Bitter is Medicinal

It's funny how we tend to take a lot of bullshit that we were fed as kids, into adulthood and most times don't even realize how wrong those things are until we finally read about the truth somewhere or something happens that exposes us to the real truth.

And while there are many of this bullshit that I speak of, today I will be focusing on just one, which is that "Anything bitter is good for our health"

_{photo by Christine Sandu}

I honestly don't know where this mentality came from, but if I'm to give my best guess, it will be due to the fact that most medicinal drugs out there, be it natural drugs or the pharmaceutical ones, they are almost always bitter. So that, somehow must have given us the idea that if it's bitter then it's good.

And we really really bought this idea, up to the extent where sometimes, we see those few good tasting drugs as ineffective, compared to the bitter ones.

I remember back in the day when my mom would ask me to go to the pharmacy to get vitamin c tablet. Now over here, there are usually two famous kind of vitamin c pills, the white one which is also known as the bitter one, and then the orange one which has a sweet taste to it.

So whenever I'm sent to buy vitamin c for me to take, I would always ask for the colored one and sometimes my mom would ask me to return it and get the white one because to her, the orange one was nothing but candy. Well, I recently found out that irrespective of their colors, they both work the same thing and I've never felt more stupid ever since because I had believed the whole bitter thing all along.

The same thing also applies to fruits, I've witnessed multiple occasions where one mistakenly buys a fruit that turns out to be bitter, instead of returning it or throwing it away, they would force themselves to eat it because apparently, the bitter ones are medicinal.

I know how many times I've been forced to eat that bitter tasting cucumber simply because I was told it was ten times better than the normal tasting cucumber. Now maybe that is somewhat true, but I highly doubt it.

The list goes on and on, another good example being the bitter leaf soup, and I know some of you will come at me for that because y'all believe that using a bitter leaf that taste terrible is a good idea for whatever reason but hey, to each his own.

Anyways, it's high time we stop thinking like this because while some of it may be true, it's not always true.