Variety and taste as tricks for eating better

Instead of dieting, just changing one’s eating habits can have a significant impact on weight. But you have to know a few things about what you’re doing. Here are two major tricks – injecting variety into your eating habits, and finding ways to make healthful food taste better – worth considering.

Balance, variety and moderation These words are the mantra of dietitians everywhere. It’s sort of like hedging your bets – eat a bunch of different things and avoid getting into ruts, and over time things that are not so healthful at least will be mitigated with the good stuff you happen across. Sounds reasonable. And, even similar farm produce (apples and oranges, for example) offer up different nutrients.

But part of the beauty of getting variety in the structure of your eating is to ease boredom. What’s so bad about boredom? It can lead to the junk food default. A study out of Wageningen University in The Netherlands (Division of Human Nutrition and Epidemiology) found that study subjects who were given the same flavor of meat sauce every night for ten weeks got bored and consumed less over time (groups with varieties of sauces did not reduce consumption as much). That’s not terribly surprising. But think of how it can impact the guy who eats the same frozen dinners or simple recipes at home, night after night. He will tend to eat less and then likely gravitate toward something else, such as pizza ordered in or something deplorable from a drive-through. Lesson learned: Develop your skills at cooking a variety of things along with a sense of how to create different flavorings. You’ll stick with your structure when it remains interesting.

Make healthy foods taste good – you’re way According to Linda Bartoshok, Ph.D., a professor at Yale University Medical School who conducts research on the pathologies of taste, clear variability exists between individuals and genders. People collectively fall into one of three general categories: supertasters, a middle group known as medium-tasters, and non-tasters. The supertasters constitute about a quarter of the population, and about two-thirds of that quarter are women.

From this we can generalize that women are more likely to be supertasters, while guys skew toward the medium or non-taster categories.

Supertasters are particularly sensitive to tastes, as the name suggests. They will find some tastes too strong, while blander foods seem to be satisfying to them. Because we guys lack this taste sensitivity, we tend to find blandness dissatisfying.

The business of flavorings and tastes relative to gender gets interesting when you consider the pain-pleasure dynamic of “piccante” or hot, spicy foods. Dr. Bartoshuk’s research finds less clear gender distinctions on the preference for pain-pleasure (relative to gastronomy, anyway). But she does note that for the larger population of men who have duller taste sensors (medium- to non-tasters), we require more spicy ingredients to stimulate our pain/pleasure. In other words, most guys who like it hot will require a greater quantity of hot sauce than most women to get the same response. Food choices and flavoring preferences are both personal and often different from that of the opposite sex – for physiological reasons. That Tabasco television commercial of a few years ago, with the backwoods guy sitting on a bayou porch, eating pizza doused in hot sauce which ultimately caused blood-sucking mosquitoes to explode, was like looking in a mirror for me. I love hot sauce on pizza. Lots of it.

But maybe you don’t. How do you know what your own personal taste preferences might be? Simple – think of your favorite foods. If you like pizza, it might be tanginess of the sauce (especially if you like more tomato-y pizzas), or perhaps the texture and taste of cheese (a significantly different nutritional component, but important to recognize). Maybe it’s sweet and sour soup, which also has a certain tang. For me, Buffalo chicken wings taste great in part because the fatty skin on the chicken, the hot sauce and blue cheese dressing on the side make a great (fatty) combination (I indulge in wings two or three times a year). When you come to understand the flavors you like the most, you’re on your way to learning how to enjoy new and healthier foods. A study out of the University of Toronto (Pliner, Stallberg-White 1998) found that children are more willing to try new foods (a different type or flavor of chip) when served in combination with a familiar taste (a chip dip they knew and liked already). This implies that the familiar helps usher in the unfamiliar.

So if you like the sour snap of lemon juice and the bite of black pepper, for example, but are not sure about grilled salmon, put all three together and your chances for acquiring a preference for this very healthful fish are increased.

Here’s are a few other approaches to taste transfer:

• Mix a little melted butter with hot sauce and drizzle it over a mash of tuna and corn topped with parmesan cheese. It has the mouthwatering taste from Buffalo chicken wings, but delivers protein minus the chicken fat.

• Do you have an addictive flavor of potato chips? Substitute edamame (soy beans in the pod) for chips and you get a protein snack with healthy, plant-based fats instead. Edamame comes frozen by the bag; fill a small bowl with some, then mix in the chip flavor you find addictive and microwave for a minute or two. Try a little vinegar, olive oil and salt (salt and vinegar); barbecue spices (barbecue); or hot sauce (jalapeño). You don’t eat the pod but squeeze it through your front teeth to pop out the soybeans, tasting the flavor from the husks as you do.

• If you don’t like the bitterness of tea, a squeeze of lime juice or other fruit flavors makes it much more drinkable. Green tea is strongly associated with lower incidence of cancers, especially those of the esophagus (people with acid reflux disease are at risk for this).

A little variety goes a long way – particularly when you enjoy it.

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Excerpted from "A Guy's Gotta Eat, the regular guy's guide to eating smart," by Russ Klettke, with Deanna Conte, MS RD LD (Marlowe & Co./Da Capo Press 2004). Available where books are sold and in more than 100 public library systems in the U.S., Canada and Europe.