Bitter pill

The world seems obsessed with inventing words these days. That’s fine because language has always evolved but the pace these days is quite rapid and some of the evolution a little vacuous. Still, word-creating is a bandwagon so let’s get on it and talk about the “blandification” of society. Yes, just about everything is becoming beige these days and “bland” has become a goal rather than a criticism. There has been blandification of politics; in their desperate rush to not stand for anything and make themselves into a small target politicians have turned blandification into an art form. This of course is an extension of the fact that thought itself has become blandified: the facile need to “accept” everything (totally missing the true and active meaning of “acceptance”) has made the search for a understanding a vice and has elevated to the status of “thinker” those who can reiterate the bland shades of grey that they have read somewhere else.

Perhaps because of all this, or perhaps causing all this, is the blandification of food. In the Western world in particular, most food is fatty or sweet and bitterness is avoided. You could take the view that it is all just a matter of taste, but the problem with that is that bitter tastes actually do you world of good. A new study has found that bitter tastes do so in a previously unknown way.

Your sense of taste is really a combination of many senses but it comes primarily from receptors located in the taste buds on your tongue. You have receptors for sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami (savoury). Bitter receptors can alert your body to the fact that a food may be spoiled or poisonous, but bitter taste is not all bad. Bitter tastes from foods like romaine lettuce have long been known to stimulate digestive juices, hence drinks including bitters have been drunk as aperitif before a meal to get digestion going. In this study, though, it has been shown that there are bitter receptors in lung tissue as well.

It is the smooth muscle cells in the airways of the lungs that have been found to have these receptors for bitter compounds. In this new study, the capacity for these bitter compounds to relax airways has suggested that they may be a highly effective treatment for asthma.

In an asthma attack, channels in the membrane of smooth muscle cells in the airways open up, allowing calcium to flow into the cell. This causes the cell, and the airway, to contract, making breathing more difficult because the airway is narrower. However, when a bitter compound attaches to the bitter receptor in the cell membrane, it causes the calcium channel to close, calcium levels return to normal in the cell, the cell relaxes and airways return to normal. The researchers say that these bitter compounds cause these “dilating” effects quicker and with fewer side-effects than current asthma medications.

This study was based on directly exposing the bronchial cells to bitter compounds, so whether simply eating bitter foods would have any effect is doubtful and certainly unproven. However, the fact that these bitter receptors are being found in tissues around the body, not just in the lungs, suggests that eating more bitter foods would be no bad thing. You can rest assured as well that sometime soon drugs will be available using these bitter elements.

In the meantime, be the change that you want to see in the world and be an advocate of the piquant in all areas of life…the world needs more peak ants.