SSS 2011-04-01

（单词翻译）

This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.

They say you should take the bitter with the sweet. But if you're not a big fan of bitter, chemists have just the loophole for you. Oh, you'll still have to take the bitter. But you won't have to taste it. Because scientists have concocted¹ a new and improved "bitter blocker." They touted² their triumph at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Our taste buds allow us to detect sweet and sour, salty and savory³, and, of course, bitter. Of that set of taste sensations, bitterness, most agree, is the most disagreeable. And we can thank (or blame) evolution. We likely find bitter bad because many toxic⁴ substances are bitter. So an aversion to bitter may have helped our ancestors survive.

Problem is, plenty of healthful foods are bitter, too. Take broccoli⁵ and kale. (Please.) The standard solution, drowning out the bitter with butter, sort of cancels out the veggies' health food status.

Rather than getting rid of the bitter, chemists came up with a compound that simply blocks our receptors for the bitter molecules⁶, and our ability to taste them. So you may not need that spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. Or the broccoli.

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkin.