The cherry flavor is so common in medicine
A lot of medicines commonly use the cherry flavor, especially for kids’ medicines, and this is the reason behind this.
One of the most difficult things that parents encounter is when they would make their children drink medicine. This is a challenging moment, especially when the child’s health is at stake. If it is difficult to make kids eat healthy but not as tasteful food, this is double difficult when it comes to medicine.
Because of this, flavors were added to medicines to make them more enticing. Based on the article in Mental Floss why among these flavors, the cherry is the most popular one.
One of the reasons why cherry is a popular flavor in medicine is because of the power of association. Medical professionals turned to bold flavors like cherry to mask the taste of bitter herbal medicine before the invention of synthetic drugs.
Dr. Swayne’s Compound Syrup of Wild Cherry (circa 1838) used the stone fruit to help make the medicine more palatable. This helped a lot in the medical field.
The practice of using cherry to flavor medicine has remained even though some time has passed since old-timey herbal products were on the market. This might not be an appetizing one but for medical purposes, people were still using the bitter drug.
Up to 50 percent of people struggle to swallow medication, according to Pfizer. One of the top reasons for this is the unappetizing flavor. This is a bigger problem when it comes to kids, especially when they have to take life-saving medication.
Cherry-flavored malaria drug was introduced by a Swiss pharmaceutical company in 2009. Before this, parents had resorted to crushing the life-saving medicine and combining it with sugar just to make their kids take this.
Eventually, new flavors were introduced like grape, orange, and other citrus flavors.