Eat Out Eat Well

Food for Fun and Thought

Should You Blame The Turkey For Thanksgiving “Food Coma”?

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The Bird And The Berry

Turkeys and cranberries, part and parcel of our modern Thanksgiving (and Christmas) menus, are both native to the Americas.

About 46 million turkeys landed on US dinner tables last Thanksgiving, around  736 million pounds of turkey meat.  US farmers produce 735 million pounds of cranberries, 1.9 billion pounds of sweet potatoes and 931 million pounds of pumpkins.

Thanksgiving “Food Coma”

Urban myth is to blame the bird for your Thanksgiving “food coma.” Wrong.  You may have post-meal fatigue, but the turkeys are getting a bad rap.  The amount of sleep-inducing tryptophan in most turkey meals isn’t responsible for your coma-like state – blame the number of calories, the booze, and your relaxed state instead.

What Was on the First Thanksgiving Menu?

American Indians, Europeans, and cultures around the world often feasted to celebrate the harvest and to thank the higher powers for sustenance and survival.

We know that the first Thanksgiving dinner in the Plimoth (Plymouth) Colony, in October 1621 in what is now Massachusetts, was attended by about 50 English colonists and 90 Wampanoag American Indian men.

The Wampanoag killed five deer, the colonists shot wild fowl, and maybe some geese, ducks, or turkey. Some form of Indian corn was served and probably supplemented with fish, lobster, clams, nuts, wheat flour, pumpkin, squash, carrots, and peas.  They were true seasonal eaters and it was harvest time.

Was The First Thanksgiving The True Thanksgiving?

Although the 1621 Plimoth Thanksgiving is thought of as the first Thanksgiving, it was really a harvest celebration. The first “real” Thanksgiving didn’t happen until two centuries later. (In the 17th century a day of Thanksgiving was actually a day of fasting.)

What is known about the three day Plimoth gathering comes from a letter written by Edward Winslow, a leader of the Plimoth Colony in 1621.  It had been lost for 200 years and was rediscovered in the 1800s.

In 1841 Alexander Young, a Boston publisher, printed Winslow’s description of the feast and called it the “First Thanksgiving,” which caught on.

In 1863 President Lincoln declared Thanksgiving Day a national holiday. The current date for the observance of Thanksgiving, the fourth Thursday of November, was established in 1941 by President Franklin Roosevelt.

Free Food Is Hard To Resist (And A Caloric Nightmare)

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Morning meeting.  Right in front of you: platter loaded with bagels, danish, and doughnuts parked next to giant coffee urns.  A freebie breakfast and the beginning of a blood sugar roller coaster ride.

No worries if you miss the morning carb fest – if all the platters aren’t picked clean the remnants will surely end up in the snack room next to the birthday cake (it’s always somebody’s birthday) or the leftover cookies from someone’s party the night before.

Costco on the weekend.  There are at least three tables manned by people offering you samples of hot pizza, luscious cheesecake, or tooth-picked pigs ‘n blankets.   Just the right size to quickly and neatly pop into your mouth – especially when you circle back for seconds.

Errands. Stops at the cleaners, the tailors, the veterinarian, the hair salon.  On the desk or counter:  giant bowls piled high with freebie candy.  You can dig deep for the kind you like – Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, mini Snickers, Tootsie Roll pops.  You name it — it’s usually there for the taking.

Party or wedding.  How do you escape the platters of salami, cheese, mini quiches, and then the desserts covered with icing, whipped cream, and powdered sugar?

What’s The Problem With Free Food?

Not a thing if you don’t care about calories, nutrition, and how you’ll feel after an overload of sugar, fat, and salt.  Tons of “starving” students and young (and not so young) adults have chowed down on ample quantities of free food.  Here’s the question:  are full bellies with no impact on the wallet ultimately the best choice?

Occasional dips into free food are probably not going to hurt anyone in reasonable health.  But, on a consistent basis, there is certainly a downside to your health.  There could me a more immediate concern, too.  A whole bunch of non-nutritious (junk, processed, and high calorie) food eaten right before a time when intense concentration and focus is necessary (translation:  exams and presentations) could certainly have a negative impact.

Why Do We Find Free Food So Attractive?

Most of us find it pretty darn hard to ignore “free food,” the food that’s just there for the taking. It’s everywhere – and we’ve become accustomed to valuing cheap calories.  Think about it:  when was the last time you resisted the peanuts, pretzels, or popcorn sitting on the bar counter?  What about the breadbasket – that’s usually free, too.

We don’t have to eat any of this stuff.  But we do.  Why?  Some of us have trouble passing up a giveaway regardless of what it is.  Some see it as a way to save money – despite possible negative health consequences.  And a lot of us use “free” as an excuse or sanction to eat or overeat sweet, salty, fatty junk food.

And the calories?  Free doesn’t mean calorie free.  But it’s all too easy to forget about those calories you popped in your mouth as you snagged candy here and tasted a cookie there.  Yikes.  You could eat a day’s worth of calories cruising through a couple of markets and food stores.

Before The Freebies Land In Your Mouth

How about creating your own mental checklist that, with practice, can help you figure out whether or not it’s worth it to indulge.  Even f you decide to go for it and taste the salami, butter cookies, and cheese cake, at least you’ll have made a mindful decision rather than mindlessly shoving food in your mouth.

Ask yourself:  Is the food you’re so willing to pop in your mouth . . .

  • fresh and tasty, with some nutrition?  It might be if you’re at a wedding or an event, but the odds go down if it’s food handed out at the supermarket or grabbed out of a large bowl at the cleaners.
  • clean?  How many fingers have been in the bowl of peanuts or have grabbed pieces of cheese or cookies off of an open platter?
  • something you really want – or are you eating it just because it’s there?
  • loaded with fat, sugar, and salt that adds up to mega calories?  Every calorie counts whether it’s popped in your mouth and gone in the blink of an eye or savored more slowly and eaten with utensils off of a plate.

Choices, Choices

Just because food is free doesn’t mean you have to eat it. No one is forcing you.  Beware of the cascading effect:  if you let yourself sample the candy, pizza, cheesecake, popcorn, or cookies, perhaps you’re giving yourself permission to continue to overindulge in food you probably don’t want to/shouldn’t be eating.

Highly caloric, sugary, and fatty foods can act as the key to opening the flood gates that cause you to continue to indulge for the rest of the day (weekend/week). Loading up on simple sugars – the kind found in candy, cookies, cake, and many processed foods – causes your blood sugar level to spike and then to drop –leaving you hungry very quickly and pretty darn cranky — and isn’t great for your waistline, either.

What’s The Dirtiest Thing In Your Kitchen?

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It’s Right Next To Your Sink:  Your Sponge

Whether you cook in your kitchen or just use it to stage your take-out food, almost all of us have a sponge hanging around the kitchen sink.

Whether you use that sponge to wash dishes, pots and pans, or just to wipe up the spills and crumbs on the counter, you might be horrified to find out what’s lurking in your yellow, green, blue, or pink cleaner upper.  Your sponge just might be the dirtiest thing in your kitchen.  Even restaurants, according to the FDA’s Food Code, are prohibited from using a sponge for the final wipe of a surface that comes into contact with food.

 What Can Be Lurking In Your Sponge

CSPI’s Nutrition Action Health Letter (11/11) reports that in a recent NSF International survey of US homes:

  • Coliform bacteria was found in 77% of sponges and dishcloths
  • Yeast and mold was in 86%
  • Staph bacteria was found in 18%

Why Are Sponges So Filthy?

There are a bunch of reasons your trusty cleaner upper is not so trustworthy.

Sponges:

  • are usually wet and/or left in damp areas near your sink – and germs love damp and wet places to multiply
  • constantly touch food residue that then hangs around inside the sponge and provides nutrients for organisms to grow
  • have lots of nooks and crannies that are great places for organisms to set up residence
  • aren’t usually cleaned or sanitized before they are used

What To Do – And What Not To Do

Only washing your sponge in running water and squeezing out the excess doesn’t do a whole lot. Soaking your sponge in 10% bleach (about twice the concentration of household bleach) for three minutes or soaking it in lemon juice or water for one minute turned out to be almost like doing nothing.

If you’re thinking that you’re ready to swear off kitchen sponges forever, there’s hope. Microbiologists at the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Lab found:

  • You can get rid of a significant number of bacteria by microwaving a wet sponge for one minute – make sure your sponge doesn’t have metal in it and that it’s wet (or it might catch fire)
  • Almost as many bacteria are killed by running your sponge through the dishwasher

Of course, if you want to, you could always use good old dishcloths and toss them in the washing machine every day.  Or, you could use paper towels for a lot of wipe up – except that’s not such an environmentally great solution.

So, even if your sponge doesn’t stink or still looks nice and clean, there still might be some nasty stuff living in there.  Just make sure that your sponge and your microwave and/or dishwasher develop a nice friendly relationship.

Taste Or Flavor — Which Is It?

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Did you ever hold your nose when your Mom tried gave you foul tasting medicine?  Does triple hot chili bring tears to your eyes and sweat to your forehead  — then lose some of its burn after three or four bites? Both have to do with taste and flavor.

What Is Taste?  What Is Flavor?

Taste is information you get from your taste buds about what you eat.  Flavor is a complex composition in which your brain helps put together tastes, smells, temperature, and the tactile sensation known as “mouth feel” to create what you perceive as flavor. There are five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (savory). Umami, a taste that’s hard to define, is sometimes called meaty, sometimes savory.

Thousands And Thousands Of Taste Buds

Your whole tongue, upper palate of your mouth, and the inside of your cheeks have taste buds that help determine flavor. Groups of 50-250 taste buds are inside the little “bumps” on your tongue. Humans are born with about 10,000 of these tiny taste bud sense organs and they work so hard that your body replaces them about every two weeks. Some taste buds are more sensitive to one taste but they all can detect basic tastes. As you age some taste buds don’t get replaced so older adults may only have 5,000 – which explains why older people may add more salt or sugar to what they’re eating.

What About Smells?

We only recognize five tastes but we can recognize thousands of smells. As much as 85% of the perception of taste comes from smell. For instance, even though a chocolate chip cookie and pecan pie both register as sweet, their flavors are different because their smells, temperatures, and mouth feel are processed along with the taste letting you know that you’re eating a freshly baked, gooey chocolate chip cookie — not pecan pie.

How Does The Taste Process work?

Smell prepares you for tasting and digesting food and it doesn’t matter whether it’s stinky cheese smell or baking brownies smell. For you to taste, food needs to be dissolved.  Smell triggers increased saliva production in your mouth and a small increase in digestive acid in your stomach to help with food breakdown. While you’re chewing, the food releases chemicals that travel up into your nose and triggers the olfactory (smell) receptors inside it.

When food goes into your mouth, chemical components navigate to your taste buds. Some react the most to sodium ions so you taste “salt.”  Others react mostly to sugar, acid, alkaloid or glutamate causing the taste to be “sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,” or “umami.”

Try putting some food on your dry tongue. Bet you won’t taste a thing. What happens when your nose is totally stuffed from the rotten cold you got from who knows where?  You can’t taste your food, right?

Why Do I Like “Sweet” And My Friend Likes “Salty”?

Humans seem be hard-wired to like certain tastes and not others – probably a survival mechanism. Sour and bitter tastes often mean food that is bad, not ripe, or poisonous. Sweet, salty, and savory tastes often signal good, energy producing, electrolyte replacing foods.

But why do some people like chocolate and some vanilla — or salty crackers rather than animal crackers?  Who puts the grape flavor into purple lollipops and cheddar cheese flavor into cheese doodles?

There’s a whole industry of food chemists, called flavorists, who work to put the flavors you crave into food. They toil away in labs filled with extracts, powders, and chemicals, mixing and sniffing dozens of combinations until they have the perfect blend. They start with aroma and then tweak the taste.  The resulting flavors can then be used in anything from chips to frozen dinners.

Why Do Our Tastes Differ So Much If We All Have Taste Buds?

We all have favorite foods and others we don’t like.   You and your friend may disagree over coffee or strawberry; brussel sprouts or beets.

Scientists who study taste are finding that we probably taste things differently because our total number of taste buds varies.  Most people, with an average number of taste buds, are medium tasters and enjoy a range of flavors. Others, the nontasters, have a minimal sense of taste which may mean that they don’t enjoy eating. Others, the supertasters, can have 100 times more taste buds per square inch than nontasters making them extremely sensitive to certain tastes — and temperatures — of food. For supertasters, spicy, bitter, or sour foods can have a very strong or unpleasant taste, and sweets may be way too much.

We like what we eat for reasons having to do with flavors, taste, smell, temperature, and mouth feel.  Keep in mind that the food industry spends mega bucks flavoring and preparing foods to capitalize on these factors. Sniff the produce and baked goods at a farmer’s market. Think about the satisfying and flavors that are derived from nature – and baker’s ovens – and not concocted in a laboratory.  The choice is yours.  Eat well.

How Many Calories Were In That Trick Or Treat Bag?

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A public heath expert has estimated that, on average, a child in the US collects between 3,500 and 7,000 candy calories on Halloween night.

She says that to burn off 7000 calories, a one hundred pound child would have to walk for almost 44 hours or play full-court basketball for 14.5 hours.

With 31% of US children and teens ages 2-19 overweight or obese, it really makes you stop and think about having candy and treats so frequently and easily available everywhere you look.

One evening of collecting candy is not going to make a child – or an adult – overweight or obese.  It is the constant bombardment with candy, sweets, and other treats that can lead to weight (and health) challenges.

Now that we’re on the cusp of the major holiday season perhaps it’s time to give some thought to the quantity and constant availability of treats.

A treat is only a treat if it happens once in a while.  If it’s a common occurrence it far too frequently becomes an expectation or a habit.