Most traditional cultures cook meat as a condiment or an enhancer as opposed to the main deal. In traditional Chinese cooking, for example, bits of meat are added to vegetable stir fries or rice or noodle dishes. In traditional Italian culture, a small piece of meat is served as a second plate, while pasta frequently reigns as the main dish. And when Americans look back to early frontier cooking, bits of bacon or salt pork were used to season beans.
There’s no need to jump into alien territory. Just try tweaking the proportions a bit. Bump up the side dishes, reduce the portion of meat. If you’re making lasagna, throw in a few more mushrooms, add some zucchini. That stew can get great flavor with added carrots or parsnips. Like chicken teriyaki? That same teriyaki sauce adds wonderful flavor to tofu and vegetables.
Challenge yourself to learn new ways to cook vegetables, grains, and beans. Perhaps you want to make one night a week a no-meat meal? Grab a cookbook and experiment! Call on your friends for help. Host a meatless potluck and see what others come up with. I’m sure everyone has at least one meatless dish they love!
The Addictive Nature of Food
How many times have you heard someone say, “I’m addicted to this chocolate candy . . . or McDonald’s hamburgers . . .or my mother’s coconut cream pie”? Whether or not food addiction truly exists is a hot topic for scientific debate.
Take sugar, for instance. Several studies in rats find that sugar stimulates the release of opiates,
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which make you feel good. Opiates, in turn, stimulate your appetite for more sugar. Give rats enough sugar, and they become addicted, constantly pressing a button to get more of the sweetened solution so they can keep getting that “high.” This same mechanism is at work in people (or rats) who get addicted to cocaine. And when you turn off the high sugar or cocaine supply, people (and rats) exhibit anxiety and other signs of withdrawal.
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Studies on high-fat foods show a similar opiate response. In addition, researchers at Rockefeller University found that regularly eating fatty foods can quickly reconfigure the body’s hormonal system to want more fat. They also found that early exposure to fatty food could influence children’s choices so that they would always seek a similar diet.
In another study, scientists puts rats on a cyclic diet of 5 days of standard rat food followed by 2 days of high fat/high sugar processed foods.
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The rats developed a preference for the processed food. Whenever they went back to the standard rat food, they showed signs of anxiety and reduced pleasure, sometimes refusing to eat. When they were given the processed food, their anxiety calmed, but they ate more than they had before the experiment started. Two months later, the researchers examined the rats’ brains. They found increased genetic expression for a brain chemical that resulted in a greater release of cortisol, a stress hormone. This same pattern of brain changes is observed during withdrawal from addictive substances like alcohol. Other research indicates that this type of response triggers cravings.
Does this indicate these foods are addictive? While some individuals may meet the lax psychiatric definition for addiction, I am hesitant to take this seriously. It just illustrates that we have pleasure pathways in our brains designed to reinforce certain survival behaviors. Eating is one of them, sex another. Narcotics use this same brain pathway, usurping the mechanism meant to reward us for eating or attempting to reproduce.
There are of course some other considerations that make use of the term “addiction” problematic. I just can’t conjure up the same level of concern when I consider someone eating ice cream compared to their shooting heroin. Nor does taking a kid to a McDonald’s drive-through elicit the same reaction as carting them along while you visit your drug dealer. I also doubt that many murders have been committed to support a Kentucky Fried Chicken habit.
However, there is research that suggests that larger people, on average, have fewer receptors for dopamine, a “feel-good” hormone, which means that the pleasure signal has fewer places in the brain to attach to and work its magic.
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Maybe, then, these individuals eat a lot to stimulate the pleasure centers that do exist as much as possible, leading to weight gain, in an eternal search for the same satisfied state others take for granted through daily life. If this attribute is genetically rooted, it explains why alcoholism, drug abuse, and compulsive eating tend to run in families: Less ability to experience pleasure makes people vulnerable to anything that provides it.
Of course, there’s another possible explanation: Maybe repeated overeating causes the brain to reduce the number of attachment sites.
Regardless of whether the term “addiction” is appropriate, the compulsion to continually seek out certain foods can be extremely painful. Should you avoid this drug-like high that you might get and “just say no” to chocolate? To the contrary, I think we should celebrate that food makes us feel good.
The challenge, then, is to figure out how to enjoy food and eating without constantly being dogged by the need for more. Start by asking yourself: Is your sugar/fat habit causing you harm? Are there other things you can sometimes do that are more effective at giving you the comfort or the high you seek? Cultivate other avenues of pleasure. Instead of relying on chocolate to make you feel good, how about friends, sports, theater, museums, volunteering, family?
In addition to pumping up your self-care skills, you also want to explore alternatives that provide the good stuff. There’s nothing wrong with loving particular tastes, but perhaps you can mimic those tastes in a more nutritious way. If you’re turned on by sugar, what about a nearly-too-ripe peach, or apples dipped in honey, or the sweetness of caramelized onions? Or spice it up: Allspice, cloves, anise, ginger, cardamom, mace, cinnamon, or nutmeg all provide tasty sweetness and can help expand your taste range. If salty foods are your thing, try savory flavors with bite, such as black pepper, garlic, curry, cumin, dill, basil, ginger, coriander, and onion.
The next issue to explore is whether your food is truly delivering on its promise. Those first few bites may have given you a pleasure high, but if you become more attentive to your experience you may just find that the next few are significantly less rewarding. This knowledge may help tone down your cravings.
Next, I encourage you to pay attention to the whole experience of food rather than just focusing on the in-the-moment pleasure. For example, you may love the Sunday family brunches and consistently overeat. Then you feel too tired and lazy afterward to participate in the fun of throwing around a football. Once you start to make the connection that the food is not as pleasurable an hour after you have eaten, it may also help you to moderate your intake. You do this because it makes you feel better, not because you are trying to restrict your calories and diet—a much more effective strategy in the long run.
Your goal? To re-educate your palate to appreciate a wider range of flavor sensations and tone down the cravings that may be causing you harm.
Is Pleasure Getting You into Trouble?
In the old days, a penchant for sweet drew us to ripe, nutrient-packed raspberries. But now it’s much easier to find a raspberry-flavored Snapple than a raspberry. And those supermarket raspberries, having been bred for shelf life, not taste or nutrient value, just don’t inspire that same magical pleasure. They are also relatively expensive.
So what do you do if your drive for good-tasting food draws you to the less nutritious processed foods? What if craving cabbage is incomprehensible to you but the distinctive smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken gets your digestive juices flowing?
Hop into the driver’s seat. It’s time to reclaim your taste for nutritious foods.
The Diet Makeover
It’s easy to take on the values of our culture but it takes extra effort to resist. For many people, processed food (including fast food) tastes delicious and seems to be a necessity for the lives we live at such frenzied paces.
If you feel stuck in this rat race, I encourage you to start by considering larger issues than just food. Ask yourself: Is this “fast” lifestyle really delivering on its promises? You may just find that you sleep better at night with a slower lifestyle, where good food and nutrition become more important than the amount of money in your bank account; where pleasure comes from community and nature rather than the size of your flat-screen television and the brand of your car.
Earlier in this book, I encouraged you to consciously choose your value system, as opposed to passively accepting cultural values. Challenging these deep-seated values—and learning more about food—will help you change your taste for food from one that plays to the lowest common denominator of the mass market to one that honors food and pleasure.
I see this all the time in the introductory nutrition courses I teach. When students start the course, they rank the reasons they choose certain foods, often listing “presumed effect on weight” as second to taste, giving less credence to a long list of other food values, such as cost, social justice, animal welfare, and environmental concerns.
In the course, I teach them the same things I’m teaching you—with an added emphasis on the social and environmental effects of our food choices. (If you are interested in learning more about these issues, check out what I’ve written by visiting my Web site:
www.LindaBacon.org
.) By the end of the course, my “after” surveys document a dramatic change in their diet and tastes. Students report that they choose more whole foods. Even more importantly, they now prefer them. They eat less meat and enjoy plant foods more. What is most interesting is how they got there: They cite an increased social and environmental consciousness as playing a larger role in their change—not concerns about weight or health.
In other words, once they lessen their preoccupation with weight and increase their knowledge about where their food comes from and its larger impact, their newfound awareness becomes compelling motivation for dietary habit change. Their previous preoccupation with weight was less successful at motivating change. So in case you needed yet another reason to dump the weight focus, there it is.
When you eat processed food, you’re digesting the values that go along with it: the idea that food has to be fast, cheap, and easy and that it doesn’t matter where food actually comes from. But it does. Your food choices really
do
matter—whether we’re talking about personal health and well-being or larger community concerns.
It is difficult to understand the consequences of our food choices when we are so distanced from them in the grocery store or fast-food restaurant. It doesn’t occur to us to think about how that ninety-nine-cent burger got on our plate. We tend to not connect supermarket meat and produce to water pollution or global warming. We don’t consider the conditions of the pig’s life or that of the slaughterhouse worker when we buy our packaged sausage. Nor are we aware of the chronic diseases that may be silently developing in our bodies. The effects are out of sight.
But in fact there’s a dramatic story that lurks beneath your food choices. Whether you care about global warming, pollution, animal welfare, food safety, social justice, or a slew of other concerns, the more you learn about it, the less palatable today’s fast-food culture becomes. And it turns out that there is a remarkable confluence of values. The same food choices that support good health and healthy weight regulation also support a more compassionate, respectful, and sustainable world. What’s good for the planet and our people is good for you!
Of course, animal rights activists, environmental activists, and others have been outspoken about the rampant abuse brought about by the processed food culture. In the past, some activists thrived on employing the “shame and blame” approach to motivate change (and some groups continue in that vein today). But guilt doesn’t produce lasting change.
What’s different now is that there is a thriving subculture to move toward, one that celebrates pleasure and good food. If you are concerned about the larger issues, it doesn’t have to be about feeling guilty and running away from the bad stuff. “Slow food” culture is quite seductive and can easily entice you.
Consider your options. You could spend your morning at your local supermarket, stock up on some produce and packaged convenience foods. The conventionally grown tomatoes will be sturdy and blemish-free, though they lack flavor and nuance. The convenience foods will give you the taste intensity blast you are accustomed to. Each eating experience reinforces a taste for the added flavor chemicals at the same time that it reinforces a disinterest in produce.
Or you could stroll through the local farmers’ market, chatting with the farmers and others in your community, sharing tips on the seasonal produce. Along the way, you sample the lovingly cultivated varieties of juicy, vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes, like the tangy Tigerella tomato, with red and gold stripes, or the colorful Green Zebras, bursting with unique flavor, and hear about their folklore. You go home and cook and share the season’s bounty with friends and family, savoring the intimacy it fosters. Your Saturday morning doesn’t feel “spent” but rather, enjoyed.