9. How Bitter Foods Counterbalance the Unhealthy Sugars In Your Diet
Your body has hidden taste receptors deep inside key organs. Learning why they work is vital to understanding how you can get a taste for better health.
If you want to give your mouth a spa-day, feed it pizza. The calorific bliss may seem as if all the nom-nom happens in your grill. It doesn’t. Instead, your sense of taste is a complex con. The illusion begins when you flip the pizza box to unleash the whiffs of cheese, tomato, and carbs. Grease shrink wraps your fingertips. The colors. The smells that account for 75% of the flavor. The emotions. Your brain makes notes on all these cues.
While each bite electrifies your mouth because your brain consolidates multiple feedback streams into one place: your tastebuds. That pizza tastes the way a gentle back-scratch feels. Goosebumps. One more slice, please. Weirdly, even though your tastebuds cop all the main character vibes, they’re just passengers in your multidisciplinary perception of taste.
Breath of Fresh Air
Tastebuds aren’t just pleasure-seeking jokers. Some are Batman. They lurk in the shadows and protect against pathogenic villains. Your upper respiratory tract is a Batcave dripping with tastebuds that act as your immune system’s gatekeepers. You have both bitter and sweet taste receptors in your airways and any bitter sensations trigger an acute immune response, found paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. These receptors control the release of antimicrobial peptides in your upper airway that battle pathogens, such as the cold.
Pathogens leave a bitter chemtrail that taste receptors in your airways detect. The role bitter foods have in this fight remains unclear, but it’s worth repeating that supertasters were less likely to get COVID-19 or become hospitalized. A mysterious connection between your body’s tastebuds and immune system is emerging and it digs deeper than your boogers.
Strong Senses
Mucus. It’s only a thing after a tequila binge leaves you blowing-snot-rockets drunk. On the daily, your tastebuds and mucus are lubrication team, built for taste and immunity. The extra-oral sweet and bitter taste receptors in your nose and paranasal sinuses, like those in your airway, also detect pathogens and control immune responses to them, suggest a review in the Journal of Pathogens. The bitter taste receptors detect bacterial by-products then mount an immune response. Conversely, your sweet taste receptors work in opposition to this.
It’s another hero and villain situation. You need them both because they bring out the best in one another, like the Dark Knight and Arkham’s inmates. Pathogens gobble up sweet sugars for energy and inhibit your immune response. To build on this, the lab coats even found diabetics have elevated glucose levels in their nasal secretions, making them more likely to get airway infections. Take home message? Sugar is generally bad. Bitter is generally good. This symbiotic relationship is so innate it even extends to your bowels.
Learning to Taste
You have many tastebuds you can’t detect and tend to be binary about their flavors: sweet and bitter. This is a phenomenon replicated deep inside your blackest of holes where you’ve also got incredibly powerful taste receptors in your pancreas and gut, found papers in the journals PLoS One and The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Like the taste receptors in your nasal cavity and airways, they don’t have powwows with your brain the same way your mouth-based ones do. Instead, your gut and pancreas tastebuds send morse code that communicates covertly within your body. While you’re probably not even aware of these whispers, they may offer answers to big questions like why you just can’t help but reach for that ninth slice of garlic bread, despite feeling irresponsibly full.
Unlocking a Sixth Sense
Your imperceptible tastebuds are built to sense danger, mount responses and detect nutrients in your body. Their actions are the conductors for a harmonious push-pull symphony between hormones that regulate your appetite and the feelings of fullness whenever you pop calories in your face’s burger hole.
In the pancreas, your internal tasting process makes sure you have the right amount of glucose in your bloodstream. This key indicator speaks to the health of your blood sugar which impact your risk factors for many diseases. Heart attacks. Strokes. Kidney disease. Vision loss. Diabetes. Amputations. They’re all there. It’s a taste that could make or break your wellness, even if you’re only aware of it when food is in your grill. It’s what happens after you swallow that separates your health into light and dark.
Tongue Twisters
Your internal tasting mechanisms are hieroglyphics deep in the tomb of your wellbeing. Consider a black coffee. Added sugar offsets the bitterness. Each sip doesn’t trigger a sweet-bitter Battle Royale. Instead, the taste consolidation process is brain based. This even happens when you cook food. While sweet and salt suppress bitterness, only bitterness can suppress excess sweet. Some of this has to do with the acidity of sweet (and sour) foods and how this is offset by the alkalinity of bitter foods.
A paper in Trends in Foods Science & Technology found bitter compounds and acids either enhance or suppress each other. Salts and bitter compounds interact so the latter is suppressed, leaving the former unaffected. Sweetness and bitterness are opposite numbers. This plays out in your kitchen and your mouth. It happens in your organs. It’s happening as you read this sentence. You’re blissfully unaware that your body is always tasting.
Sugary Solution
Sugar! Nutritional crack. Yawn! Sugar’s many failings were aired back when headphones still had wires. That said, it’s worth rebooting your Mega Drive with a single study on the sweet to illustrate the counterbalance bitter tastes may offer. Research in Cell Biology found the hormone ghrelin tells you when you’re hungry while regulating your metabolism and memory. Sugar stimulates your gut to produce ghrelin. This hormone makes your body forget it’s eaten and wills you to scoff that entire tray of Krispy Cremes. Bitter does the opposite.
Bitter substances reduce ghrelin. Research in Nutrients suggests it could be used to prevent obesity and type 2 diabetes. How fast is this interaction? Dom Toretto mph. When people were given a bitter HCI quinine, they ate significantly fewer calories just 1 hour afterwards, found a paper in the Journal of Neurogastroenterology and Motility. On the inside, bitter taste works in opposite to sugar. It is one side of a give-and-take battle for control over the hormones that can so often rule your health.
Bitters Betters Digestion
Bitter foods aiding digestion is as old as the pyramids. Ancient Egyptians fused bitter medicinal herbs into jars to drink with meals. Romans even added digestive bitters to their wines. And if you’ve ever enjoyed a Jägermeister then you’ve partaken in their spicy digestive delights. Modern science is beginning to catch up to what ancient cultures decided were facts.
Bitters (a digestive tonic) can very effectively stamp out the fires of indigestion caused by eating or drinking, suggests a paper in the Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. So, not only does bitterness make you feel better directly after eating, but it may also help keep your desires for less healthy food in check long afterwards. Is bitterness sugar’s culinary counterbalance? While that can’t be said for certain, the evidence is beginning to show that while sugar causes the problems, bitter has taken a Hippocratic oath to protect you.
Sugar Says No
Sugar’s villainous failings have seen food producers try to invest in replicating its taste, sans the annoying calories. Enter: artificial sweeteners. These are processed food’s golden child. At first, artificial sweeteners worked, but they were a solution with mixed success, suggests a paper in the journal Molecules. These researchers looked at popular artificial sweeteners - namely, aspartame, sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame, and acesulfame potassium-k, which they found to be toxic to the populations of your gut’s healthy bacteria. Ouch!
Why does this matter? Well, poor gut bacteria levels can cause you to have wide ranging health issues. Even zero-calorie sweeteners can still lead you towards diabetes and obesity, suggests another research paper. The waters about artificial sweeteners effectiveness are clearly muddied and should leave you with the kind of suspicion you should reserve for anyone selling a locked iPad on the internet.
Artificial Trickery
Your body shows how suss it feels when you slurp a diet soda and are left with weird bitter aftertaste. That’s the disconnect mouth-based sweetness that the tastebuds in your gut and pancreas don’t recognize as sweet. While things like bitter taste receptors for Stevia sweeteners in your mouth have been discovered, the impacts for those on the inside of your body are only now beginning to be fully understood.
Eat calorie-free sweetness and your body knows it hits different on the inside. That’s the rank aftertaste. Fool the tastebuds in your mouth, but the ones on your insides are the brains of the operation. Internal tastebuds demand bitter foods to optimize your wellbeing and longevity. They’re the Mentos dropped into promise that a Diet Coke is healthy. Believe the Coke’s claims and the lies are likely to explode in your face, leaving you with some rather sticky health issues.
Your Move
Your internal tastebuds are hardwired to detect two tastes on the inside. Sweet and bitter. The former suppresses your immune system and makes you eat more. The latter elevates your immune system and helps keep your body mass check. You’re blissfully unaware of the intricacies involved in these processes. Whether bitter foods can help the bitter taste receptors in your airways and nose, mount a stronger immune response remains to be proved. However, this is an area begging for more research.
It is certain that supplying your gut and pancreas with bitter foods helps you get to your fighting weight. Real food and bitter tastes carry information that directs your hormones, cells, and physiology. Sweet, processed food is confused and disinforms your body. Food is more than just a macro nutrient numbers game. It delivers powerful messages that impact your mind, body, and overall feelings of wellness. It does this by tasting them from the inside out. Remember this when you’re zero-calorie soda in hand. Every magic trick comes at a cost. Especially the sweet ones.
Bittersweet Tip 11: Feast on Stalks
Broccoli doesn’t selectively divide its nutrients into the floret and stalk. Instead, it just distributes its goodness evenly, yet most people toss away the bitter stalks. That’s money wasted and nutrients that could be elevating your health. Here’s what the stalks give you:
Vitamin A for skin and eye health
Vitamin C for immunity
Fiber for satiety
Folate for energy
Sulforaphane for fighting cancer
Five ways to eat broccoli stems
1. Dice and add to a green smoothie with spinach, avocado pineapple, banana and mango.
2. Freeze and use to create vegetable stock or bone broth
3. Slice longways and add to a stir fry
4. Dice and add to soups, stews, and casseroles
5. Grate broccoli stems and add to coleslaw or salad