Do we imagine things are different here in Australia?
I think not.
Do you have a sweet tooth? Do you chew your food quickly, eat while watching TV or checking your emails, or constantly snack while on-the-run?
Many foods, including a number of vegetables and most meats, are naturally sweet. We don’t appreciate their naturally sweet appeal unless we take a bit of time to chew thoroughly, mindfully paying attention to our food and the pleasurable ritual of eating.
The benefits are that an enzyme in saliva which breaks down the natural sugars in these foods does its best work when food spends an adequate period of time in our mouths. We can enjoy the sweet flavour without ever needing to ingest added sugars and sweeteners. We simply need to chew thoroughly.
The other benefit of mindfully enjoying naturally sweet foods – indeed all foods – is that we consume less.
Yes, you read it correctly! There’s a satiety centre in our brains which signals to us when we’ve had sufficient. Unfortunately, the distractions of all our screens, and fast-food-gulping ensure that many of us keep wolfing it down, well after the brain has reminded us we need to stop.
Your sweet challenge for the week?
See how many common vegetables are really quite sweet, when cooked simply and eaten slowly.
Yum yum!
via The Ethical Nag
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Image: India – Haridwar 010 – vegetables for sale in Bara Bazaar. McKay Savage on Flickr. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Words: © Margi Macdonald at Some Energy Thing. © Carolyn Thomas at The Ethical Nag
Margi Macdonald 
Thank you Margi – a delicious reminder that, really, everything we need is catered for in the natural world. Adding flavour to our foods, as the Ancients did, was designed for medical and culinary balance – it had a purpose to either activate other constituent flavours/compounds or moderate other more potent/harmful elements.
The modern practice of adding or coupling flavours has very little to do with this and more to do with the aesthetic. The addition of sauces, dips, salt, pepper and dare I say it, MSG engenders this idea that the natural world and its myriad of flavours isn’t enough for the human taste sensation. For us, as humans, the challenge is to reject this orthodoxy and find favour with natural flavour.
HI Pete
thanks for dropping in and reminding us about nature’s flavouring agents – spices and herbs – each with its role to play in making food enjoyable, and more readily digested and absorbed.