– There are nutritious plants that are rich in carbohydrates that tend to be more sweet. There are salty plants that have a higher mineral status. And that’s where the saltiness would come from. Then we have pungent plants. That pungent spiciness comes from volatile aromatic compounds and we can usually smell those before we taste them. And sense of smell is directly related to sense of taste right. We can smell more things than we can taste. And if you’ve ever had a stuffy nose, and you try to eat you realize that when you have a stuffy nose you can’t really taste your food very well. So smell is directly tied in to taste. Bitter is a taste that is found in all plants. Sweet isn’t, sour isn’t, salty isn’t, nor is spicy. But bitter is found in all plants to some degree. In some plants more than others. Over time where we have been consuming plants, that we developed this repertoire. Our liver developed this repertoire of chemicals that it became knowledgeable of. That it came to know and it knew how to handle it, knew how to detoxify it, break it down into metabolites that weren’t so toxic and get it out of the system. And the way that was done is the production of bile and bile is secreted into the gallbladder and then eventually down in to the pancreatic duct into the small intestines. Eventually eliminated via feces right so this is how this is a natural detoxification of pathway or elimination route is what I should say. And so what’s fascinating about this is that the liver actually needs a little bit of a challenge to do its job. So if the liver isn’t getting stimulated by something like bitters. It tends to become sluggish. So what we’ve done in the modern era is we have replaced bitter with sweet. Now our ancestors didn’t really have this luxury. Our paleolithic ancestors as well as our agrarian ancestors up until the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago. About 200 years ago when we started to refine and process foods is when we really started to replace bitter foods with sweet foods. Now our ancestors ate a lot of plant material. Our ancestors consumed upwards of 95 to 300 plus different plants for food and medicine. So there was a real strong relationship with the plant world and that was a lot of phytochemical information streaming into the physiology. All of which could stimulate the liver and get it doing its detoxification more efficiently. So without that little bit of challenge, the liver becomes sluggish and slow to detoxify. And where we are today a lot of my friends who are herbalists talk about having a bitter deficiency syndrome. Which I would agree with. This is a really important taste for us. And it’s one that we’ve eradicated. And so what’s happened is that the liver becomes a little bit sluggish. The food is being replaced with sweet foods. And we’re just not getting the challenge that we need.