Hate salad or veggies? Just keep eating them. Here’s how our tastebuds adapt to what we eat

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Do you hate salad? It’s OK if you do, there are plenty of foods in the world, and lots of different ways to prepare them.

But given almost all of us don’t eat enough vegetables, even though most of us (81%) know eating more vegetables is a simple way to improve our health, you might want to try.

If this idea makes you miserable, fear not, with time and a little effort you can make friends with salad.

Why don’t I like salads?

It’s an unfortunate quirk of evolution that vegetables are so good for us but they aren’t all immediately tasty to all of us. We have evolved to enjoy the sweet or umami (savoury) taste of higher energy foods, because starvation is a more immediate risk than long-term health.

Vegetables aren’t particularly high energy but they are jam-packed with dietary fibre, vitamins and minerals, and health-promoting compounds called bioactives.

Those bioactives are part of the reason vegetables taste bitter. Plant bioactives, also called phytonutrients, are made by plants to protect themselves against environmental stress and predators. The very things that make plant foods bitter, are the things that make them good for us.

Unfortunately, bitter taste evolved to protect us from poisons, and possibly from over-eating one single plant food. So in a way, plant foods can taste like poison.

For some of us, this bitter sensing is particularly acute, and for others it isn’t so bad. This is partly due to our genes. Humans have at least 25 different receptors that detect bitterness, and we each have our own genetic combinations. So some people really, really taste some bitter compounds while others can barely detect them.

This means we don’t all have the same starting point when it comes to interacting with salads and veggies. So be patient with yourself. But the steps toward learning to like salads and veggies are the same regardless of your starting point.

It takes time

We can train our tastes because our genes and our receptors aren’t the end of the story. Repeat exposures to bitter foods can help us adapt over time. Repeat exposures help our brain learn that bitter vegetables aren’t posions.

And as we change what we eat, the enzymes and other proteins in our saliva change too. This changes how different compounds in food are broken down and detected by our taste buds. How exactly this works isn’t clear, but it’s similar to other behavioural cognitive training.

Add masking ingredients

The good news is we can use lots of great strategies to mask the bitterness of vegetables, and this positively reinforces our taste training.

Salt and fat can reduce the perception of bitterness, so adding seasoning and dressing can help make salads taste better instantly. You are probably thinking, “but don’t we need to reduce our salt and fat intake?” – yes, but you will get more nutritional bang-for-buck by reducing those in discretionary foods like cakes, biscuits, chips and desserts, not by trying to avoid them with your vegetables.

Adding heat with chillies or pepper can also help by acting as a decoy to the bitterness. Adding fruits to salads adds sweetness and juiciness, this can help improve the overall flavour and texture balance, increasing enjoyment.

Pairing foods you are learning to like with foods you already like can also help.

The options for salads are almost endless, if you don’t like the standard garden salad you were raised on, that’s OK, keep experimenting.

Experimenting with texture (for example chopping vegetables smaller or chunkier) can also help in finding your salad loves.

Challenge your biases

Challenging your biases can also help the salad situation. A phenomenon called the “unhealthy-tasty intuition” makes us assume tasty foods aren’t good for us, and that healthy foods will taste bad. Shaking that assumption off can help you enjoy your vegetables more.

When researchers labelled vegetables with taste-focused labels, priming subjects for an enjoyable taste, they were more likely to enjoy them compared to when they were told how healthy they were.

The bottom line

Vegetables are good for us, but we need to be patient and kind with ourselves when we start trying to eat more.

Try working with biology and brain, and not against them.

And hold back from judging yourself or other people if they don’t like the salads you do. We are all on a different point of our taste-training journey.The Conversation

Emma Beckett, Senior Lecturer (Food Science and Human Nutrition), School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Burn! How To Boost Your Metabolism

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    Let’s burn! Metabolic tweaks and hacks

    Our metabolism is, for as long as we live, a constantly moving thing. And it’s not a monolith either; there are parts of our metabolism that can speed up or slow down independently of others.

    If we talk about metabolism without clarifying context, though, this is usually about one’s “basal metabolic rate”, that is, how many calories we burn just by being alive.

    Why do we want to speed it up? Might we ever want to slow it down?

    We might want to slow our metabolism down in survival circumstances, but generally speaking, a faster metabolism is a better one.

    Yes, even when it comes to aging. Because although metabolism comes with metabolizing oxygen (which, ironically, tends to kill us eventually, since this is a key part of cellular aging), it is still beneficial to replace cells sooner rather than later. The later we replace a given cell (ie, the longer the cell lives), the more damaged it gets, and then the copy is damaged from the start, because the damage was copied along with it. So, best to have a fast metabolism to replace cells quickly when they are young and healthy.

    A quick metabolism helps the body to do this.

    Most people, of course, are interested in a fast metabolism to burn off fat, but beware: if you increase your metabolism without consideration to how and when you consume calories, you will simply end up eating more to compensate.

    One final quick note before we begin:

    Limitations

    There’s a lot we can do to change our metabolism, but there are some things that may be outside of our control. They include:

    • Age—we can influence our biological age, but we cannot (yet!) halt aging, so this will happen
    • Body size—and yes we can change this a bit, but we all have our own “basic frame” to work with. Someone who is 6’6” is never going to be able to have the same lower-end-of-scale body mass of someone who is 5’0”, say.
    • Sex—this is about hormones, and HRT is a thing, but for example, broadly speaking, men will have faster metabolisms than women, because of hormonal differences.
    • Medical conditions—often also related to other hormones, but for example someone with Type 1 Diabetes is going to have a very different relationship with their metabolism than someone without, and someone with a hypo- or hyperactive thyroid will again have a very different metabolism in a way that that lifestyle factors can’t completely compensate for.

    The tips and tricks

    Intermittent fasting

    Intermittent fasting has been found to, amongst other things, promote healthy apoptosis and autophagy (in other words: early programmed cell death and recycling—these are good things).

    It also has anti-inflammatory benefits and decreases the risk of insulin resistance. In other words, intermittent fasting boosts the metabolism while simultaneously guarding against some of the dangers of a faster metabolism (harms you’d get if you instead increased your metabolism by doing intense exercise and then eating a mountain of convenience food to compensate)

    Read the science: Intermittent Fasting: Is the Wait Worth the Weight?

    Read our prior article: Fasting Without Crashing? We Sort The Science From The Hype

    Enjoy plenty of protein

    This one won’t speed your metabolism up, so much as help it avoid slowing down as a result of fat loss.

    Because of our body’s marvelous homeostatic system trying to keep our body from changing status at any given time, often when we lose fat, our body drops our metabolism to compensate, thinking we are in an ongoing survival situation and food is scarce so we’d better conserve energy (as fat). That’s a pain for would-be weight-loss dieters!

    Eating protein can let our body know that we’re perfectly safe and not starving, so it will keep the metabolism ticking over nicely, without putting on fat.

    Read the science: The role of protein in weight loss and maintenance

    Stay hydrated

    People think of drinking water as part of a weight loss program being just about filling oneself up, and that is a thing, but it also has a role to play in our metabolism. Specifically, lipolysis (the process of removing fat).

    Because, we are mostly water. Not only is it the main content of our various body tissue cells, but also, of particular note, our blood (the means by which everything is transported around our body) is mostly water, too.

    It’s hard for the body to keep everything ticking over like a well-oiled machine if its means of transportation is sluggish!

    Check it out: Increased Hydration Can Be Associated with Weight Loss

    Take a stand

    That basal metabolic rate we talked about?

    • If you’re lying down at rest, that’s what your metabolism will be like.
    • If you’re sitting up, it’ll be a little quicker, but not much.
    • If you’re standing, suddenly half your body is doing things, and you don’t even notice them because they’re just stabilizing muscles and the like, but on a cellular level, your body gets very busy.

    Read all about it: Cardiometabolic impact of changing sitting, standing, and stepping in the workplace

    Time to invest in a standing desk? Or a treadmill in front of the TV?

    The spice of life

    Capsaicin, the compound in many kinds of pepper that give them their spicy flavor, boosts the metabolism. In the words of Tremblay et al for the International Journal of Obesity:

    ❝[Capsaicin] stimulates the sympathoadrenal system that mediates the thermogenic and anorexigenic effects of capsaicinoids.

    Capsaicinoids have been found to accentuate the impact of caloric restriction on body weight loss.

    Some studies have also shown that capsinoids increase energy expenditure.

    Capsaicin supplementation attenuates or even prevents the increase in hunger and decrease in fullness as well as the decrease in energy expenditure and fat oxidation, which normally result from energy restriction❞

    Read for yourself: Capsaicinoids: a spicy solution to the management of obesity?

    You snooze, you lose (fat)

    While exercising is generally touted as the road to weight loss, and certainly regular exercise does have a part to play, doing so without good rest will have bad results.

    In fact, even if you’re not exercising, if you don’t get enough sleep your metabolism will get sluggish to try to slow you down and encourage you to sleep.

    So, be proactive, and make getting enough good quality sleep a priority.

    See: Effects of sleep restriction on metabolism-related parameters in healthy adults: A comprehensive review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

    Eat for metabolic health

    Aside from the chilli peppers we mentioned, there are other foods associated with good metabolic health. We don’t have room to go into the science of each of them here, but here’s a well-researched, well-sourced standalone article listing some top choices:

    The 12 Best Foods to Boost Your Metabolism

    Enjoy!

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  • 11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips – by Melinda Wright

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    If hips don’t lie, what are yours saying to you? If what they’re saying to you sounds like a cry for help sometimes, this is the book to get you onto a better track.

    The hip is the largest joint in your body, and it bears a lot of weight. So it’s little wonder if sometimes they’d like a word with the boss. The question is: what will you do about it? Melinda Wright has suggestions to keep your hips—and you—happy.

    She spends the first couple of chapters introducing key concepts, and some anatomy and physiology that’ll be good to know.

    Then we’re into resistance stretching, basic hip exercises, all the way through to more advanced stuff. There are very clear photos for each. One thing that stands out about this book is each exercise is not just explained simply and clearly, but also offers “easing oneself in” exercises. After all, we’re not all at the same starting point.

    The book finishes off with some more holistic advice about chronic pain management, based on her personal experience with scoliosis, and some dietary tips to reduce joint pain and inflammation too.

    All in all, a very helpful book!

    Pick up 11 “Minutes to Pain-Free Hips” at Amazon today!

    ^You will also see options for pain-free back, and pain-free neck, by the same author

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  • The Best Menopause Advice You Don’t Want To Hear About

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    Nutritionist and perimenopause coach Claudia Canu, whom we’ve featured before in our Expert Insights segment, has advice:

    Here’s to good health

    When it comes to alcohol, the advice is: don’t.

    Or at least, cut back, and manage the effects by ensuring good hydration, having an “alcohol curfew” and so forth.

    What’s the relation to menopause? Well, alcohol’s not good for anyone at any time of life, but there are some special considerations when it comes to alcohol and estrogenic hormonal health:

    • The liver works hard to process the alcohol as a matter of urgency, delaying estrogen processing, which can increase the risk of breast and uterine cancer.
    • Alcohol has no positive health effects and is also linked to higher risks of breast and colorectal cancer.
    • Alcohol can also trigger some menopausal symptoms, such as night sweats and hot flashes. So, maybe reaching for that “cooling drink” isn’t the remedy it might seem.
    • During menopause, the body becomes more insulin-resistant, making it more susceptible to blood sugar spikes caused by alcohol. Also not good.

    Common reasons women turn to alcohol include stress, frustration, the need for reward, and social pressure, and all of these can be heightened when undergoing hormonal changes. Yet, alcohol will ultimately only worsen each of those things.

    For more on the science of some of the above, plus tips on how to make positive changes with minimum discomfort, enjoy:

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    Want to learn more?

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    Take care!

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  • Exercised – by Dr. Daniel Lieberman

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Surely the title is taking liberties? We must have evolved to exercise, right? Not exactly.

    We evolved to conserve energy. Our strength-to-weight ratio is generally unimpressive, we cannot casually hang in trees, and we spend a third of our lives asleep.

    Strengths that we do have, however, include a large brain and a versatile gut perfect for opportunism. Again, not the indicators of being evolved for exercise.

    So, Dr. Lieberman tells us, if we’re not inclined to get up and go, that’s quite natural. So, why does it feel good when we do get up and go?

    This book covers a lot of the “this not that” aspects of exercise. By this we mean: ways that we can work with or against our bodies, for both physical and psychological fulfilment.

    There’s an emphasis on such things as:

    • movement without excessive exertion
    • persistence being more important than power
    • strength-building but only so far as is helpful to us

    …and many other factors that you won’t generally see on your gym’s motivational posters

    Bottom line: this book is for all those who have felt “exercise is not for me” but would also like the benefits of exercise. It turns out that there’s a best-of-both-worlds sweet spot!

    Click here to check out Exercised and get working with your body rather than against it!

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  • How community health screenings get more people of color vaccinated

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    U.S. preventive health screening rates dropped drastically at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They have yet to go back to pre-pandemic levels, especially for Black and Latine communities

    Screenings, or routine medical checkups, are important ways to avoid and treat disease. They’re key to finding problems early on and can even help save people’s lives. 

    Community health workers say screenings are also a key to getting more people vaccinated. Screening fairs provide health workers the chance to build rapport and trust with the communities they serve, while giving their clients the chance to ask questions and get personalized recommendations according to their age, gender, and family history.

    But systemic barriers to health care can often keep people from marginalized communities from accessing recommended screenings, exacerbating racial health disparities. 

    Public Good News spoke with Dr. Marie-Jose Francois, president and chief executive officer, and April Johnson, outreach coordinator, at the Center for Multicultural Wellness and Prevention (CMWP), in Central Florida, to learn how they promote the benefits of screening and leverage screenings for vaccination outreach among their diverse communities. 

    Here’s what they said. 

    [Editor’s note: This content has been edited for clarity and length.]

    PGN: What is CMWP’s mission? How does vaccine outreach fit into the work you do in the communities you serve?

    Dr. Marie-Jose Francois: Since 1995, our mission has been to enhance the health, wellness, and quality of life for diverse populations in Central Florida. At the beginning, our main focus was education, wellness, and screening for HIV/AIDS, and we continue to do case management for HIV screening and testing. 

    When the issue of COVID-19 came into the picture, we included COVID-19 information and education and stressed the importance of screening and receiving vaccinations during all of our outreach activities. 

    We try to meet the community where they are. Because there is so much misconception—and taboo—in regard to immunization. 

    April Johnson: So our job is to disperse accurate information. And how we do that is we go into rural communities. We build partnerships with local apartment complexes, hair salons, nail salons, laundromats, and provide a little community engagement, where people just hang out in different areas. 

    We build gatekeepers in those communities because you first have to get in there. You have to know that they trust you. Being in this field for about 30 years, I’ve [learned that] flexibility is key. Because sometimes you can’t get them from 9 to 5, or [from] Monday through Friday. So, you have to be very flexible in doing the outreach portion in order to get what you need. 

    I’ve built collaborations with senior citizen centers, community centers, schools, clinics, churches in Orlando and [in] different areas in Orange, Osceola, Seminole, and Lake counties. And we also partner with other community-based organizations to try to make it like a one-stop shop. So, partnership is a big thing. 

    PGN: How do you promote the importance of preventive screenings in the communities you serve?

    M.F.: We try to make them view their health in a more comprehensive way, for them to understand the importance of screening. [That] self care is key, and for them to not be afraid. 

    We empower them to know what to ask when they go to the doctor. We ask them, ‘Do you know your status? Do you know your numbers?’ 

    For example, if you go to the doctor, do you know your blood pressure? If you’re diabetic? Do you know your hemoglobin (A1C)? Do you know your cholesterol levels

    And now, [we also ask them]: ‘Have you received your flu shot for the year? Have you received all of your vaccine doses for COVID-19?’ We are even adding the mpox vaccine now, based on risk factors. 

    [We recommend they] ask their provider. For women, [we ask], ‘When do you need to have your mammogram?’ For the men, ‘You need to ask about your PSA and also about when and when to have your colonoscopy based on your age.’ 

    We also try to explain to the community that the more they know their family history, the more they can engage in their own health. Because sometimes you have mom and dad who have a history of cancer. They have a history of diabetes or blood pressure—and they don’t talk to their children. So, we try to [recommend they] talk to their children. Your own family needs to know what’s going on so they can be proactive in their screenings.

    PGN: What strategies or methods have you found most effective in getting people screened? 

    M.F.: Not everybody wants to be screened, not everybody wants to receive vaccines. 

    But with patience, just give them the facts. It goes right back to education, people have to be assured. 

    When you talk to them about COVID, or even HIV, you may hear them say, ‘Oh, I don’t see myself at risk for HIV.’  But we have to repeat to them that the more they get screened to make sure they’re OK, the better it is for them. ‘The more you use condoms, [the] safer it is for you.’ 

    In Haitian culture, they listen to the radio. So we use the radio as a tool to educate and deliver information [to] get vaccinated, wash your hands. ‘If you’re coughing, cover your mouth. If you have a fever, wear your masks. Call your doctor.’ 

    In our target population, we have people who have chronic conditions. We have people with HIV. So, we have to motivate them to receive the flu vaccine, to receive the COVID vaccine, to receive that RSV [vaccine], or to get the mpox vaccine. We have people with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depressed immune systems. We have people with lupus, we have people with sickle cell disease. 

    So, this is a way to [ensure that] whomever you’re talking to one-on-one understands the value of being safe. 

    This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Why are people on TikTok talking about going for a ‘fart walk’? A gastroenterologist weighs in

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    “Fart walks” have become a cultural phenomenon, after a woman named Mairlyn Smith posted online a now-viral video about how she and her husband go on walks about 60 minutes after dinner and release their gas.

    Smith, known on TikTok as @mairlynthequeenoffibre and @mairlynsmith on Instagram, has since appeared on myriad TV and press interviews extolling the benefits of a fart walk. Countless TikTok and Instagram users and have now shared their own experiences of feeling better after taking up the #fartwalk habit.

    So what’s the evidence behind the fart walk? And what’s the best way to do it?

    CandyBox Images/Shutterstock

    Exercise can help get the gas out

    We know exercise can help relieve bloating by getting gas moving and out of our bodies.

    Researchers from Barcelona, Spain in 2006 asked eight patients complaining of bloating, seven of whom had irritable bowel syndrome, to avoid “gassy” foods such as beans for two days and to fast for eight hours before their study.

    Each patient was asked to sit in an armchair, in order to avoid any effects of body position on the movement of gas. Gas was pumped directly into their small bowel via a thin plastic tube that went down their mouth, and the gas expelled from the body was collected into a bag via a tube placed in the rectum. This way, the researchers could determine how much gas was retained in the gut.

    The patients were then asked to pedal on a modified exercise bike while remaining seated in their armchairs.

    The researchers found that much less gas was retained in the patients’ gut when they exercised. They determined exercise probably helped the movement and release of intestinal gas.

    Walking may have another bonus; it may trigger a nerve reflex that helps propel foods and gas contents through the gut.

    Walking can also increase internal abdominal pressure as you use your abdominal muscles to stay upright and balance as you walk. This pressure on the colon helps to push intestinal gas out.

    Proper fart walk technique

    One study from Iran studied the effects of walking in 94 individuals with bloating.

    They asked participants to carry out ten to 15 minutes of slow walking (about 1,000 steps) after eating lunch and dinner. They filled out gut symptom questionnaires before starting the program and again at the end of the four week program.

    The researchers found walking after meals resulted in improvements to gut symptoms such as belching, farting, bloating and abdominal discomfort.

    Now for the crucial part: in the Iranian study, there was a particular way in which participants were advised to walk. They were asked to clasp hands together behind their back and to flex their neck forward.

    The clasped hands posture leads to more internal abdominal pressure and therefore more gentle squeezing out of gas from the colon. The flexed neck posture decreases the swallowing of air during walking.

    This therefore is the proper fart walk technique, based on science.

    A woman walks with her hands clasped behind her back
    Could walking with your hands behind your back yield better or more farts? candy candy/Shutterstock

    What about constipation?

    A fart walk can help with constipation.

    One study involved middle aged inactive patients with chronic constipation, who did a 12 week program of brisk walking at least 30 minutes a day – combined with 11 minutes of strength and flexibility exercises.

    This program, the researchers found, improved constipation symptoms through reduced straining, less hard stools and more complete evacuation.

    It also appears that the more you walk the better the benefits for gut symptoms.

    In patients with irritable bowel syndrome, one study increasing the daily step count to 9,500 steps from 4,000 steps led to a 50% reduction in the severity of their symptoms.

    And just 30 minutes of a fart walk has been shown to improve blood sugar levels after eating.

    Two people go for a walk.
    Walking after eating can help keep your blood sugar levels under control. IndianFaces/Shutterstock

    What if I can’t get outside the house?

    If getting outside the house after dinner is impossible, could you try walking slowly on a treadmill or around the house for 1,000 steps?

    If not, perhaps you could borrow an idea from the Barcelona research: sit back in an armchair and pedal using a modified exercise bike. Any type of exercise is better than none.

    Whatever you do, don’t be a couch potato! Research has found more leisure screen time is linked to a greater risk of developing gut diseases.

    We also know physical inactivity during leisure time and eating irregular meals are linked to a higher risk of abdominal pain, bloating and altered bowel motions.

    Try the fart walk today

    It may not be for everyone but this simple physical activity does have good evidence behind it. A fart walk can improve common symptoms such as bloating, abdominal discomfort and constipation.

    It can even help lower blood sugar levels after eating.

    Will you be trying a fart walk today?

    Vincent Ho, Associate Professor and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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