Coffee Tastes Bitter, So Why Do People Drink It?

Pedro_P

Credit: Shutterstock
▼ It may sound counterintuitive, but people who are supersensitive to coffee's bitter taste actually drink more of it, a new study finds.
This sensitivity isn't simply a matter of taste, either, but rather is influenced by a person's genetic makeup, the researchers said in the study, which was published online today (Nov. 15) in the journal Scientific Reports.
"You'd expect that people who are particularly sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee," study senior researcher Marilyn Cornelis, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said in a statement. "The opposite results of our study suggest coffee consumers acquire a taste [for] or an ability to detect [the bitterness of] caffeine due to the learned positive reinforcement elicited by caffeine."
Put another way, people who have a heightened ability to taste the bitterness of coffee, and especially the distinct bitter flavor of caffeine, learn to associate "good things with it," Cornelis said. This finding is surprising, given that bitterness often serves as a warning mechanism to convince people to spit out harmful substances, the scientists said.
Researchers conducted the study to understand how genetics influences people's consumption of tea, coffee and alcohol, which tend to taste bitter, said lead study researcher Jue Sheng Ong, a doctoral student in the Department of Genetics and Computational Biology at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia. (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, read the full note here: Source