Bitter Taste Food helps steady your Fire Energy

Jonathan Clogstoun-Willmott

April 25, 2022

The bitter taste is important, not just to alert us to the presence of poison, but in food to provide a cooling and descending function.

By descending it means that the food helps move the contents of your digestion in a downwards direction. That reduces reflux, eructations, nausea, burping, hiccups, all of which act in an upwards or yang direction. So bitter taste foods have a yin action. By descending, it means they also help your bowel movements to consolidate and regulate. In fact, many laxatives like senna are bitter-tasting. Their action clears out pockets of stagnation in the bowels and stimulates peristalsis.

Yin things are nutritious and moistening, cooling and consolidating.

Yang action foods are spicy, warming, aromatic, exciting. In excess they heat and inflame. Bitter taste foods balance this, and have another function in that they are often cleansing. clearing out poison. (Even though the bitter taste when strong indicates poison.) For more on yin and yang, click here.

They particularly help where you have excess Stomach Fire symptoms, with burping, reflux, nausea, hiccups, unpleasant eructations or uncontrollable hunger, for example.

The bitter taste also neutralises stomach acid and breaks up fats. It is a yin energy, so usually cooling in action. Too much bitter food, even if cooked and eaten warm, will tend to be cooling. If you tend to get cold easily, make sure that when eating bitter taste foods you also take warming herbs to counteract the cooling action. For ideas, see below.

What is meant by ‘Bitter’

Your taste-buds quickly alert you to the taste of bitterness in food, for very good reasons! It might be a poison!

But knowing what typical bitter tasting foods do, the Chinese also described some other foods as ‘bitter’, meaning that even if they didn’t taste bitter, their action was the same as the action of bitter foods. So that’s why, in the following lists, you may encounter foods that don’t really taste bitter. On the other hand, if you allow your taste-buds to mature, you may begin to appreciate bitterness in foods where formerly you hadn’t expected it.

Your body already produces a very bitter substance, called bile. It’s made by your Liver and is used to neutralise any remaining acids in your small intestine (because your stomach coats food in strong acid to break it down before passing the food down into your small intestine) and to break up fats.

Bear in Mind: foods can have different qualities at the same time. Mustard Greens are bitter, but also spicy, both of which help move your bowels.

The Bitter taste is essential for health

Believe it or not, most of us like the bitter taste. Some of us crave and need it daily.

How Come? Coffee and Chocolate!

Of course, often we submerge the bitter taste with sugar or the blander taste of milk solids, so we don’t think of chocolate as being bitter. But taste raw chocolate powder and you’ll be in no doubt.

In coffee, the bitter taste also alerts us to the stimulant quality of caffeine, another poison that many of us really like. Its action is stimulates peristalsis, so we like it because it gets our bowels moving. But coffee is unusual among bitter foods in that it is mildly warming and yang, so it wakes us up and speeds our metabolism. However, that yang action comes with a cost! Read more about that cost here!

Chocolate is less warming in its raw state, but with milk solids it is comfortable and comforting. These are more yin-like actions.

Some Bitter taste foods

Artichoke
Asparagus
Bitter melon
Broccoli
Brussel Sprouts
Cabbage
Celery
Chicory lettuce
Chinese greens
Dandelion greens
Escarole
Endive
Italian greens
Mung bean sprouts
Mustard greens
Olives

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

Radicchio
Rapini or Broccoli rabe
Snap peas
Snow peas
Spinach

Below are some foods that aren’t necessarily bitter but help the bitter function in food.

Spices that prevent or move food stagnation:

Caraway
Cardamom
Coriander seed
Cumin
Fennel seed
Ginger

Kitchen herbs that help stagnation

Basil
Cilantro
Coriander leaf
Dill
Marjoram
Oregano
Parsley
Rosemary
Tarragon
Thyme

Sprouts help to descend

Bean sprouts (but take them stir=fried and hot to prevent their cold quality overwhelming your Stomach yang energy)
Mung bean sprouts

Bitter taste type food — Photo by Faris Mohammed on Unsplash

Seeds that are gelatinous (after soaking) help move stagnation

Chia
Flax (can be sued ground
Sesame

Small Beans tend to cause less bloating than large beans

All beans should be soaked overnight before rinsing then cooking them in fresh water.

Split pea
Lentil
Mung
Adzuki

The water adzuki beans are cooked in is diuretic.

Here’s a list of bitter taste foods … BUT!

.. the list is incomplete because we haven’t decided about all modern foods and, as you’ll have read above, some foods help the ‘bitter’ action in different ways.

alfalfa sprout

artichoke

asparagus

basil

beer

broccoli

caper

cardamom

celery

chamomile tea

chicory

chrysanthermum tea