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  • This little tablet is made of a small red fruit called the miracle fruit, a shrubby

  • plant native to West Africa.

  • The fruit itself doesn’t taste like much -- it’s got low sugar content and a slight

  • tang kind, of like a mildly sweet cranberry -- but people don’t eat it for its taste.

  • They eat it because of how it makes other things taste.

  • See, miracle fruit contains a unique protein called miraculin that does something really

  • weird to your taste buds when you eat it: it makes sour stuff taste super sweet.

  • I’m talking like, turning vinegar into syrup and Tabasco sauce into donut glaze.

  • Since miracle fruit isn’t always easy to find, has a very short shelf life, and miraculin

  • breaks down when it’s heated, people tend pass the fun along by freeze-drying the pulp

  • and mashing it into powder or pills like the ones I happened to have right here...

  • Fun times!

  • So what the heck just happened to my tongue?

  • Okay, for starters, your tongue is covered in lingual papillae, otherwise known as taste

  • buds.

  • Theyre receptors that translate food chemicals into electrical signals that tell the brain

  • what it’s tasting. Each taste bud contains a bunch of taste cells with proteins that

  • bind to the molecules in food, which is how we detect specific flavors like sweet, salty,

  • sour, and bitter.

  • That is, unless youre eating miracle fruit.

  • Because when you chomp a berry or suck a tablet, that miraculin binds to specific parts of

  • your sweetness receptors..

  • Under totally neutral conditions, miraculin actually blocks these receptors, preventing

  • them from picking up sweet flavors in food, which is one reason the fruit itself doesn’t

  • taste like much.

  • But under acidic conditions it does the opposite -- it jacks up your sweet receptors, making

  • them extra /extra/ sensitive.

  • So if you, say, take a bite of lemon or chug some pickle juice, those acids actually cause

  • the miraculin to change its molecular shape, increasing the intensity of its binding power,

  • and changing the shape of those sweet receptors -- making them go haywire.

  • Suddenly all your brain is hearing from your tongue is, that is SWEEEET!

  • Just how sweet, you ask?

  • Well, artificial sweeteners bind to your taste receptors more aggressively than natural sugars,

  • which is why most of the powder in the little packets isn’t actually the sweet stuff.

  • And one study showed that acid-activated miraculin binds about a million times more strongly

  • than aspartame -- an artificial sweetener -- and nearly 100 million times more intensely

  • than sugar.

  • And if a stronger bond means a sweeter taste, you can see how miraculin would make orange

  • juice taste like maple syrup.

  • Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow, which was brought to you by our patrons on

  • Patreon. If you want to help support this show, just go to patreon.com/scishow. And

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This little tablet is made of a small red fruit called the miracle fruit, a shrubby

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