It happens that pumpkin soup is bitter. It's a signal you can't ignore

October is the time when our honed culinary senses focus on one specific product: pumpkin. Every year we wait for it like salvation, and of course the first thing we prepare is cream soup (and cake shortly after). In other words, we love it and adore it blindly. It's not surprising, then, that when pumpkin soup comes out bitter, a fierce battle ensues between reason and greed. Despite everything, we should then rely on what our mind suggests.

Even though pumpkin is an incredibly healthy vegetable — it contains a lot of vitamins, minerals, and hidden in the seeds are already legendary unsaturated fatty acids — it's not for everyone. The contraindication is kidney failure and taking lithium-based medicines (you can read more on this topic here), but if the pumpkin soup turns out bitter, everyone should abstain from consuming it.

The bitterness of pumpkin soup is a symptom of a high concentration of cucurbitacin in it. This chemical compound, which naturally occurs not only in pumpkin, but also in cucumbers or zucchini, although it has positive effects on the body to some extent (it combats harmful parasites in the human digestive system), it becomes toxic to us in larger amounts.

Pumpkin producers do everything they can to ensure the pumpkins they sell do not contain high concentrations of cucurbitacin, but sometimes this can happen inadvertently through a process known as cross-pollination. The aforementioned alkaloid is characterized by a bitter taste, so detecting bitterness in pumpkin soup can save us from severe stomach poisoning and not only that. As reported by the portal odzywianie.wprost.pl, the scientific journal "JAMA dermatology" even described a case from France in which eating bitter pumpkin soup also led to... hair loss.