this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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Yes and no. Broccoli, like a lot of other veg, contains bitter flavors that kids can still taste, but adults can't. So, for them it may actually taste horrible, even if it is delicious for you.
Broccoli is one of the less bitter vegetables. Kids tend to like it. I think kids don't like overcooked tasteless broccoli.
And they grew the bitterness down over the years, too.
I hated raw broccoli as a kid, didn't "like" it until I had fully-cooked, soft broccoli, so I'd say your hypothesis is flawed.
Huh. I wonder why humans would just happen to be born with the propensity to hate something good for them only to lose that propensity later in life. Like, would there be some evolutionary advantage? Maybe there are toxic plants that contain those bitter compounds and children who don't eat them survive to pass on their genes but adults who have lived and learned what not to eat don't need the same bitterness feedback, so humans evolved to lose it later? Or maybe I'm making stuff up and it's just one of god's practical jokes on humans like when we bite our tongue while chewing.
I don’t know where I heard or read it, so take my explanation with a grain of salt. Most poisons taste bitter, so avoiding bitter tasting things means avoiding poisonous things. Since children have a smaller body weight, the lethal dose is smaller for them. As go grow older, your body mass increases and so does your tolerance to poisons. But I am not sure why we would not want to avoid poisons in general even if they were not lethal any more.
Because some plants use small amounts of those poisons to avoid being eaten. So losing some of the aversion to the taste gives you a wider variety of food sources once you can tolerate the poison enough.
The idea is that some kinds of food are hard to digest or otherwise problematic for kids, while adults can eat and digest a broader diet.
fake: ive always enjoyed brocoli
Maybe you never had those receptor cells. We are talking about 15000 different bitter receptors in kids vs. 5000 in an adult. If you were lacking one in 15k it's not much of a miss.
Kids have double the taste buds, they taste everything more. #TheMoreYouKnow
Having a kid who always ate broccoli since solid foods were introduced, I think it comes down to more of what options the kids have available, and what their taste buds expect.
A lot of "kid food" marketed to parents is sugar filled, processed shelf stable stuff. If you give your kid "fruit snacks" and Teddy Grams as part if their daily food, of course they're going to think broccoli or other veg is disgusting.
So even if they have "double the taste buds" (something that I've never seen or heard a doctor tell me in all these years), but even if that's true, if the palate is used to sugar/ultra-palatable foods, yeah, broccoli will taste like shit.
It's not everyone, but many kids do have a high sensitivity to bitter tastes.
TIL I'm still a kid.
Brokkoli smells like farts to me. I'm not eating something that smells like farts.
The smell is a typical cabbage smell, so you probably won't like other cabbages either.
True that! Sauerkraut and boiled red cabbage is fine, though.
Well, it is fermented, respectively boiled. Which reduces or destroys some of the sulphur-based molecules that cause this issue.