Life wouldnโ€™t be as sweet without the bitter. Itโ€™s an adage for life, one that really seems to have been taken to heart by coffee drinker of the world who are pushing this fanciful turn of phrase to its logical conclusion: lifeโ€™s potential for sweetness can only be increased by the addition of more bitter. Lots of it. A new study shows that those more sensitive to bitter tastes consume more coffee than those who arenโ€™t.

As reported by NPR, researchers looked through collected data from the UK Biobank, a genetic repository where โ€œmore than 500,000 people have contributed blood, urine and saliva samplesโ€ as well as โ€œfilled out questionnaires asking a variety of health-related questions, including how much coffee they drink.โ€

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For their analysis, researchers pored over the half million participants to find those who were more or less sensitive to one or more of three bitter compounds: caffeine, quinine, and propylthiouracil, a substance generally used in โ€œgenetic tests of people’s ability to taste bitter compounds.โ€ When cross-referencing the participants with their self-reported coffee intake, the researchers found that people more sensitive to caffeineโ€”meaning those who are more genetically adept at picking up on its bitter tasteโ€”consumed more coffee than those less sensitive to it, by two tablespoons on average. Interestingly enough, those sensitive to quinine or propylthiouracilโ€”neither of which are in coffeeโ€”consumed less.

To explain the ostensibly counterintuitive findings, Marilyn Cornelis, an assistant professor of preventative medicine at Northwestern Universityโ€™s Feinberg School of Medicine and one of the studyโ€™s authors, postulates that it isnโ€™t the taste that keeps people coming back but what they associate with it, namely the energy jolt. Folks may โ€œlearn to associate that bitter taste with the stimulation that coffee can provide,โ€ as Cornelis states.

It just goes to show the alchemical calculus coffee drinkers perform on a daily, if not multiple times a day, basis: that if you are going to chase the dragon of sweet, sweet liquid mental acuity, youโ€™re going to need equal parts bitter to catch it.

Zac Cadwaladerย is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.ย Read more Zac Cadwaladerย on Sprudge.

Top image ยฉ Vladimir Floyd/Adobe Stock

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