Today's interesting fact has to do with bitter tastes, spinach, and brussels sprouts.

I started off today’s fact with how a lab in the US has developed a system that uses extracts from spinach leaves to produce electricity.

While this was considered interesting by my audience, Nick Myall stated that he doesn't like the taste of spinach, brussels sprouts and other brassicas.

As he is the one I give these interesting facts to, this reminded me, that there are bitter tasting chemicals that not everyone taste.

While at university many years ago, our chemistry professor gave all of the class a litmus test strip that had been dipped onto one such chemical.

Our task was to taste the strip and report on that taste. About 10% of the class found it very bitter, but the rest of the class reported tasting just paper.

This ability to taste this specific chemical comes from having two copies of a specific recessive allele of a certain gene.

Our ability to taste many bitter tastes is also controlled by specific alleles.

So Nick and his son, who both find brussels sprouts particularly repugnant, probably have some of these genes, whereas his wife and daughter, who love the taste, probably don't.

My advice would be to have something different on their plates, if possible.