Keep in mind that children are not just “little adults.” Young children need to eat more frequently than adults given their high energy needs and less-developed digestive tracts. Three meals a day just aren’t enough for them—at least not without a couple snacks in between. Be sure to have foods accessible between meals.
Structured snack times are more effective than grazing, and also help ensure that your child comes to the table hungry. By late toddlerhood, kids can already develop skills to control mild hunger and wait for a meal to be ready—and you can support them in further developing those skills. If your child is hungry, the food will taste better, and they will be more inclined to enjoy foods beyond their favorites.
Given our cultural fear of fat, you may be tempted to limit or withhold food if you have a pudgy kid. Don’t. Kids of all sizes need to learn how to regulate their food intake. Pudgy kids will be feeling plenty of cultural prejudice. They don’t need more hassling from you—they need your support. Better to shore up their self-esteem: Reinforce the idea that kids come in a wide range of sizes and that every body is a good body. Teaching them to appreciate, not hate, themselves will support them in making better choices.
Remember, it’s about health, not size, even with our kids.
Summing Up
Now that you know how to integrate more healthful habits into your life, let’s talk again about food. In the next chapter, I will show you how to reprogram your taste buds so that you are drawn to nutritious foods and, in the process, take another step along the path to Health at Every Size.
ELEVEN
Change Your Tastes
W
hat if you craved broccoli in the same way you crave double chocolate Häagen-Dazs? What if a bag of potato chips appealed to you about as much as a piece of shoe leather? Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Just as the food industry has manipulated our taste buds into preferring high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar foods with added flavor chemicals, we can “manipulate” them back, retraining them to prefer fresh, quality foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. This chapter helps you revitalize your palate, based on the latest research in taste science, supporting you in eating food that tastes truly delicious to you.
The Joy of Eating
Think about eating a just-plucked-from-your-garden strawberry, still warm from the sun. Even before it reaches your lips, the rich color and intoxicating perfume have taken over two of your senses. As you bite into it, the sensations of sweetness with just a hint of acidity overtake your taste buds. You feel the texture of the seeds mixed with the soft pulp, the flavors changing and becoming less intense but no less delicious as you swallow. Mm, mm, good! The next day you return to the garden, eye your strawberry patch, and your mouth waters in pleasant anticipation.
What’s going on here is that you’re getting your biological reward for nourishing yourself. Ripe fruit looks and smells appealing, titillating your senses and compelling you to try it. Dig in and it unleashes a flood of hormones and neurotransmitters that make you feel good.
And there’s more. Experience pleasure and your body releases a hormone called dopamine, which locks onto your brain cells and builds a memory of how that pleasure was derived. Flavors, scents, even sexual experiences are in that memory, making you want to experience them over and over again.
Pleasure. It’s a crucial component of the eating experience. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The stakes are high: stop eating, die. It’s not surprising we come hard-wired with a reward system to encourage us to eat! Some scientists even suggest the reason we naturally produce opiates is to stimulate eating—and the pain relief they provide is only a secondary function.
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As an added bonus, pleasure brings an additional reward: You absorb more nutrients when the food is more appealing to you. When researchers fed a traditional Thai meal of rice and vegetables spiked with chili paste, fish sauce, and coconut cream to two groups of women, one Swedish and one Thai,
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the Thai women, who liked the meal better than the Swedish women, absorbed 50 percent more iron from the same food than the Swedish women.
The presentation is also important: When the meal was blended together and turned into an unfamiliar paste, the Thai women’s absorption of iron from the meal decreased by a whopping 70 percent!
More evidence of the importance of pleasure and presentation: When volunteers at the University of Minnesota spent six months on a semi-starvation diet, they developed all kinds of strange rituals around eating. Meals that might ordinarily have been consumed in just a few minutes took hours as the men cut their food into tiny pieces, rearranged the food on their plates, chewed each mouthful two hundred times . . . all behaviors engineered to prolong the enjoyment of their limited food.
The fact that pleasure supports you in getting the nourishment you need—and insufficient pleasure invites neurotic behaviors—reinforces the reality that it’s safe to dump the old diet values of deprivation and self-denial. After all, the proof is in the pudding: Eating tasty food actually helps your body grow healthy and strong, strengthening your immune system and bodily defenses. Add a heaping amount of guilt and the food loses some of its benefits.
Scientists have begun tracing some of the other biochemistry that supports these connections. For instance, one chemical called cholecystokinin (CCK) helps metabolize our food, tells us when to stop eating, and makes us feel good about eating. Cholecystokinin is produced in response to protein or fat in a meal, after which it begins stimulating your digestive organs to work. It also travels to your hypothalamus to shut down appetite before activating the pleasure center of your brain. So it’s clear that eating—and the pleasure derived from it—is intimately connected to a natural fullness response.
Let’s talk a bit more about why you like the food you do.
Your Ancestors’ Taste Legacy
Why do some people love Brussels sprouts, yet others find them repulsive? Why do some people find them bitter, others sweet? Genes tell part of the story. No amount of open-mindedness, good parenting, or parental arm-twisting will get some kids (or grown adults) to salivate at their smell as they simmer.
To teach students about the powerful impact of genes on taste, I give them a dried piece of filter paper doused in a chemical called 6-n-propylthiouracil, or PROP for short. I ask the students to place the filter paper on their tongues. Inevitably about one-quarter of students find it nasty (they’re mad at me for giving it to them), while another quarter find it tasteless, feeling as if they’ve licked the paper equivalent of water. The other half note a slight bitterness, nothing too dramatic.
After they argue about what it tastes like, I usually have to distribute a second round of filter paper to reassure the students that I wasn’t tricking them—they all got a taste strip doused in the exact same chemical.
PROP is a bitter-tasting substance, but only those with a certain genetic makeup can sense it. Those who perceive a strong bitterness are called “PROP super-tasters” and have a double dose of the gene; those for whom it conveys a mild bitterness are called “PROP tasters” and have one copy of the gene; and those that are insensitive to taste are called “PROP non-tasters.” PROP is frequently used in scientific experiments because it is a strong marker not just for bitterness, but for taste sensitivity in general.
You don’t need a filter strip to figure out your genetic predilection. Answer these questions:
• Do you prefer your coffee black (rather than with cream and/or sugar)?
• Do you like grapefruit?
• How about cabbage and Brussels sprouts?
If you responded with a resounding yes to each of these questions, you are, in scientific jargon, a “non-taster”—you don’t perceive the bitterness or intensity in certain foods that turn others off. Strong cheeses and heavy salad dressings probably go down with no trouble. One advantage to this is that you enjoy a broad range of tastes and it will be easy for you to expand your horizons. You can physiologically enjoy many nutritious foods, such as cruciferous vegetables, even if you haven’t developed the hankering. Because you are a little less taste-sensitive, however, you may need more flavor intensity in your foods—making you also drawn to processed foods and sweets.
If you answered a definitive no to those questions, you are a “super-taster” and are very sensitive to flavor. Because a little bit goes a long way, you don’t like extremes and are probably a relatively finicky eater. You may need to flood your coffee with creamer and sugar to mask the bitterness you perceive. You can also detect every bit of sweetness in candy and every hint of bitterness in some forms of alcohol—which may curb your appetite. However, you may also snub nutrient-rich vegetables, such as Brussels sprouts and cauliflower, because you detect their bitterness.
If your answer was yes to some and no to others, you probably have a single “taster” gene, making you flavor-sensitive, though not extreme.
In the old days, being a “taster” or “super-taster” conferred the advantage of helping you to detect and avoid poisonous foods, a trait not nearly as handy in modern times. Nowadays, none of these taste profiles are inherently good or bad. However, knowing your taste style can help you develop a strategic eating plan.
If you are a . . .
•
PROP taster or super-taster
, you may turn away from many vegetables because you sense their bitterness. If this is your plight, your challenge is to be open-minded. Experiment with a wide range of vegetables, rather than writing them all off. You will find that not all have an off-putting flavor; carrots, red bell pepper, beets, sweet potatoes, snow peas, and green beans, for instance, are unlikely to trigger your distaste, and you will probably find their sweetness pleasant.
You can even love the more bitter vegetables, given the right preparation. For example, cooking cuts bitterness, as does the addition of a sour taste, such as lemon juice. (No one knows why lemon juice is effective, but it is well documented.) Try roasting vegetables. Sprinkle them with salt, then roast in the oven until soft (the timing depends on the veggie). Roasting brings out a vegetable’s natural sweetness—even Brussels sprouts.
•
PROP non-taster
, you are more likely to enjoy a wide range of wholesome vegetables, but you’re also less discriminatory in general, which may make you more vulnerable to overeating. Paying more attention to recognizing subtle differences in foods and limiting yourself to foods that
really
taste good may help you. Develop your sensitivity to negative alliesthesia. Recall that negative alliesthesia is the decline in our preference for specific tastes as we consume more of them over a short period of time. The chocolate truffle test discussed earlier is one important exercise to help you increase your sensitivity.
Experience Changes Your Tastes
While genes like those that confer sensitivity to PROP play a role in your sensitivity to certain tastes, your tastes preferences aren’t hard-wired. In fact, your past experience with food plays an even larger role in directing your desires than your genes.
I wrote a bit about this in chapter 5—that your senses adapt to what they’re familiar with. Eat the same flavors over and over and you generate more cells that convey the same receptivity to those flavors while generating fewer cells sensitive to tastes you encounter less often.
The result, also discussed in chapter 5, is that many of us are “hooked” on processed foods. Accustomed to their intense flavoring chemicals, we have lost our ability to appreciate the subtlety and complexity found in “real” food. We’re better acquainted with “raspberry flavor” than real raspberries, with “sour cream and onion” flavor than the nuanced taste of the real thing. Too many of us have lost the ability to sense the wonderful range of flavors in whole foods.
That’s why trying to get a group of people raised on Chinese food to try a ripe Stilton cheese results in a group of nauseated Chinese people; while getting gourmet cheese lovers to try the Chinese delicacy known as a “Thousand Year Old Egg,” a preserved fermented raw duck egg, also sends them running for the bathroom.
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Each group, trying these tastes for the first time, finds them repulsive. Although both groups had a penchant for strong, adventurous flavors, their taste buds just couldn’t immediately accommodate flavors they weren’t accustomed to.
But as a species, we have a remarkable ability to learn to love the taste of almost anything given enough time. This ability has allowed us to populate every corner of the globe while most other animals with more restricted diets are limited to locations that provide just the type of food they need. Research suggests that it may take ten to twenty exposures before a child
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or an adult
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accepts a new food, so be sure to stay open-minded and be patient.