I dont have to tell you all how much I love food, and how much I disdain diets of any kind. Dierdre did that Atkins business a while ago and her butt disappeared. Nightmare!
Anyway, food is awesome. Just check out this pot pie!
Deelish!
The reason I bring it up is that there was a great op-ed piece in the Times yesterday. You can read it here. In it, Harriet Brown reveals some smokin' studies, like this one...
In the 1970's, researchers fed two groups of women, one Swedish and one Thai, a spicy Thai meal. The Thai women — who presumably liked the meal more than the Swedish women did — absorbed almost 50 percent more iron from it than the Swedish women. When the meal was served as a mushy paste, the Thai women absorbed 70 percent less iron than they had before — from the same food.
The researchers concluded that food that's unfamiliar (Thai food to Swedish women) or unappetizing (mush rather than solid food) winds up being less nutritious than food that looks, smells and tastes good to you. The explanation can be found in the digestive process itself, in the relationship between the "second brain" — the gut — and the brain in your head.
Imagine sitting in your favorite Japanese restaurant before a plate of sushi, chopsticks poised. You take in its fragrance and the beautiful cut of the fish, the shapely rice and nori rolls. Those delectable smells and sights tell your brain that the meal will be enjoyable, and the brain responds by pushing your salivary glands into high gear and ordering your stomach to secrete more gastric juices.
Result: you get more nutritional bang for your buck than you would, say, faced with a platter of lutefisk. In that case, your brain might send fewer messages to your mouth and stomach, causing the food to be less thoroughly digested and metabolized.
In short, eat what you like. The more you like the food, the more vitamins and shit your body's going to get out of it. Diets are for suckers. So if this is what you love...
Then just let some hippy have this crap.
Go read the article! Good news is hard to find these days.
