Every year at this time there is a lot of information and recipes with winter vegetables like Brussel’s Sprouts, broccoli, and winter squash.
As a child I had a hard time with Brussel’s sprouts. The taste was so strong for me and nobody else thought so. “Oh, it’s just because you are a child and can still taste food. You haven’t been drinking hot or icy beverages or smoking to destroy your taste buds. You’ll learn to like them and even like rutabaga, eventually.” Adults were always saying things like this to me. Did they say the same to you?
Many articles were published about how children could taste foods that tasted really strong to them, that adults couldn’t taste as strong or bitter. And they said due to all the hot and ice cold things adults drink and eat, their taste buds have been dimmed or toned down.
My mother was, what I like to call, an English cook. She never used herbs or spices unless she had to like in pumpkin pie. Everything had to be cooked for an hour no matter what it was. You can imagine how the house smelled the days she boiled cabbage for dinner for an hour. Sulfur city! Liver or chicken cooked for an hour seemed nearly inedible to me.
Yes, there were days I would sneak herbs and/or garlic into the food she was making. She loved the taste, until I mentioned I had added garlic, and then she would throw a fit and say the food wasn’t right with all that garlic. So I quit telling her what I was adding to her food. I often used to say, when I had Kathleen’s Cooking and Nutrition Centre for 20+ years, that I learned to cook to save my life. Oh, her food was always well-made and tasty, but very bland and predictable. Same old— same old at every holiday.
Thanksgiving was the time for Brussel’s sprouts. They are a fall vegetable. But they were so bitter I had a hard time eating them. The same with cabbage and spinach. Unless they were drenched with something like cole slaw dressing or mashed in with cream cheese to make creamed spinach. But Brussel’s sprouts were not able to be disguised like that in our house, just a little bit of margarine on it and maybe salt and pepper, but not too much pepper. So I always had an attitude towards them. “Why would anyone want to eat something so bitter”, I often asked myself and grownups when I was a child. But adults would just chuckle a little and say something like: you’ll get used to them and eventually grow to like them.
It took a long time. I eat them now, but prepare them myself. I have learned the secret to it. Yes, for me and thousands of others like me Brussel’s sprouts take a lot of work and time to get used to. About 35% of women and 15% of men in the United States are supertasters and have this problem with not just Brussel’s sprouts, but also kale, spinach, broccoli, green peppers, grapefruit juice, tomatoes, coffee, and dark chocolate.
These are the foods that contain chemicals that supertasters can taste and nontasters can’t. It’s the bitter principal that they can taste. I have often recommended eating bitter herbs to improve digestion of fats, but as a child I never thought about the bitter taste being one of the good qualities of these foods. There is a lot science around this taste sensation and some psychologists use these genetic tasting with their clients. There are nontasters, medium tasters, and supertasters.
I’m a super taster! I’ve known about it since university biology classes at Wayne State University in Detroit in the 1960s. We were studying Gregor Mendel’s genetics of inheritance theory. How two blond parents are most likely to have blond children, but a dark haired parent and blond parent have chances of several different hair colors in their children. So geneticists make charts of the probability of the hair color to show all the different possibilities, kind of like a guessing game for parents. To illustrate this scientific theory the professor gave us all a small piece of paper and said to wait until he told us to before we put it in our mouths to test us. Apparently, there were people who could taste something on this paper that others couldn’t and it was genetic. Cool, I thought, a practical use for biology.
So he gave the word and we all put the little square of paper on our tongues. Before it was saturated I was spitting it out, wiping my tongue with my hankie (it was the 1960s after all) and running out to the drinking fountain to rinse my mouth out. It was horrible, so bitter I couldn’t stand it. Of course the class thought I was faking it, but I was not! It was nasty. When I came back in the professor declared: Kathleen is a supertaster.
Yep, I could taste it whereas very few others in my class could. I had never heard of a supertaster. But I suspect that being a supertaster is the reason I can’t handle the taste of most stevia and quinoa. I can’t even imagine why someone would eat quinoa, it is so bitter, even the kind that says it has reduced the bitter taste is still bitter to me. I can’t eat pasta where quinoa is only a small proportion of the entire pasta, still too bitter.
There are two tastes that are the tastes that define supertasters: PROP and PTC. PROP is short for propylthiouracil , PTC is phenylthiocarbamide. The gene they think is responsible for this supertaster phenomenon is TAS2R38. So if you can taste the bitter part of these listed foods, you might be a supertaster.
You also can tell if you are a super taster by looking at your tongue. Supertasters have more taste buds than nontasters. They show this by using a small sterilized paper with a hole punched in it by a paper punch. This is put on the front of the tongue and then the red raised up taste buds are counted. If you have at least 35 of them in that tiny little hole you are a super taster. This was not covered in my book The Anger Cure in the graph titled “Stories the tongue can tell”. This was too weird and too rare to put in there, and I wasn’t talking about genetics.
What can be done about it? If you have family members who complain about the strong or bitter taste of Brussel’s sprouts, spinach, kale, etc. there is hope for your Thanksgiving dinner this year. The bitter taste is covered up by oil and dairy (presumably full fat dairy), sugar, and salt.
Here is the sad news. You can use more salt on the food or add sugar, both block the ability of the tongue to taste these two chemicals in food. Now you know why people develop a taste for highly salted and sugary fast foods. Strangely enough supertasters often dislike fat. So drenching Brussel’s sprouts in a lot of butter and bacon fat is not going to appeal to them either. But adding salt to their portion will help or even adding a little bit of sugar can stop the bitter taste from being overpowering. Sad news because adding salt and sugar to foods is not always a good idea healthwise.
So if you have picky eaters this holiday season make sure you serve Brussel’s sprouts with an added topping like a mild cream sauce, or oil and vinegar and herbs. Roasted Brussel’s sprouts often have the added advantage of having some form of oil or butter on them. Most of the recipes for roasted Brussel’s sprouts call for bacon and/or bacon fat on them with additional herbs or even grated lemon peel. If your family follows vegan eating you would not want to use dairy or bacon, but a nice vegan béchamel sauce would be nice. Soy is also one of the foods in the category of bitter for supertasters, so keep that in mind as well if you decide to use soy on Brussel’s sprouts.
A perfect addition would be CocoBacon. This vegan product contains all the tastes that will make Brussel’s sprouts tasty and reduce the bitter taste for your supertaster. CocoBacon is coconut with organic mesquite smoke flavoring, organic coconut sugar, Celtic sea salt, and other organic seasonings. It contains both sugar and salt and tastes like bacon. I heard about these fabulous coconut products at Selina Naturally when I was a guest on the Frankie Boyer radio show out of Boston. Frankie recommended them and they are really fabulous.
If you suspect that you or someone in your family is a supertaster you might want to do some research on what it is and how to make the bitter foods palatable to supertasters. All you have to do is ask them if they find that any of the foods listed above taste bitter to them. You might already know because they would not want to eat these foods and might be described as ‘picky eaters’ when in reality they might just be supertasters. Happy Thanksgiving, hope you are having Brussel’s sprouts.
Kathleen O’Bannon, BA, DD, CNC, is the author of 12 books on nutrition and healing. As an international Television and radio personality and corporate speaker, she is available to speak to your group on health and healing, Food and Mood at Work, or customize programs to fit your needs. She can be reached at kathleen@kathleenobannon.com.
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