I wonder if we should be eating some of these bitter things like cranberries. Without adding tons of sugar, I could not eat them. Is nature telling us something with the bitterness? Or should the ‘bitterness test’ be disregarded.
Another idea is we need to eat some bitter to balance out the sweets we eat. I read that eating bitter helps increase bile production. (But don’t know if it is true.)
Lots of our domesticated fruits wild version are bitter, like unimproved crab apples and citrons. If we didn’t eat and improve upon bitter fruits, we wouldn’t have most of our fruits today.
As to why some fruits are bitter, I think that is because they are mainly propagated by birds, which can’t taste bitterness. If your main source of reproducing doesn’t need your fruit to taste good, don’t waste energy on it. For some fruits, that bitterness comes from poisonous compounds to us (like nightshades) but thats not true for every fruit.
Personally, I think that is why a large portion of wild berries are bitter in comparsion to wild large fruits (especially tropicals) that would need larger animals to spread their seeds. I have no real scientific basis for this, but it makes sense to me. I have “other logical but have no backing” lines of reasoning that build off of this, but since this is all purely conjecture I’ll leave it at that.
Lots of bitter and astringent compounds in fruit and vegetables have health benefits for animals/us.
@Zone6
I eat craisins at least twice a week. They are tart, not bitter. The latter involves alkaline compounds, while the former involves acidic compounds.