Flavour, Toxins and Nutritional Wisdom

In this post, Food for Thought on Food Choices, I wrote about learning to listen to my body.  In the past couple of years since I have purged processed foods from my diet there have been times when I have craved a particular food and I felt like my body was telling me that I needed something that's in that particular food.

I'm talking about cravings for real foods like scrambled eggs and fresh parsley, or a big salad or a juicy steak, not fake foods like chips and ice cream.   I've heard this referred to as "intuitive eating", a concept I initially considered a bit "airy fairy" and "new age" or something, but I really do feel like I've experienced it.

After listening to this podcast which is an interview with Mark Schatzker, author of the book "The Dorito Effect" it made sense. 

This was a really interesting interview.  The "Dorito Effect" is about flavour and nutritional wisdom.  It's about how we can know what our body needs to meet our changing nutritional requirements and how toxins, chemicals naturally occurring in foods, talk to our body to tell us when to stop eating - an inbuilt dieting mechanism you might say.  Most of all it's about how artificial flavours in processed foods, even those labelled "natural flavours" which incidentally are not natural at all, trick our brains, confusing our innate nutritional wisdom.

It's also about how modern commercial production of meats and produce, which focuses on higher, faster yields, is occurring at the expense of flavour and nutritional content, also affecting our nutritional wisdom.

Mark says:

"The good stuff is getting blander and the wrong stuff is getting more flavourful."

"The food crisis we're spending so much time and money on might better be thought of as a large-scale flavour disorder.  Our problem isn't calories and what our bodies do with them.  Our problem is that we want to eat the wrong food.  The longer we ignore flavour, the longer we are bound to be victims of it"

In his show notes the interviewer, Sean Croxton, says:

"Fruits and vegetables, once bursting with flavour, are now plump with water and bred with yield in mind, to the detriment of taste and nutrition.  And it's making us fat (and hungry).  Flavour dilution is the new normal.  Meanwhile, the food flavouring industry has made a science out of covering it all up while engineering addiction at the same time."

The interview discusses some very interesting research done in this area.  To me it highlights yet more incentive to avoid processed foods and seek out real whole foods, but it is also evidence of God's great engineering!

Im definitely putting this book on my reading list.

Source:  www.undergroundwellness.com
"The Dorito Effect" is available as a ebook from Amazon and ITunes.

~ take every opportunity to put the good stuff in ~

This blog is about me, what I'm doing, what's working for me, and what's not. It includes my experiences and opinions. It is for general information only and is in no way intended to replace the advice of a health care professional.