Are You a Supertaster?

Do you turn your nose up at black coffee?  Can’t stand bitter foods like broccoli, spinach or green tea?  If so, you might be a supertaster.  Thanks to an extra bunch of taste buds on the tip of your tongue, these bitter flavors taste more strongly to you than they do to most people. It’s been said that, for a supertaster, experiencing flavor is like feeling objects with 50 fingers instead of five.

It’s been known for nearly a century that people differ in their perception of bitter tastes in foods.  But not until relatively recently have scientists traced the origin to small genetic differences among people – variations in a taste gene that explains why about a quarter of us (the supertasters) are highly sensitive to bitter taste, while the rest of us either don’t respond much at all to bitter taste, or at least don’t find it particularly unpleasant.

No one knows why, but women are more likely to be supertasters than men. Most parents probably assume that their children are super-tasters, given that so many children have an aversion to vegetables.   But with kids, there are other factors at work that lead them to turn up their noses at Brussel sprouts. 

 If you’re a supertaster, it can be a challenge to enjoy the health benefits of foods like cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, tea and soy –foods like these are literally bitter pills to swallow. But there are a few tricks that do seem to work. 

A bit of salt helps to block the bitter taste of foods, so a dash of soy sauce or a sprinkle of garlic salt on bitter spinach can work wonders.  Rather than trying to choke down raw broccoli, cauliflower and other bitter vegetables, many find that steaming them lightly makes them more palatable.  Softer, loose-leaf cabbage varieties – like bok choi and napa – are often milder in flavor than the full-bodied round-headed types.   Sometimes adding a little bit of fat helps, too.  Stir-frying vegetables in a dash of flavorful olive or sesame oil, or adding avocado to a salad of deep green spinach, can take the edge off the taste.

On the plus side, many supertasters are sensitive not only to bitter tastes – they often also find sweet foods too sweet and very fatty foods unpalatable. As a result, they may eat less fat and sugar than most of us – and that could reduce their risk of obesity and heart disease.   

Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD. Susan is a paid consultant for Herbalife.

Healthy Eating: Can You Eat Too Much Healthy Food?

Last week, a friend was telling me that he’d eaten a huge serving of a delicious end-of-the-summer watermelon the evening before. Afterwards, he got to thinking – did he overdo it? Can you, in fact, eat too much of what’s good for you?

I get asked this a lot, particularly when it comes to fruit. Depending on what it is you’re concerned about, the answer could be yes or no. If you’re worried about eating “too much sugar” from fruit, then I’d say the concern is unwarranted. Yes, fruit is sweet from the natural sugar it contains, but it’s also packaged up with vitamins, minerals, fiber and a host of healthy phytonutrients that act as antioxidants. And, you’re probably not getting nearly as much sugar as you think – you’d need to eat a quarter of a large watermelon to match the sugar in a medium-sized soft drink. That’s a lot of melon.

If you’re worried that you might ‘overdo’ a particular vitamin or mineral, you can rest easy, too. We’re designed to take in a wide range of foods – so, as long as your diet is well-rounded and includes a variety of whole foods, you’d be hard-pressed to take in too much of any one vitamin or mineral. You just wouldn’t be able to eat enough food in order to do that.

On the other hand, when it comes to eating healthy foods, some people figure that ‘if some is good, more is better’. So while it’s highly unlikely that you could over eat a particular nutrient, you can certainly eat too many calories. And this is where the answer to the question is yes – you can eat healthy, but still eat too much.

I’ve run into this more times than I can count. The patients who say, “I don’t get it – I eat healthy, but I can’t lose weight” are often the ones who boast that they’ve switched from regular chips to fat free chips, but ignore the fact that they still eat the entire bag in one sitting.

I’ve had patients who took in huge amounts of excess calories from the most unlikely sources – foods that are “healthy” or “low calorie” – simply because they ate too much of them. One ate jar after jar of pickles; another ate over 200 calories a day from breath mints. I also had a patient who satisfied her craving for potato chips by munching on dry, uncooked (but fat free) pasta – to the tune of about 450 extra calories a day.

The healthy food that we eat – fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins and nonfat dairy products – do have a lot fewer calories per bite than the less healthy food that’s full of fat and sugar and they’re also more satisfying. The proteins keep hunger at bay, and the fiber and water in the plant foods help to fill us up.

But we have the capacity to eat a lot more calories than we burn off. So don’t assume – as many do – that portion size doesn’t matter as long as you’re eating only healthy foods. Yes, even fruit can add up – if you did eat that quarter of a watermelon, it would cost you about 350 calories. Fat free granola might be healthy, but that doesn’t mean you should eat it from a bowl the size of a football helmet. When it comes to calories, you can, in fact, get too much of a good thing.

Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD. Susan is a paid consultant for Herbalife.

Buffet Behavior – All You Can Eat or All You Should Eat?

Picture yourself at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Are you facing the buffet, or are you sitting with your back to it? Are you in a booth or at a table? Do you cruise the whole buffet line before deciding what to eat, or do you just plunge right in? To the well-trained eye, the way you behave in a buffet line could say a lot about you – and could very well affect how much you eat.

A couple of years ago, a paper published in the journal Obesity1 revealed some interesting findings from a cleverly-designed study. A total of 22 ‘trained observers’ were scattered among 11 all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets throughout the country, where they slyly watched over more than 200 diners.

They’d been trained to accurately estimate the weight and height of random patrons, then use this information to estimate their body mass index (or BMI) which is a simple way to express a person’s weight in relationship to their height. After they’d done that, they sat back, watched, and recorded what they saw – and the findings were remarkable.

There were clearly observable differences in behavior between normal weight and heavy-set people. Those with BMIs in the normal range were more likely to sit in a booth, while the high BMI folks were much more likely to sit at a table. The heavier people were also more likely to seat themselves so they could view the spread, rather than sitting with their backs to it.

The observers also noticed that the normal-weight diners tended to ‘scope out’ the whole buffet before deciding what to eat – and they put their final choices on moderately-sized plates. Most overweight diners just started at the beginning of the line and piled on the foods – and they used larger plates to do it. Even the choice of utensils differed – a lot more normal-weight people chose to eat with chopsticks, while the heavy ones opted for a fork.

Now, anyone who’s trying to lose weight knows that there are lots of tips for modifying eating behavior – eat slowly, keep tempting foods out of plain sight, practice portion control and pre-plan your meals. So what made this study so interesting is that it was a real-world observation of these principles at work.

When foods are easy to get and eat, we tend to eat a lot more of them. We’re pretty adept at using forks to shovel our food in, so it’s not surprising that heavier people might favor this method, since it’s the easiest and fastest way to get the job done. It’s also a lot easier and faster to get out of a chair rather than a booth in order to make a return trip to a buffet.

Taking a quick tour around the buffet first – something the normal-weight diners tended to do – says you’re planning ahead for what you’re going to eat. Heavier diners seemed to have only one plan – to eat, and eat a lot. And they threw another portion-control trick out the window when they opted for larger plates. Keep tempting foods out of plain sight? Hard to do when you sit facing the buffet line.

If it’s value you’re after, consider the nutritional value of your meal rather than how much food you’re getting for your dollar. Just because the sign says “all you can eat”, doesn’t mean you should.

1Wansink B and Payne CR. Eating Behavior and Obesity at Chinese Buffets. Obesity. 16(8):1957-60, 2008.

Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD. Susan is a paid consultant for Herbalife.

Food Cravings and Your Body

Are food cravings really the body’s way of telling us we’re lacking certain nutrients? The belief holds that nature creates these strong and specific food cravings so we’ll consume the necessary foods to make up the deficit.

It seems like a logical connection – that pregnant women, for example, must crave ice cream because they lack calcium, or pickles because they need sodium. Or that we turn to chocolate to cheer us up because it supplies us with compounds that are supposedly lost during a crying bout.

But scientific studies discount these notions and instead say that cravings – specifically, the intense desire for a particular food, drink or taste – are triggered not by nutritional shortages, but by a more complex set of circumstances.

Yes, chocolate does have some biologically active compounds. Two of them – phenylethylamine and anandamide – could potentially trigger the release of mood enhancing chemicals in the brain, but there’s so little found in chocolate that it’s doubtful there’s enough to have much effect. On top of that, they’re broken down during the digestive process so it’s unlikely that they reach the brain intact – which is the only way they’d do any good.

Pregnant women do yearn for foods that are very sweet, spicy or salty. But it’s thought that these food cravings are driven not by any specific nutritional need – that instead they reflect a natural drive put there by Mother Nature. In ancient times, when food was scarce, a craving for highly palatable foods would help boost calorie intake and ensure a healthy pregnancy. Nowadays, getting enough calories is usually not the problem. But pregnant women may be using cultural norms – they’re ‘eating for two’ – to support giving in to their urges for high calorie fare.

In another blow to the theory that nutritional deficits drive food cravings to replace the nutrient in question, it’s been well documented that some women who are iron deficient will eat huge amounts of ice – which is virtually iron-free. My mother-in-law used to do this. When she was going through menopause, she’d munch through two trays of ice cubes during the evening news. It’s not known why low iron stores trigger this craving, but the yearnings usually go away when the iron deficiency is corrected.

So it looks as if it’s the complexity of the individual – not so much the complexity of foods – that sparks these strong urges. We’re influenced by personal, physiological and social pressures in making food choices, and we may use cravings as a way to justify their consumption.

Ice doesn’t repair an iron shortage, but some people apparently derive pleasure from chewing it. Pregnant women don’t crave ice cream because they need calcium – they crave it because it’s delicious and because its consumption is sanctioned during pregnancy. It’s not just the bioactive compounds in chocolate that we ‘need’. We crave chocolate because it’s such an amazing sensory experience– it’s sweet, smooth, creamy, aromatic – and extremely pleasurable to eat. And since it’s loaded with fat and calories, it’s a sinful, forbidden food, too – which just makes it that much more appealing.

Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD. Susan is a paid consultant for Herbalife.

Healthy Breakfast

What did you have for breakfast today?

What do you have for breakfast? Chances are, like most people, you have either a simple carbohydrate ‘meal’ of toast or cereal, or you skip breakfast entirely (usually leading to mid-morning snacking).

Both of these approaches lead to rapid increases in blood sugar and insulin, carbohydrate cravings (snacking) and a drop in energy.

Carbohydrate-based breakfast…

In the morning, simple carbohydrates (sugary refined cereals, white bread, toast etc) cause an immediate surge in blood sugar, which results in a substantial release of insulin from our pancreas.

The insulin removes most of the sugar from our blood, turning any excess into fat. This decreased level of blood sugar results in further cravings for carbohydrates.

This vicious cycle constitutes one of the major reasons for diabetes, high blood pressure and extra weight.

Skipping breakfast…

When we skip breakfast, blood sugar drops below the normal level , leading to cravings and a drop in energy.

To deal with cravings, we usually revert to snacking on simple carbohydrates, causing a fast rise in blood sugar levels and a substantial insulin emission. The insulin removes most of the sugar from the blood and turns any excess into fat. Our body, now low in blood sugar, experiences further cravings and a drop in energy.

This vicious cycle constitutes one of the major reasons for diabetes, high blood pressure and extra weight.

Balanced healthy breakfast…

A balanced breakfast supplies our body with vital nutrients and energy without increasing blood sugar and insulin levels, and helps to avoid dependence on carbs during the day. In this way, appetite stays under control, cravings for carbs diminish and our body uses its fat stores for energy.

Criteria of a good breakfast…

A balanced healthy breakfast should do three things:

• Rehydrate the body, to replace the fluids lost during sleep.
• Provide the body with energy.
• Provide the body with all vital nutrients while helping to maintain a normal blood sugar level.

How can I get this balanced breakfast?

Our Core Nutrition Program is a simple 30 day programme for anyone looking to increase their intake of good nutrition every day. It covers all three criteria of healthy breakfast: energy, nutrition and hydration.

Hydration…

A large glass of water is the best way to begin every day.

To flavour your water, Herbalife’s Aloe Concentrate drink is a refreshing way to replace fluids lost during sleep. Aloe vera has also been proven to have numerous health benefits and aid digestion.

Energy…

Herbalife’s Instant Herbal Beverage is a refreshing and invigorating alternative to coffee or tea in the morning.

Our Herbal Beverage is an instant green tea extract, offering all the health benefits of green tea with the convenience and energy boost of instant coffee.

Nutrition…

Herbalife’s Formula 1 Healthy Meal Shake is the most important part of your healthy, balanced breakfast.

Formula 1 shakes are high in key vitamins, minerals and herbs, and the combination of protein and complex carbohydrates keeps you going without the insulin spike associated with simple carbohydrate breakfasts.

Nutritional smoothies aren’t just for weight loss, they’re for anyone who wants a healthy meal containing only the nutrients your body needs (and none of the ones it doesn’t!). They’re quick to prepare and taste great.

To make it easy, just order the Quick Start Program which includes all of our Core Products (Formula 1 Shake mix, Multivitamin, Cell Activator) plus the Herbal Tea. Just add the Aloe Concentrate to your quick start order and you have a well balanced system to be Hydrated and Energized and to get all the Nutrition you need.

Also try our
21 Day Herbal Cleansing Program.

Nitrates in Fruits & Veggies Promote Heart Health

By susanb, August 26, 2010

The story around diet and heart health has been around long enough that most people know the drill pretty well. Watch your weight, keep your total fats and saturated fats down, and don’t be too heavy-handed with the salt shaker. Add some soluble fiber from foods like oatmeal and some healthy fish oil into the mix, and you’ve got a pretty good dietary strategy.

All good advice, to be sure. After all, a high fat diet can put weight on you, saturated fats can elevate blood cholesterol levels, and excess salt can drive up blood pressure – all of which can increase your risk for heart disease. But there’s another piece to the heart health puzzle that’s getting more attention these days – a little molecule called nitric oxide.

Nitric oxide – produced in cells lining the surface of the blood vessels – is a gas that dilates arteries, which in turn aids blood flow and reduces blood pressure. It’s also a strong antioxidant, working to relieve oxidative stress in the body and reduce the threat of heart disease.

Our bodies produce nitric oxide from oxygen along with arginine, an amino acid found in abundance in protein-rich foods like nuts, beans and seafood. But there’s also another source – we can also manufacture nitric oxide from the nitrates in the foods that we eat.

When we consume nitrates in the diet, they’re absorbed in the small intestine and enter the bloodstream. About 25% of the nitrate is taken up by the salivary glands, where it’s concentrated in the saliva. Bacteria that naturally occur in the mouth then convert the nitrate to its chemical cousin, called nitrite, which is absorbed back into the system. From there, further chemical changes in blood and tissue leads to the production of nitric oxide.

You may only know nitrates and nitrites as an additive to cured meats like ham and bacon – they’re put there to primarily to preserve freshness, color and flavor. But before you start thinking that bacon is the new health food, keep in mind that it’s loaded with saturated fat and salt. And, very little of the nitrate we eat comes from cured meats.

It turns out that the majority of the nitrate we consume – between 70% and 85% – comes from vegetables and fruits, the richest sources being spinach, lettuce, celery, cauliflower, grapes, strawberries and root vegetables. Most of the rest of the nitrate we take in comes naturally in drinking water.

Fruits and vegetables have always been known as nutritional powerhouses – they’re loaded with antioxidants, fiber, vitamins and minerals, yet cost us little in terms of calories. They’re also loaded with vitamin C, which enhances the generation of nitric oxide from nitrite. But the fact that they’re also nitrate-rich just gives us yet another reason to eat them.

Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD. Susan is a paid consultant for Herbalife.

The BIGGEST Winner!

We are announcing the very first “Weight Loss Challenge” held at Take Off Express Nutrition Club in Port Orange Florida.

“This is a 12 week challenge. It officially starts Monday August 30th 2010 @ 6:30pm. This challenge will finish on November 15th 2010.”

WIN WITH WEIGHT LOSS

Join our Weight Loss Challenge and become THE BIGGEST WINNER! Unlike that show called the biggest loser, you will be the biggest winner with our challenge. You will lose weight and a chance to win money and prizes.

Our Weight Loss Challenge is a great way to lose weight. And you will have the chance to win money or prizes if your one of the top achievers in your challenge.

In a 12 Week Class, you will get:

• Your Own Personal Coach
• Personal Development
• Free Meal Plan (There is NO Food to buy like other programs)
• Group Support to Cheer You On

Best of all, Its FUN!
(Class size limited, so call now and reserve your spot)

Join Our Challenge for Only – $35

WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE?

Fill out the form @ www.LoseWeightNow.com/JCBasta and see the success stories of those who lost weight on our programs.

Call NOW… You can only register by calling us @ 631-220-2312 or 718-510-7603 if your in the PORT ORANGE, ORMOND BEACH, DAYTONA BEACH, SOUTH DAYTONA or near by Florida area’s to come and Join this challenge.

” The nutrition club is a cafe atmosphere where you will get a chance to make new friends and have FUN with other individuals just like yourself, wanting to lose weight and become healthy. You won’t be in this challenge alone. We give you great support and education in eating right and nutrition.”

Hope to see you there.