Eli5: Why do Adults generally enjoy bitter tasting things (ie. Coffee, beer, dark chocolate) when children rarely do?
In: Other
Okay, but there’s an actual reason these other comments don’t address.
Children are more sensitive to bitter tastes. We know this, and there’s a few theories about why. The most popular is that it stops kids from being poisoned, because bitter plants are more likely to be poisonous (coffee, for instance, is mildly poisonous).
As you get older, this effect diminishes (probably because evolution didn’t select for it after a certain point in life), and some people begin to enjoy (and most people tolerate) bitter tastes.
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