What'll it be?

Sometimes I let my fingers do the walking through the internet, and here I am. I just stumbled across a site called "mindbodygreen," which is all about "mindfulness, health, food, movement, beauty, home, parenting, the planet..." and more.  Apparently, one can stay on this site forever; there is hardly a topic they don't touch on, with the possible exception of Jim Palmer's lifetime statistics (268 wins, 152 losses, with a 2.86 earned run average.)

And they talk about coffee and tea, two topics I enjoy. I love tea, hot and cold. Coffee, I only take when we dine at Friendly Farm; all other coffee tastes like bitter dishwater to me.

But the "mbg" site talks of a study in Scientific Reports, which says that we choose coffee over tea (or vice versa) based on our ability to detect bitterness. But...you'd think that sensing bitterness would point a person toward drinking more tea, since coffee is bitter, but Northwestern University and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia did a study of over 400,000 participants, and that's what they found.  The more sensitive a person is toward bitter taste, the more likely they are to say, "Make mine Maxwell House."

The conclusion is that it all in your genes; your genetic background determines how much bitterness you can take. "The findings suggest our perception of bitter tastes, informed by our genetics, contributes to the preference for coffee, tea, and alcohol," Marilyn Cornelis, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told Science Daily.

None of this makes any sense on any level to me. It's like saying if you don't like tomatoes, you'll probably love tomato soup. And the researchers say that by all rights, none of us should like coffee, because our minds tell us, when our tongue tastes something bitter, that this is a warning that what we're tasting might be harmful.

The brainiacs behind this study posit that we love the jolt of caffeine (from coffee, which has twice the caffeine of tea) so much that we have rewired our brains to make us like coffee after all.

Now, I need to conduct a study about coffee drinkers to tell me why they never finish their cup o' joe! Look around any coffeehouse, office, shipping dock or Woolworth Luncheonette, and you'll find half-drunk cups of coffee left behind.  I'm guessing the #1 reason will be that people don't finish drinking their coffee because 1/2way through it, they realized it tastes like coffee!