You probably remember hearing about The Miracle Fruit (containing the mysterious protein miraculin) earlier this year. It makes bitter and sour taste sweet, and, by altering those two flavors, makes everything taste like something else.

Surprise surprise, they turned it into a pill!

Available from ThinkGeek, the Miracle Fruit Tablets come in dodgy-looking packets of ten and will apparently blow your mind so much, they recommend only taking half a tablet to start.

Originally documented in France in 1725, the Miracle Fruit has been experiencing a renaissance of interest since 2007. We attribute the public fascination to the hope that one day cauliflower will taste like ice cream and vinegar will taste like ranch dressing. As people continue to invent crazy diets to lose weight, everyone is on the lookout for a way to make diet food taste more like Snickers bars. We wonder what it does to cabbage soup!

For now, people are mostly using the tablets recreationally. Two pills per person makes one heck of a crazy dinner party!

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My grandmother likes to tell a story about how she was hypnotized in a stage show. Under hypnosis, she ate a lemon and thought it was an apple. It's hard to imagine doing that and not noticing the difference. However, with the miracle fruit, we all could be eating slices of lemon for dessert.

Slashfood blogger Emily Matcher wrote yesterday about the New York Times article on the miracle fruit. If you missed it, the miracle of the fruit is not that it cures cancer or creates world peace - it makes sour foods taste sweet.

As described on Wikipedia, "when the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule [miraculin] binds to the tongue's taste buds, causing bitter and sour foods (such as lemons and limes) consumed later to taste sweet. This effect lasts between thirty minutes and two hours."

The miracle fruit is by no means a new discovery. It has been eaten for centuries in West Africa. Back in 2005, The Guardian wrote about a cafe in Japan where diners start the meal with a single miracle fruit and then proceed to eat dishes with 100 calories or less and love them!

Why haven't we seen the miracle fruit in diet products everywhere? The facts aren't clear. However, there is a BBC article that describes how an attempt to bring miracle fruit products to the US market was surprisingly and suddenly shut down by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Want to try one? Miracle Connect sells the berries! They cost $24 for six. They recommend two per person for a dinner party.

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At "flavor tripping" parties, guests nibble miracle fruit, which turns sour flavors sweet. Vinegar becomes, for an hour or so, as sweet as apple juice; unadorned chevre turns into cheesecake.

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It sounds to good to be true -- a berry that makes sour things taste sweet!

The berry is very real. It's called "miracle fruit -- that's actually what it's called -- though the scientific name is Synsepalum dulcificum for those of you who want to get technical. And more for the technical folks, a protein in the fruit binds to taste buds and alters the tongue's so-called sweet receptors to activate when sour foods are eaten. Sour things taste sweet for about an hour after the berry is eaten.

It may seem just a novelty or a fun foodie trick to do at parties, but there could be some health and medical uses for the berry once the science people figure it out. I can think of a few now: lose weight by tricking your taste buds into thinking that extremely low calorie foods are actually as sweet as dessert, and any other use in which people need a sugar substitute.

[via: Gimundo]