Does Food Taste Too Good?
This blog post is from the Nurse Kim archives of myth busting. I want to share some "alternative" or maybe just lesser known health and wellness viewpoints for you to chew on.
*These posts are not intended as official medical advice.
They ARE meant to be fun, informative, and thought provoking, hopefully sparking an interest for you to do your own research (you can start with the links I provide!) and discover the marvels of the human body, and how it can function at its optimal performance level if we understand how it works and interacts with our environment and our diet.
I have a passion for health and wellness through lifestyle and nutrition and have done thousands of hours of research in addition to being a registered nurse for 23 years. I have done A LOT of self-experimentation in and around diet, lifestyle, body care, and supplementation and have spent a lot of time looking into the science behind it all (or lack thereof!). Check back weekly for the latest post!
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Ever wonder why it is SO easy to overeat some foods and
impossible to overeat others? I could sit down right now and eat a full size bag
of Cool Ranch Doritos or an entire sleeve of mini powdered donuts without
batting an eye. But if I tried to eat an equivalent volume of say, steak and eggs…
I would have to stop. Why is that?
The reason is because our bodies come fully equipped with
hormones that let us know when we are hungry and when we are full WHEN we eat real
food that the body can recognize such as in the case of steak and eggs. But because
we are such a smart and innovative species, food scientists, whether inadvertently
or on purpose, have figured out ways to hijack our systems so that the
foods they create do
not trigger those hormones.
Leptin
Leptin is our satiety hormone; it tells you when to stop eating.
There is a (conspiracy) theory out there that processed food is engineered to NOT
trigger leptin. How horrible! Why would they do this? I don’t think I need to
spell it out.
Hyper-Palatability
It’s not just the leptin. Processed foods are loaded
with flavor enhancing compounds and combinations that humans would NEVER encounter
in nature. These hyper-palatable
flavor combinations drive us to eat more for the simple reason that it tastes
so good and gives us so much pleasure.
One of the downsides of trying to return to a whole foods
diet is that at first, it’s BORING!! It’s simply not the same eating
experience. Beef, broccoli, zucchini, apples, and potatoes DO NOT have the same
palate affect as macaroni and cheese, frosted flakes, frappuccinos, triple berry
yogurt, or blueberry muffins.
Opiates
And it even goes beyond the leptin and hyper-palatability
issue. Grain based products like cereal, bread, and pasta contain opiate like
compounds called gliadin proteins (yes opiates like heroin and morphine) that
trigger a dopamine response in our brains resulting in addictive behaviors towards
those foods and a number of other more
serious issues. But the good ole USDA says we need to eat 6-11 servings of
grains and make them the base of our diet.
I suggest you dig into this with the links provided and make an informed decision for yourself.
Until next week ya’ll! (Or maybe the week after since sometimes I take longer to marinate my thoughts 😉)
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