paper in the journal Chemical Senses discovered everything you eat meets your saliva before it hits your taste buds. Your saliva has proteins that can hypnotize your taste perception. With repeated exposure to bitter foods, your saliva changes and makes the foods more enjoyable. Sadly, they didn’t put a precise number on the quantity of serves you need to eat to begin enjoying that repulsive kale tang. The researchers did say that the more you eat them, the more your perception of the taste will change over time.
Okay, so you’re never going to convince a child that broccoli salad is party food. To them it’s like Velcro – a rip off. However, it’s this perception that will evolve from a physical and mental perspective once you understand salad is healthy and makes you feel your best. It may take a while to condition yourself to this Pavlovian response, but you don’t need to suffer while you eat. While there are plenty of recipes in the rest of this book, here’s how your food prep can help get these bitter foods into your diet with a little more palatability.
ROAST IT
This can convert some of the carbs to sugars which will make them seem naturally sweeter. Just drizzle with some high-quality olive oil, salt and pepper then roast until slightly crunchy. This is perfect for foods such as Brussel sprouts which have a harder texture that can withstand higher temperatures while still allowing them to caramelize. While roasting can sap some of the more fragile nutrients from vegetables, but it’s a better alternative than not eating them.
ADD FAT
Everything tastes better with fats, it’s a simple life fact, and in the case of the A, D, E and K vitamins it will help you absorb more of them in your bitter foods. It’s the trick you use when you’re long black in hand at Starbucks: add fat and sugar. This means it can be applied to your dinners too by drizzling bitter veggies with a little olive oil or grass-fed butter. You will never go back to dry and bland veggies again.
SEASON CORRECTLY
Spices don’t have to overpower the bitter foods flavor, but they can enhance the tones you find more enjoyable. Elements such as garlic, chili and ginger all have the right notes that drastically improve bitter foods.
ADD A SWEETENER
Bitterness has a culinary counterpart: sweetness. You can often overwhelm bitter foods with sweet flavors, but you can strike the correct balance between these two opposition teams. Take the case of the green smoothie. They’re usually full of tragically bitter leaves like kale and chard so the natural counterbalance is something such as pineapple and mango which will complement the bitter flavors to give it a neutral and delicious flavor.
Bitter Reconditioning
Bitter foods can be like stubbing your toe twenty times. Eventually, you remember where that annoying little step is by adapting and creating new cerebral connections. If you’re serious about your well-being, it’s in your best interest to train your taste buds the same way you train your legs. Yes, at the start of a squat session they may wince like a rattlesnake with a hernia. Over time you will grow to enjoy them because you appreciate the positive outcomes they offer.
You’ll feel light, clear headed and healthier. Everything you want from your food. Yes, it may take time. Luckily, once you understand that you’re undoing decades of flawed food programming then you’ll really appreciate what a quick turn around you can create by relieving yourself of your defective past perceptions. Think of it as taste bud therapy. Only you won’t ever need to ask yourself how it makes you feel. You’ll just feel better and taste the difference in yourself.