Placebo Effect!

Expectations change our sensory system and alter the way we experience subjectively and objectively.

We may be laughing at people who believed in the effect of snake oil and think we are different now but Placebos still work the magic on us.

Placebos are effective in two stages to shape our expectations. Imagine that we first see the health claims all over the box of a new product, we believe in them and we decide to try. Great expectation makes us feel better after having it. Our faith results in positive initial experience and we are confident to go on. Sooner than later, we are conditioned to expect positively after repeated experiences and release chemicals to prepare us for the next pleasant outcomes, just like Pavlov's dogs salivated at the bell rings.

This explains why it's so hard to stop eating the junk food that we know is bad for us.

When we allow ourselves to reach for the convenient junk foods while feeling most hungry, sad, tired, stressed and frustrated, we are totally vulnerable to expect something good to lift us up, and boy, they are good! They are ingeniously designed and engineered so! Of course they cure all our ailments and we are hooked. We become emotional eaters of this cure-all.

We just went through the most effective Placebo process, thinking it's not much more than merely spoiling our appetite for the next meal, without knowing that it might be far more difficult to strip away the preconceptions and its self-enhancing Placebo effect once when our brains are primed and conditioned.

My point? If you have to, have it early in the day, when you are happy, full, and share it so you don't have to finish the whole bag by yourself.

Notes:

Hormones such as endorphins and opiates can block agony and produce exuberant highs and dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain's pleasure system when you expect a rewarding experience.

The Power of Expectations!

When we believe something will be good, it generally will be good. Studies show that it doesn't just change our beliefs psychologically, it also changes the physiology of the experience itself.

It turns out that knowledge doesn't merely inform us of a state of affairs, it actually reshapes the sensory perceptions to align with the information we received. That is, the knowledge of what we are going to eat actually modify the neural activity underlying the taste itself, so that when we expect something to taste good or bad, it will actually taste that way.

Interesting, don't you think?

What you know modifies your taste, changes the way you perceive and appreciate the food!

This will be quite useful when you invite people for dinner or encourage people to try something new.

However this is also how branding and marketing get us hooked on a product. We expect the product to be good because of the name, the artful presentation, the video clip or the well-designed box that suggest benefits, cultural images or social connections, and we experience greater pleasure from the product and the process of consuming it.

Don't believe that expectations change the experience? Check this out.

Coke versus Pepsi.
It's all in the head.

Receptive vs Expressive Level of Knowing.

In the world of language, we use "receptive vocabulary" to refer to the words that we understand in listening or reading, and we use "expressive vocabulary" to refer to the words that we not only understand well but can also skillfully use in speaking and writing.

Learning to taste well is the receptive food skill. Learning to prepare food is the expressive or productive skill.

Just like learning a word isn't an on/off switch process, learning how to cook is also a dimmer-switch, a "crescendo" process. The good thing is that, we don't have to make flash cards. We eat at least three times a day to refresh it.

Without a good receptive level of knowing your food, it will be hard to build up the expressive level of food skill because our receptive food memory sets up how we evaluate what we taste.

Moreover, if the receptive understanding of food is skewed, nothing out of nature and prepared by human hands naturally will taste like the processed food that you often had when you just started learning to cook. Discouraged, you thought you suck at cooking and you stopped trying. How sad!

Remember, pick up something fresh and is safe to eat raw, but will perish eventually if left long enough. Wash it clean and eat it as it is without messing with it. That's what you should compare to when you evaluate your cooking.

Chase the Real, Not That of Little Worth.

Admit it, some food is not worth having. Don't feel bad if you have to close the door to it. It is not a lost cause, it's your gain.

We hate the feeling of loss; we have an innate aversion of loss. That's why we feel we must take home that big screen TV on the last day of sale and we must take that last chocolate cookie on the platter before someone else does.

Chasing a lot of little worth just to keep the options open is foolish because it wears out our palate, our emotions, our energy, our time, our self-control capacity and our wallets.

With the abundant opportunities we have today, the right thing to do is to consciously closing some of the doors of little value and worth. We need to stay focused and selective with good taste in this very distracting world.

It is true for life and certainly true for food.

Escape from Freedom!

Do you have a hard time making choices or decisions? Do you feel overwhelmed or even anxious when you have to pick out of several options presented to you, because of the fear of missing out the others?

You are not alone, my friend. Quite the opposite, you are just the same human being as the next one.

Erich Fromm said in his book "Escape from Freedom" that we are beset not by a lack of opportunity, but by a dizzying abundance of it.

We keep telling the kids we can do anything and be anything we want to be.

That is all good, only that I see two problems, if we forget to read them the fine print.

Let's make the case within the realm of food.

We have talked about our brain and how evolutionally ancient it is (our food brain). When it comes to food, when our brain is primed to believe "do anything we want, experience everything", when we believe that without the knowledge of what's in our best interest and about the food system we have today, it is (in fact, it has been) a recipe for disaster. In a nut shell, if the food system doesn't work for you, you can't just take everything and every opportunity when the food is presented to you. Do you know whether that is real food or just edible food-like substances, how it is produced or manufactured, and what it does to your body and mind? That is the first problem.

The second problem is in living up to it.

I know, you are going to say, "didn't you just say we should not eat everything we could? So, is experiencing it all a bad thing to avoid or a good thing to live up to?"

Exactly! If you do it right, it's a good thing. If you do it blindly, it's beyond bad.

In my opinion, a good thing that's worth living up to, is something we must develop ourselves in every possible way so we can discern the nuance, truly appreciate the expression and consume the offering responsibly. The development of the capacity to perceive will enhance and maximize the experience, making it a lot more meaningful and substantial to you and to the planet.

Moreover, when you have the capacity to distinguish real from fake, your craving will be geared towards food that is naturally good to you. That is how you reclaim your freedom in choosing what you eat and trust me, when it comes to deciding what can touch your body, you want the sole ownership of that right.

On the contrary, if we ignore to build up our understanding around it, we, as human beings, tend to spread ourselves too thin, eating everything we could unselectively, trying the newest product with the most health claims, running from one hip place to the next but never quite feeling enough or satisfied. Do you know that the processed food today, is meticulously and scientifically engineered to make us "insatiable" and always want more of it. How can you stay in control of your appetite and palate without knowing it? You have an illusion of freedom in your food choices but as a matter of fact your brain and palate have scientifically been hijacked.

Problem two in a nut shell: if you don't know what you are eating, it's bad, beyond bad. Build your food skill from tasting it and then preparing it.

Homemade Chicken Breast Sandwich Slices, with Bonus Soup.

The chicken breasts are a great source of lean protein that I often buy the whole pieces with bone-in and make for the whole week. I add them into my salad, sandwiches, wraps, or top off my ramen noodles.

The key is to time the process so as not to overcook the breasts.

Try my simple way of cooking the chicken breasts.

I also made a soup out of the bones.

Simple Tomato Soup with Leftover Bones.

Enjoy!

No Time for Breakfast? Try This!

I don't have to tell you the importance of breakfast, but a lot of times we skip it because we are so pressed for time in the morning. Okay, maybe the usual cereal and milk or whatever is boring and we are just not in the mood to do anything in the morning, other than turning on the coffee machine.

Here is something as simple and you can prepare the night before. Heat up and you have a breakfast to go.

Try my Creamy Hot Sesame Cereal.


Note:

• Sesame seeds are an excellent source of copper, a very good source of manganese, and a good source of magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, iron, zinc, molybdenum, vitamin B, vitamin E, and selenium. It is also rich in vitamin B, vitamin E, and contains sesamin and sesamolin.
• Therefore, regular consumption of black sesame seeds is believed to have the following benefits:
• Anti-aging
• Lowering your cholesterol
• Protect heart health
• Improve blood pressure
• Balance hormones
• Fight Cancer
• Help burn fat
• Support healthy bones and skin
• Protect liver in detoxification process
• Relieve constipation
• Improve digestion

So, enjoy!

Have You Tasted Lately?

The taste buds on our tongue and palate can perceive the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory. These five basic tastes are meaningful from our evolution history and they are the markers for things that helped us survived.

As we talked about in the posting Dessert Disaster and Food Brain, sugar is a marker for ripeness in fruits and vegetables, which did not come very often in prehistorical age. When our smart prehistorical ancestors encountered a bush of ripe berries, they topped out their carb tanks to provide the energy for the existence, and thus had the chance to pass on the genes with the predisposition to sugar.

Saltiness is a marker for sodium, minerals, and micronutrients that we need to regulate our fluid balance and body functions.

Sourness is a marker for under-ripeness or even spoilage. It is to alert us to think twice before eating that further. Without that, we might eat too much of unripe fruits and get sick or a stomachache.

Bitterness is a marker for alkaloids in a plant-based diet, which are often poisonous. It is a warning that it is risky to put that in our mouth again, as it might kill us.

Savoriness, or called Umami in Japanese (a trendy term used by chefs), is the flavor of protein that has begun to break down through enzyme activity or through long cooking process. Savory flavors can be found in soy sauce (brewed and fermented with enzyme), cured meats (fermented), aged cheese, miso (Japanese fermented bean paste), and broth or stock (cooking fish or livestock bones for a long period of time).

Enter flavor.

Isn't it the same thing? Not quite. Be right back ...

Elephant in the Room: Stress!

Why are we so stressed out?

To detox, we need to understand stress.

Two Types of Stress:

To understand the causes of stress, we need to first know there are two kinds of stress: acute stress and chronic stress.

See, stress in our daily life is just like hurt or pain - they are there to protect us from further harm.

When people or animals experience an immediate threat to their well-being, they know something is wrong and danger might be there if we don't do something, thus acute stress occurs to alert us. Think about when we could not find our wallet or cellphones, the stress response kicks in to help us respond to the event. Once the event is over, our body returns to normal and the stress is gone.

These days, when people talk about stress, they usually mean chronic stress that's always there, in the background ready to rise up.

Animals don't seem to experience chronic stress, except those that live around human beings (yeah, and we thought they were the trouble makers.) - those we abuse or keep in cages. When left along, animals don't appear to have chronic stress like we do.

Three Causes of Chronic Stress:

There are three reasons why we are far more chronically stressed than animals or our prehistorical ancestors.

1. We changed our environment drastically

Wild animals live in pretty much the same environments like they have been living for millions of years in their evolution. We don't. We have changed our environment so much that most things that create chronic stress are the recent developments of civilization and culture, including traffic jams, computer crashes, constant interruptions and noise, air travel, financial market mess and stock market volatility.

2. We changed from being in immediate-return environment to being in delayed-return environment, thus uncertainty about the future rise.

No, I am not talking about the interest rate and long term treasury bond.

Wild animals live in immediate-return environment, while we found ourselves in a delayed-return environment ever since we started to rely on farming about 10,000 years ago (at the start of the agricultural revolution when we began to settle into permanent communities, build houses and grow our own food.)

In the immediate-return environment, animals get immediate feedback to know how things are going, or if their effort, responses to events work. (Well, if you get eaten, you get eaten, but at least you know the outcome right then.) Our ancestors also lived like that until very recently. They wandered around, searching for foods, dealing with threats or predators, interacting with other human beings and raising kids. Day to day, moment to moment they had constant feedback about how they were doing in meeting goals. Prehistorically, people couldn't do much for the future so they were focusing on meeting their day to day needs and there were very little uncertainty about how well they were doing.

These days we spend most of our time and effort for future goals. Can this relationship work out? Can we find a job after four years of college? When we put all our time and effort into something, there is no assurance that our hard work will pay off and the uncertainty about the future causes us constant stress.

3. To make things worst, there is often nothing we can do about it.

Just like the return is delayed, the threat is also delayed in the future, and it is in our mind rather than immediately present, even though it's every bit real. Our human nature wants to take action to remove the stressors but we find ourselves not able to do anything about it at the moment. Therefore, we feel frustrated and stressed out when we worry about things in the future that we have no control over.


Well, happiness and stresses are both connected to our well-being and eating well is part of the whole so we have to take a holistic approach. When we are off balance, we tend to stress eat without really enjoying, savoring and tasting whatever food has to offer and that's sad.

The Real Reason for Bargains is to Eat Well.

When I give you the weekly sales, I don't mean to have you drive around town to get them.

Instead, I want you to stick with your favorite stores but try to grab good deals when you spot them and pay attention to what is on sale recently. (Sorry, this won't work for folks in Southern Hemisphere, such as Aussies and Kiwis.)

See, you think bargains are all just about stretching the dollars and their buying power, right?

Well, that too but not so fast.

For centuries, people know to eat food at their peak, when they are in season.

When the food, especially fresh produces are in season, they grow faster, easier, more delicious and contain more nutrients.

Since they grow easier, the cost is lower and that's why, there are bargains.

Further more, we should eat food that is local and indigenous, if we can help, because these are fresher when we get them, they don't have to travel far and be harvested prematurely.

By eating local food in season, we make it more sustainable for our planet too.

So, by all means, buy the bargains, I mean, enjoy them when they are in season. I am here to help you notice it and prepare it, if you allow me.

Cheers.

Brain Food for Tea Time!

Can we eat to help our brain function better?

Your brain needs vitamins and essential fatty acids to function. They also support your heart and your body's general well being.

When you feel like having something to help you focus in the long, awkward time between lunch and dinner, don't just munch away and let temptation rule you. First defense line to guard your health is snacking mindfully.

Like I mentioned not all calories are created equal. You can snack to really fuel your body and your brain or undermine them.

By the way, the most important thing to help your brain is good sleep. If you are sleep deprived or suffer from insomnia, don't try to eat your problem away. Get some good sleep first. (I'll post something in that regard later.)

Here is a list of food that would help your brain function.

1. Broccoli, Cauliflower - your brain's best friend with high level of vitamin K, which has a great deal of health benefits, including enhancing cognitive functions. Steam it for only 2 to 4 minutes or roast it instead. Sprinkle with chopped garlic, olive oil, and chile flakes for the boost.
2. Fish high in EFA's and Omega-3 - oily fish like salmon, sardines, trout, and kippers contain EFA's in a ready-to-use form. Omega-3 supports brain and nerves system and prevent cognitive problems, sleep disorders, learning disabilities and depression. The essential fatty acids from fish and nuts can not be produced by the body and have to be ingested from our diet. 
3. Fruits high in vitamin C - blackcurrants, tomatoes, blueberries. The antioxidants that your body gets through regularly consuming fruit and vegetables are an important part of your diet, as they improve your cognitive performance and ward off stress, to help you think and learn better – essential for all of us out there. Their high level of vitamin-C that can help nerve cells and brains function better and prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease.
4. Sweet potato or banana for potassium -  Potassium is needed for good oxygen flow to the brain to support concentration and productivity. Sweet potato has more potassium than a banana and lower GI for a lower and longer sugar burning boost. Bake it with a sprinkle of salt, Cajun.
5. Nuts - they are whole food with low GI, high-protein for brain fuel and they are very filling. Walnuts are a great source of omega-3 fatty acids, like oily fish. However, watch out for the calories as they are, after all, high in calories from oil. Take a moderate amount and don't refill after you finish them.
6. Chocolate, the darker the better - not the kind from candy bars. I prefer 80 percent or more and I eat them with pumpkin seeds or nuts such as almonds.

The rest are also good for brain function but may suit better in your meal plan.

1. Curry - Turmeric, the spice that gives curry and mustard their yellow color, contains a chemical called curcumin. Research has shown curcumin’s ability to boost memory, slow the progression of Alzheimer’s and stimulate neurogenesis, which is the process of creating new brain cells. It may also clear out amyloid plaques, the brain gunk thought to be a cause of Alzheimer’s, and calm inflammation of brain and nerve cells.
2. Chickpeas - They contain high level of magnesium, a mineral that plays a key role in energy metabolism. Magnesium is highly beneficial for brain cell receptors, speeding message transmission. Magnesium also relaxes blood vessels, letting more blood through to feed the brain.
3. Buckwheat - buckwheat is a natural mood-calmer because it's high in relaxing tryptophan, providing 25 percent of your recommended allowance in a one-cup serving. Buckwheat is also a good source of magnesium, with 229 mg per serving. (Though some forms of cooking drop the magnesium content.)  Technically a fruit seed, buckwheat is gluten-free and high in fiber, so it’s a great grain substitute. Throw it in soups or stews, or cook it and add it to salads. You can even boil it up as a hot breakfast cereal, much like grits or cream of wheat.

Sorry it's a bit long, but when it comes to our brain, we just can't cut corners, eh?

Are You Happy?

And what is happiness? A surge of pleasure because something good happened to you? How long does it last?

We love moments of happiness but no one can sustain happy feelings over time. Moreover, do we want just occasional episodes of happiness, or an overriding sense of contentment, with life, with ourselves?

Social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky classified causes of happiness into three major categories: life circumstances, genetics, and behavior. Furthermore, her research shows that only about 10 percent of people's happiness is due to their life circumstances - such as health, getting a raise  at work, buying a new house, or getting married. However that's what most of us focus on and try to change to make us happier, or more precisely, to imagine us being happier in the future with those changes. Those changes might make you happy, but perhaps they don't make you as happy as you think they do, or for as long as you imagine.

Most people think that they will be happier if they had more money. Well, it's hard to be truly happy if you live in poverty, below a certain income level.

However, researchers at Princeton University found that after people have somewhere between $60,000 and $75,000 (in 2010), there's no relationship between income and happiness.

So, what makes you happy? Or maybe we should ask, how do we make ourselves happier, for longer?

Dessert Disaster!

When we eat a big helping of dessert calories packed with refined sugar and carbohydrates, which pass through our digestive system quickly and load up our bloodstreams with sugar in the form of glucose, our food mechanism would turn that big surge of glucose into energy and store it for later use, yes, in and around our bellies.

That means, 100 calories from syrup isn't the same 100 calories from a handful of almonds or from a bowl of brown rice in terms of how our body responds to them.

Foods with high GI, high sugar content and no protein or other nutritional value are usual a great quick fix for your hunger pangs, or boredom snacking, but they’ll leave you more tired, hungry and dissatisfied than you were to begin with.

The better way to eat is to choose snacks that will nourish your body and your mind – and keep your hunger at bay.

We all need tasty treats to keep us swinging until work is done in the afternoon and we don't have to give up all desserts, we just have to select a better kind, if not the right kind.

Note: 

Glycemic Index (GI) - 

It measures how a carbohydrate-containing food raises blood glucose. Foods are ranked based on how they compare to a reference food — either glucose or white bread. A food with a high GI raises blood glucose more than a food with a medium or low GI. The lower is better and generally, foods with glycemic index of 55 or lower is considered low, 56 – 69 as medium; and 70 and above as high.

Brown rice has much lower GI than white rice, while white rice has a lower GI than glutinous rice (the sweet sticky rice that makes mochi or rice dumpling.)

The same food can have different GI reading when prepared in different ways, for example, white rice porridge has lower GI than steamed rice.

When you eat rice with protein, that can lower the GI of the whole dish, as you can imagine the protein can slow down the break-down process for rice to turn sugar so it can't rush to our bloodstream as fast. That's why the same calories in a cup of sugar water as opposed to that in a handful of almonds have quite different impact to our body.

When Evolution Is Outpaced ...

Why do we eat too much and even continue to eat when we are full and consciously know we are undermining our health and shortening our lives? Why does our eating mechanism seem to be malfunctioning and going against our best interests?

The answer is, human beings have an evolved mechanism to eat whenever food is available.

Human nature evolved mostly on the plains of Africa, where our ancestors wandered around as nomadic scavengers, gatherers, and hunters, long before we settled in communities. Our days were spent looking hard for food. When we found some, it made a lot of sense to eat as much as we could because we had no way to store or carry extra food, and we didn't know how long it might be until we would eat again.

These days we have much more food than we need. We can eat as much as we want, 24 hours a day.

To make matters worse, we seem to have a particular penchant for sweet and fatty foods. Maybe these are fairly common on the plains when we evolved, so we did not need to be a glutton for vegetables. However, sweet fruits and fatty animal flesh were hard to get. When our prehistorical ancestors found sweet fruits and killed an animal, it was advantageous to eat as much as possible. So unless we work very hard to control ourselves, we feel fine and happy to finish that juicy hamburger and head off for dessert.

Our food industry has made so much progress while we still have the same stone-age brain that we inherit from our gatherer-hunter ancestors, with a hard-wired mechanism telling us to eat as much as possible. We are so out-dated, out-paced, out-numbered and out-smart'ed that it is for sure a tough battle to fight, but we have to try no matter what.

If we don't know how our food brain works, if we don't know what we are dealing with, there is no chance we can prevail.

To read more, go to Your Stone Age Brain.

Yes, I know. You want the recipes for good food. They are on the way...

Did you check out my salt page yet?

Enjoy.

Go Nuts! Go Bananas!

I have a huge sweet tooth. I love nuts, fruits, cakes and the combination of all three, but today, I am going to focus on fruits since summer is around the corner and I don't want you to miss all the goodies coming our way.

Not only do fruits taste great by itself, they detox, cleanse and nourish us in many ways. For many people who dislike vegetables, it's the only thing they would eat uncooked and unprocessed.

A lot of nutrients found in the fruit peels and skins, such as the resveratrol in red grape, are very beneficial to us. Most of them have the same nutrients in flesh as well. To me, with or without the skins, they rock either way. Best of all, they satisfy my sugar cravings without the fat.

Check out more facts about fact about pythonutrients.

Since we got gorgeous berries at bargain prices this week, I am going to give you some recipes based on that. Stay tuned.

Detox, is it for real?

Detox, is it really difficult? Is it necessary?

Do you feel moody, exhausted, stressed and unhappy most of the time but have no idea why? Do you want to stay healthy, energetic but can not find enough time to shop, cook or exercise, so you just grab whatever and gobble it up, hoping that will fix it for you.

The diet we have today is very different from what it used to be, so is its availability, quality and the amount we consume. On top of that, we have a very different life style. Without some understanding in the food we eat, the art of cooking we can manage, the nutrition our human body needs to function at its best, we really are just shooting in the dark, are we not?

I intend to write short articles in this blog, focusing on where to find the best deals and prepare the food in the most delicious way I know of, but since I put up "Detox" as the first word in my description line, I feel I owe it to you to explain my food philosophy before posting anything further.

You must know that some people release their pressure through emotional eating, but that starts an evil cycle of stress, eating and guilt until many chronic deceases destroy our overall wellbeing.

Most of us are not to that extreme but when it comes to something so easy to see, so tempting to grab and so ready to jump into our shopping cart. Unwittingly, we have put a lot of those in us before we find our skin dehydrated, our hair losing quickly and our metabolism slowing down.

The problem maybe that we overeat, eat the wrong things, eat in the wrong way, and eat it for the wrong reason. Maybe the real question is, what is eating us that is causing us to feel hungry and in need of instant gratification from food all the time?

Fresh food doesn't necessarily cost more. Food, doesn't have to be expensive to make us healthy, to be sustainable for our planet earth. Cooking doesn't have to take up a lot of time to make it great, soothing and relaxing after a long hard day. That's the meaning behind my description line: "Detox, Easy, Fresh, Affordable and Sustainable."  That's my idea how food should be.

To read more...