The bitter taste determines in each of us a nervous reflex that stimulates the salivary and gastric secretion, preparing the digestive system to receive food and digest it. This property belongs to every bitter drug; gentian is also part of this class. , but cinchona appears to be the bitter drug par excellence Cinchona is, from the pharmacognostic point of view also reported by the Pharmacopoeia, that drug that has a bitter taste so intense that it can be taken as a reference for evaluating other drugs with similar characteristics. The bittering power is one of those pharmacognostic evaluations, used and indicated in the Pharmacopoeia, which allow us to qualitatively evaluate a drug on the basis of its bitter taste; this aspect is very important on the herbalist level, precisely because of the aperitif and eupeptic aspect it gives it arises.
Cinchona, or rather its best known active principle, quinine, is taken as a reference for its bitter taste; arbitrarily, a precise numerical score is given to the bitter taste of a solution of quinine at a given concentration. If hypothetically this solution has a bitter value of 1000 bittering units, this score serves as a numerical reference for evaluating other drugs.To assign these values, a pool of people extremely sensitive to the bitter taste is selected, and based on their answers, expressed after tasting the solution, the numerical value is processed. Subsequently, these same people taste solutions of other bitter drugs at a certain known concentration and assign them the most suitable numerical value (not at all bitter, not very bitter, very bitter, very bitter). The relationship between the values found for a drug and those obtained from the taste of cinchona provides a numerical score that reflects the quantitative measure of the bitter taste.
Here is the importance of cinchona, very high for the health, herbal, liqueur and even technical fields, because it is the reference drug for an evaluation of bitter drugs, a category to which it belongs.
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