Re: Why does spicy food taste bitter to me?

This is an excellent and complicated question.

According to the good folks at Beringer Vineyards: http://www .beringer.com/beringer/entertaining/pairing.jsp "Spicy food will exaggerate the tannin and bitterness of a wine"... We can extrapolate that more generally, to say that spicy foods can exagerate the bitterness of *any* food.

But that doesn't explain why your friends don't experience the same thing.

You should understand that different people have different sensitivities to bitter taste, and this difference in (in part) genetically based. I've been tested by my colleague, Dr. Beverley Tepper http://foodsci.rutgers.edu/tepper/ who does research in this area.

I (and perhaps you) am/are part of a select (25% of the population) group of individuals that are "super-tasters". We perceive bitter tastes more stronlgy than the rest of the population.

Here is an interesting article from Cornell that talks about the whole super-taster issue: http://www.cce.cornell.edu/food/expfiles/topics/utermohlen/utermohlenqanda.html