Have We Forgotten How to Be Bitter?

Could America's collective digestive complaints be partly related to the disappearance of bitters from the table?

There is something peculiar about bitterness. It is one of the five basic tastes, and yet it is the one modern people (Americans, I mean) seem most determined to avoid.

We have engineered bitterness out of our vegetables, sweetened our coffee, removed the bitter compounds from foods whenever possible, and built an entire food culture around making things smoother, sweeter, richer, and easier to like.

And then we wonder why so many of us seem to have forgotten how to digest a meal.

I don't mean that literally. Bitters are not a magic answer to America's digestive complaints, and I certainly would not claim that every case of bloating, reflux, constipation, belching, or indigestion is caused by a lack of bitter herbs.

But I do think we have lost something interesting.

We have lost a bitter culture.

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And as an herbalist, the more I study bitters, the more fascinating that loss becomes. Bitterness isn't merely a flavor. It is information. It is a sensory signal. It is a pharmacological category. And historically, it was an important part of the way human beings related to food, medicine, and the digestive process.

Before the meal, there was often something bitter

For centuries, bitter herbs have occupied a strange territory between food and medicine.

The traditions are old. European herbal medicine inherited a long tradition of using bitter plants as digestive and tonic herbs, with gentian, wormwood, centaury, dandelion, artichoke, chicory, and countless other bitter plants appearing in various materia medica.

The basic herbal idea was beautifully simple:

Bitterness prepares.

A bitter taste on the tongue was traditionally understood to "wake up" digestion. To stimulate the appetite, salivation, gastric secretions, and the broader physiological processes involved in receiving and processing food. Modern physiology is giving us some surprisingly interesting pieces of evidence for why that traditional observation may have made sense.

We now know that humans have approximately 25 different bitter taste receptors, known as TAS2Rs. And those receptors aren't confined to the tongue. They occur throughout the gastrointestinal tract as well.

Researchers have found bitter receptors on cells of the stomach and intestines, including enteroendocrine cells that participate in sensing what has entered the digestive tract and coordinating digestive and metabolic responses.

In other words, your digestive tract doesn't simply sit there waiting for food to arrive. It is constantly tasting.

Not tasting in the way your tongue tastes a lemon or a piece of chocolate, but chemically sensing the contents of the digestive tract and responding accordingly.

Bitter compounds can interact with this chemosensory system and influence signaling involving gastrointestinal hormones, motility, gastric emptying, satiety, and other digestive processes. That is a very different picture from the old idea that taste is merely about deciding whether something is delicious.

Taste is part of digestion.

And bitterness appears to be one of the oldest and most sophisticated pieces of that signaling system.

Bitterness and the stomach

Now we get into the particularly nerdy part.

One of the reasons bitters have traditionally been used before meals is the idea that they can encourage the digestive secretions needed to process food.

And there is some fascinating mechanistic evidence here.

Human gastric cells express bitter taste receptors, and experimental work has demonstrated that certain bitter compounds can influence proton secretion, which is the process by which the stomach produces hydrochloric acid. One study found that bitter receptor signaling was involved in gastric acid secretion, while other research has demonstrated that various bitter compounds can stimulate proton secretion in human gastric cell models.

A 2026 study looking at a complex digestive herbal preparation containing bitter herbs including gentian, wormwood, yarrow, chicory, and dandelion found concentration-dependent stimulation of proton secretion in human gastric parietal cell models, with bitter polyphenolic compounds implicated in the effect.

This is fascinating.

But here is where I want to put on my herbalist hat and my scientist hat at the same time:

This does not mean that taking bitters will "fix low stomach acid."

Human digestion is considerably more complicated than that.

The evidence for specific commercial bitters preparations increasing gastric acid in people with diagnosed hypochlorhydria is not robust enough for me to make that claim.

And digestive complaints such as reflux, bloating, belching, or early fullness have many possible causes. "Low stomach acid" has also become something of a catch-all explanation in wellness culture, when the actual physiology may be considerably more complicated.

What we can say is that bitter compounds interact with receptors and signaling systems involved in digestion, and that the traditional use of bitters as digestive stimulants has some interesting physiological plausibility behind it. The most interesting thing about bitters may not be that they force the stomach to make more acid. It may be that they help the body prepare to eat.

Your body begins digesting before the food arrives

Think about what happens when you smell dinner cooking.

You salivate. Your stomach begins preparing. Your nervous system shifts. You become hungry. Your digestive tract is already getting the message:

Food is coming.

This is part of the cephalic phase of digestion, or the anticipatory phase in which sensory input helps coordinate digestive physiology before the meal has even reached the stomach.

And bitter taste is one of the sensory signals capable of participating in this conversation. This is one reason I find the traditional timing of bitters so compelling.

A bitter tincture taken shortly before a meal isn't simply "putting herbs in your stomach."

You are tasting them. And that taste itself is information. A few drops of a genuinely bitter preparation can create a remarkable physiological punctuation mark:

We are about to eat.

Perhaps this is part of what traditional cultures understood intuitively long before we had TAS2R receptors and enteroendocrine cells to explain it.

And then there is Italy.

Which is particularly convenient for me, because I am about to go there.

I have been studying bitters for some time now, and this September I am going to Puglia (again) with my husband and son. (Fun fact: Caspian was made in Italy!)

The trip is not a research trip. I did not plan a family vacation to Italy because I thought, "Excellent, this will be a convenient way to conduct my bitter-herb studies." But I would be lying if I said I wasn't tremendously excited about the accidental overlap, because Italy has retained something that much of American culture has largely misplaced: a cultural relationship with bitterness.

Think about the Italian aperitivo. The very word aperitivo comes from the Latin aperire—"to open." It is something taken before a meal.

Then there is the digestivo. Something taken after the meal.

And somewhere in between these two rituals lives the wonderfully broad Italian world of amari—herbal, bitter, aromatic preparations that can be sipped as beverages and traditionally associated with the end of a meal.

The point isn't that every Italian is taking a medicinal tincture before dinner. They aren't.

And an amaro is not interchangeable with an herbal digestive bitter. Many are alcoholic, often sweetened, and designed as beverages rather than concentrated herbal preparations.

But culturally, the important thing is that bitterness has a place at the table. There is an accepted ritual space for bitter flavor.

There is an understanding that the meal has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

There is aperitivo. There is dinner. There is digestivo.

And there is an entire category of food and drink built around preparing for and closing out the meal. That fascinates me. Because in America, our digestive rituals increasingly look something like this:

Eat quickly. Eat while standing. Eat while driving. Eat while answering emails. Eat a giant portion. Drink something sweet. Then, when the stomach objects, reach for something to make the discomfort go away.

We have become remarkably good at managing digestive consequences.

Perhaps we could spend a little more time thinking about digestive preparation.

So what happened to America's bitters?

This is where the history gets particularly interesting.

America actually had a huge bitters culture. Nineteenth-century America was awash in bitters.

Bitters were sold as tonics, stomach remedies, stimulants, patent medicines, and "cures" for an almost comically broad range of ailments. The Library of Congress has preserved advertisements for products such as "Dewdrop Bitters—the great American stomach regulator," "Isham's celebrated stomach bitters," and countless other preparations marketed as medicinal compounds.

Bitters were not some obscure herbalist's curiosity. They were mainstream. But there was a problem.

The American bitters tradition became entangled with the patent medicine industry. And that industry was not exactly a shining example of responsible herbal medicine.

Proprietary preparations could contain undisclosed ingredients, alcohol, opiates, stimulants, and other substances, while advertising promised extravagant therapeutic effects. By the early twentieth century, investigative journalism and growing public concern over these practices helped fuel the movement toward federal regulation, culminating in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Bitters, unfortunately, got swept up in that history.

And then something else happened: Bitters moved. They migrated from the apothecary to the bar.

One of the earliest printed definitions of the cocktail, dating to the early nineteenth century, described a mixture of spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. By the late nineteenth century, bitters had become strongly associated with cocktail culture.

And this is one of the great ironies of American bitters:

We didn't stop using bitters.

We changed what we used them for.

Instead of taking a few bitter drops before dinner because we wanted to engage our digestion, we started putting them into whiskey.

Instead of bitters being part of the meal ritual, they became part of the cocktail ritual. And eventually, even that relationship became somewhat specialized.

Today, if you tell someone you make bitters, they may immediately think of cocktail bitters.

If you tell an Italian you make digestive bitters, the conversation may go in a very different direction.

What if we simply became afraid of bitter?

There is another piece to this story that I find even more interesting. Modern food culture is increasingly optimized for immediate pleasure.

Sweet. Salty. Fatty. Creamy. Crispy. Umami. Convenient.

Bitterness is inconvenient. Bitterness requires adaptation.

Children naturally tend to reject bitter flavors because bitterness historically functioned as a warning signal for potentially toxic plants. That aversion is not irrational. It is part of our biology.

But traditional food cultures learned how to work with bitterness.

They paired it with fat. With salt. With acid. With sweetness. With fermentation. With cooking. They learned that bitter foods could be delicious. And medicinal cultures learned that the unpleasantness of a bitter herb was not necessarily a flaw.

Sometimes the bitterness was the point.

Modern food manufacturing has largely gone in the opposite direction. We breed less bitterness into vegetables. We remove bitter compounds. We sweeten products. We make everything approachable. And there is nothing inherently wrong with making food delicious. But perhaps we have taken "delicious" to mean never challenging the palate.

And the digestive system may have lost one of its oldest sensory languages along the way.

Before and after: bringing the ritual back

So what would happen if we brought bitters back... not as a miracle supplement, but as a meal ritual?

I think there is something worth experimenting with here.

Traditionally, digestive bitters are most interesting before the meal.

A small amount of bitter preparation on the tongue 10–15 minutes before eating gives the sensory system a chance to register that bitterness and begin the cascade of anticipatory digestive signaling.

This is where I especially like the idea of using bitters as a ritual rather than another thing to remember to take.

You prepare the table. You sit down. You take your bitters. You pause. You smell the food. You taste the bitter herbs. And then you eat. The goal isn't to force digestion.

It's to arrive at the meal.

And after the meal?

This is where the Italian tradition becomes especially charming.

A small digestivo, a cup of bitter herbal tea, or another gentle digestive preparation can serve as a signal that the meal is complete.

It creates a transition. The kitchen closes. The plates are cleared. Conversation continues. The body moves from eating toward resting and digesting. There is something profoundly human about that.

We don't necessarily need another supplement schedule.

Maybe we need better rituals.

Bitters aren't just "for digestion"

The more I study bitter herbs, the more I think the category is too interesting to reduce to "something you take when your stomach hurts."

Bitterness is a sensory quality shared by an enormous diversity of plant constituents.

Gentian's secoiridoids. Wormwood's sesquiterpene lactones. Dandelion's sesquiterpene lactones and phenolic compounds. Artichoke's caffeoylquinic acids and flavonoids. Citrus peel's flavonoids and other bitter compounds. And those compounds don't all behave identically.

That is part of what makes formulation so interesting.

A good bitters formula is not simply:

Add five bitter herbs.

It is an exercise in balancing tissue states, energetics, chemistry, taste, affinity, and the practical experience of taking the formula.

Some bitters are intensely cold and drying (actually, most true bitters are). Some are warming. Some are aromatic. Some are pungent. Some are mineral-rich. Some have a strong hepatic affinity. Some are more specifically stomachic. Some bring movement. Some bring relaxation.

And some are so spectacularly bitter that you wonder whether the plant is personally offended by you.

That is the kind of nerdy territory I love.

Prelude

Which brings me to the newest member of the Morningstar Botanical House apothecary.

Prelude.

I chose the name very deliberately (an homage to my previous life as a musician).

A prelude is an introduction. The opening movement.

The thing that tells you: Something is about to begin. And that is exactly how I think about a good digestive bitter.

Prelude is designed to be taken before the meal to awaken the palate, engage the bitter taste receptors, and begin the ritual of digestion.

The formulation is:

• Gentian root — the classic bitter
• Burdock root
• Dandelion root
• Grapefruit peel
• Lemon balm
• Ginger

I wanted this to be unmistakably bitter. Not bitter in the sense of "technically contains a bitter herb."

Actually bitter. But I also wanted it to be beautiful.

Burdock and dandelion provide a broad, earthy root foundation. Gentian brings the unmistakable intensity of the classic bitter. Grapefruit peel adds bright citrus bitterness. Lemon balm brings aromatic softness. Ginger adds warmth and movement.

It is a formula intended to make you pay attention.

And that is fitting, because I don't want Prelude to be the end of my bitters exploration.

I want it to be the beginning. (Another facet to the name, Prelude)

A whole bitter line is coming

Prelude is, quite literally, the prelude to an entire line of bitters I am developing.

Different digestive constitutions. Different tissue states. Different kinds of digestive patterns. Different herbal affinities. Different expressions of bitterness.

Because the more I study these plants, the more convinced I become that "digestive bitters" shouldn't be a single category with one universal formula.

Digestion is not one-size-fits-all. Why should the bitters be?

This line will take time.

I want to study these formulas deeply. I want to work with the plants individually and together. I want to understand their chemistry, energetics, traditional uses, sensory qualities, and physiological effects.

And now, I am about to have another rather wonderful layer of education added to the mix.

Italy.

Specifically, Puglia.

I am going to spend time in a region where food, herbs, bitterness, olive oil, citrus, wine, communal meals, and hospitality have been woven together for generations.

I am not going to Italy to study bitters. But I am absolutely going to let Italy teach me something about them.

I want to taste. I want to observe. I want to pay attention to what happens before the meal, during the meal, and after it. I want to notice what herbs show up in food. What gets paired with bitterness. What gets served after dinner. What people do without thinking about it.

Sometimes the best education isn't another textbook. Sometimes it is sitting at a table.

Maybe the question isn't "What's wrong with our digestion?"

Maybe the question is: What have we forgotten about eating?

We have become very good at thinking about food as fuel. We have become very good at thinking about digestion as a mechanical process. We have become very good at reaching for something after the fact.

But digestion begins before the first bite. It begins with anticipation. With smell. With sight. With saliva. With appetite. With the nervous system. With the sensory experience of food. And, perhaps, with bitterness.

The evidence does not justify saying that a lack of bitters is the cause of America's digestive complaints. But I think it is fair to ask whether the disappearance of bitter foods and bitter rituals represents a small but meaningful loss.

Our ancestors did not need to know what a TAS2R receptor was to understand that certain herbs prepared the stomach for food. They knew because they used them. And perhaps we don't need to turn that wisdom into a miracle cure. Perhaps we can simply bring a little bitterness back to the table. Not because bitter is fashionable. Not because it fixes everything. But because sometimes the things that challenge our palate are also the things that teach our bodies to pay attention.

Prelude is the first movement. Coming for the October 11 Autumn Drop.

xo Dannica 🌿✨

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