Why having doubts about sprouts doesn’t make you picky

ARE you ever made to feel like you’re being overly fussy for turning down sprouts at the dinner table?

Well now you can tell your critical friends that, in actual fact, there’s strong scientific evidence to justify your revulsion.

Certain vegetables may taste worse to some individuals than others because of different bacteria present in their mouth, experts have found.

It is well known that brassicas such as broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower can have a bitter taste.

But they also release smelly sulphurous compounds, believed to make their flavour less appetising. A study of almost 200 adults and children found certain people’s saliva produced more of these unpleasant compounds. Those with more of the smelly compounds have different mouth bacteria, experts believe.

And the research found parents and children who were related tended to produce similar amounts of sulphur compounds, suggesting not liking broccoli and Brussels sprouts could run in families.

The study, published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, was done at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO. Lead author Dr Damian Frank, said the results suggested ‘it may be harder for some parents to get their children to eat broccoli and cauliflower, because they also really don’t like the vegetables themselves’. ÷ ALMOST a quarter of children are either following a vegan diet or would like to, according to the BBC Good Food Nation survey. It found 8 per cent of children aged 5-16 were following a vegan diet, while 15 per cent said they would like to.