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Are You Using The Holidays As An Excuse To (Over)Eat?

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Gotta have the Christmas cookies, the candied yams, the stuffing with pecans, both pumpkin and pecan pies, the peanut brittle, eggnog, and whatever else your particular holiday, culture, and family traditions dictate.

Really???

Ask yourself why.  Are your groaning table and edible holiday delights really because of tradition – or, in part, an excuse to surround yourself with the food you love and want to eat?

There is nothing wrong with tradition and wanting to share your memories and love through food.

Are Holidays An Excuse To (Over)Eat?

The big question to ask yourself is:  am I really sharing/holding to tradition and memories of the season – or am I using the holidays as an excuse to make and eat a whole lot of food that I really would prefer not to eat – or eat in such quantity?

Most people who know me also know that I bake really good Christmas cookies – for a lot of events, not just Christmas.  I baked them for a party for my son’s July wedding (not a Christmas tree in sight) and as I brought them out there was a chorus of “Christmas cookies” from his friends who have eaten them many times before.  Didn’t matter that it was July.  The recipe was the same, they tasted the same, and they came from my kitchen.

What’s my point?  I love baking these cookies, and I love sharing them.  There are a whole host of emotions wrapped around these cookies.

I also know that I love eating them.  Have I ever used an occasion as an excuse to bake them – even though things would have been fine without the cookies?  You bet I have.

Why?  I love those cookies.  I love to eat them.  I love to eat the dough (I’m really not endorsing that – It’s a bad habit and the dough does have raw egg in it).

The bottom line is that I end up eating hundreds of calories – delicious, but not healthy ones – that I certainly don’t need.  And, even though I’m sharing what I consider to be “a little bit of love from my kitchen,” I still, very frequently, use the holiday or the event as an excuse.

Some Helpful Hints

I’m certainly not advocating giving up baking Christmas cookies or whatever your specialty or tradition is.  What I am suggesting is that you ask yourself the reason for doing so.  Recognize and be mindful of your reasons.

  • If you do make your specialty – plan for it.  Make it and then keep it out of sight (out of mind).  Eat it with everyone else – not in a constant stream of tasting and little snatches from the fridge or cupboard.
  • Store your amazing food out of sight and, hopefully, out of mind.  Far away, too.  Usually if we have to work to get food it may take some of the desire out of it.  So store the food in the basement or someplace out of the kitchen.
  • Leftovers?  Send them home with your family and friends.  I’ve fed lots of college dorms and offices with my leftovers.  Freeze them and store them in the back of the freezer where you can’t see them (although I can attest that frozen Christmas cookies are great – my sons once ate a whole container of them out of my downstairs freezer without my knowing about it.  Had to bake another batch before Christmas dinner.)

Traditions are important and food is nurturing.  Traditions, family, and holidays can also be stressful.  Cook away if that’s your pleasure. Just ask yourself if you are using holidays, traditions, guests, and family as excuses to (over)eat. 

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.

Does Frozen Mean Less Nutrition?

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So many of us are pressed for time – or just not interested in spending whatever time there is slaving away in the kitchen.  Do you wonder if you sacrifice nutrition by choosing far more convenient frozen produce?

According to the FDA, frozen fruit and vegetables give you the same essential nutrients and health benefits as fresh produce does.

Frozen fruit and vegetables, processed at their peak freshness and nutrition, are really just fresh fruit and vegetables that have been blanched (cooked briefly in boiling water or steamed) and frozen within hours of being picked.

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.