Bitter Is Better

Scientists now understand that naturally occurring phytonutrients found in vegetables and fruits may be even more important to good nutrition than the vitamins in these foods and can help prevent chronic inflammation and halt the production of cancercausing agents in the body, blocking activation of these chemicals or suppressing the spread of cancer cells that already exist. The vegetables and fruits researchers think are most capable of preventing cancer and other diseases, including heart disease, are green leafy vegetables, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, onions, citrus fruit (not the juice), grapes, red wine, green tea, and others. One common theme in many of these types of foods is their taste: the more bitter or pungent, the better.

For plants, these bitter-tasting phytonutrients serve as natural insect repellents and pesticides. Some are even toxic to small animals like birds, mice, and rats, including some compounds in cabbage and brussels sprouts. Generally, higher amounts of bitter-tasting phytonutrients are found in sprouts and seedlings than in mature plants. This provides young plants with natural protection from being eaten at an early stage of life, before the chance of reproduction. But you would have to consume pounds and pounds of vegetables daily to ingest toxic amounts of phytonutrients.

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

Despite the therapeutic and nutritional value of phytonutrients, the food industry is solving the so-called problem of bitterness in vegetables and fruits by removing these healthful chemicals through genetic engineering and selective breeding. Unfortunately, our culture has associated bitterness with bad taste instead of health promotion. Now many agricultural scientists, who want foods sweeter, are artificially changing our natural food supply for us—they are literally removing the healthy components from certain foods in order to sell more food products. And they are succeeding. Canola oil, for example, has had its phytonutrients significantly reduced through selective breeding. And transgenic citrus is now common as both fruit and juice—it’s sweeter but it’s also free of limonene, the bitter substance that can help prevent and treat skin cancer. With the consumption of more sugar, and with packaged and processed foods being sweeter than ever before, many humans have not only lost their taste for vegetables because of bitterness, but find the natural taste of such foods as leaf lettuce, parsley, and zucchini offensive.

Cancer researchers propose that a heightened sense of bitterness might be a healthy trait, allowing people to select foods with the highest phytonutrient content. This view contrasts with the food industry’s practice of measuring the content of these bitter phytonutrients merely as a way of developing new non-bitter, phytonutrient-deficient strains. So while some nutrition scientists propose enhancing phytonutrients in foods for better health, the standard industry practice has been to remove them for better taste. Indeed, the lower amount of bitter compounds in the modern diet reflects the “achievement” of the food industry. The irony is that as agricultural scientists remove more phytonutrients from plants, farmers have to use even more chemical pesticides to protect their crops; thus, consumers are left with the double whammy of vegetables and fruits with less nutrition and more harmful pesticides.

In addition to bitterness, an astringent taste is also associated with healthy phytonutrients. These tastes can actually be quite attractive. Consider a fine-aged Bordeaux wine or a high-quality green tea. Unfortunately, these are exceptions, and sweetness is a dominant taste preference, or perhaps “addiction” is a better word.

You can get more phytonutrients into your diet by eating foods that have a natural bitter or astringent taste. In addition to zucchini and other squashes, pumpkins, cucumbers, melon, citrus, and many other vegetables and fruits, along with almonds and many types of beans, contain natural phytonutrients, as do red wine, green tea, and cocoa.