If you crave your daily dose of java in the morning, you might just be bitter. A new study by Northwestern Medicine and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia reveals that the more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink.
“You’d expect that people who are particularly sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee,” said Marilyn Cornelis, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “The opposite results of our study suggest coffee consumers acquire a taste or an ability to detect caffeine due to the learned positive reinforcement (i.e. stimulation) elicited by caffeine.”
Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances. By evolutionary logic, we should want to spit it out. But thanks to a genetic variant, making some people more sensitive to bitter tastes, the opposite actually holds true. “The findings suggest our perception of bitter tastes, informed by our genetics, contributes to the preference for coffee, tea and alcohol,” Cornelis said.
In other words, people who have a heightened ability to taste coffee’s bitterness, particularly the distinct bitter flavor of caffeine, learn to associate “good things with it,” Cornelis said. Which is great news for Starbucks stockholders.
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