11. Absorb Nutrients Like Captain America, Chris Evans
Bitter foods shield you against bloating by giving more punching power to your gut’s ability to digest everything you eat and build more muscle
Looking like a super soldier starts on the inside. While the heart is at the center of being a good leader, the ticker is fueled by a digestive system that draws the goodness from food. Chris Evans, aka Captain America, knew this when he shaped up to become the first Avenger and ate accordingly.
In an interview with TRAIN magazine Chris was candid about his diet. “My breakfast is porridge, walnuts, raisins, low-fat Greek yogurt, a scoop of protein and sliced banana, which I eat an hour or two before I workout,” said Evans. Through the day it is about getting good protein, fish, and meat and then vegetables and fruit. It's often salad with a protein source, lots and lots of salad. Lots of dark green, leafy vegetables, and then handfuls of almonds every so often.” Salad is there because even super soldiers need foods that enhance their digestive abilities.
Your Internal Civil War
The team behind Chris Evan’s biceps knows you are not what you eat. You are what you absorb. Your absorption aversion is more common that you might think. The Australian Food Authority found up to 25 per cent of Australians have some forms of food intolerance. Food intolerances sounds like a comic book beating. Meh! Aargh! Urgh! A harmony of discomfort.
Even if you’re confident your stomach could turn gravel into sand, you may not be absorbing all the nutrients you imagine you are. Most people lack the enzymes to digest a quarter of the protein in a typical slice of sirloin. To make sure you digestion is operating efficiently, it’s wise to do a little gardening for your gut flora. This is where bitter flavors make a superb case for their inclusion to you get more meat from your sizzle.
Helping Hands
Bitter foods are the steak knife to your fillet because they’re abundant in a powerful prebiotic called inulin. This enhances the growth of your healthy gut bacteria. It is a member of the fructan family that occurs in various flowering plants. A paper in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition got 26 people to eat inulin-type fructans for just two weeks.
This allowed them to tuck into substantially higher volumes of well-tolerated dietary fiber, which improved almost all their food related behaviors. More importantly, these types of foods improved the condition of their gut microbiota composition and function. This powerful ingredient even helps you age better than Captain America. It offers an insight into the foods that’ll help you get your monies worth when you’re fork in hand.
Definitive Findings
Bitter foods start at the top and liberate good things further down your body’s food chain. Research in the journal Nutricion Hospitalaria looked at 252 people and found their inulin intake had a positive impact on bowel function. Further research found inulin rich foods can even help control diabetes, improve digestion, and promote weight loss. This is thanks to their high levels of fiber. The good news is that this crafty little prebiotic is found in roughly 36, 000 species of plants.
You can get inulin very low amounts from sweeter packages such as bananas, apples, and oats. Unquestionably the richest source of inulin is chicory root, which boasts a tang akin to ground coffee beans. This why people try cook chicory in ways that relieves it of its inherent bitterness. Other abnormally high inulin sources are fellow bitter tasting foods such as artichokes, garlic, raw asparagus, and barley. Aside from the garlic, you’re unlikely to have eaten these in the last week. If you feel bloated, its usually the absence, rather than the presence, of certain foods that make you feel like a blind bullfrog at a ping pong ball buffet.
Fermented Questions
In a publication that details how bitter foods can improve nutrient absorption, you may have imagined a gaping plot hole in this preposterous hypothesis when you thought about fermented foods. They’re praised as the ultimate elixir for your gut. The taste? Distinctly sour.
Whether it’s kombucha, kimchi or sauerkraut, you cannot escape the first bite that coerces your mouth into the shape of cat’s butt. Is the jig up? Do bitter foods fall on their sword and bleed out broken promises. No, especially if you look at the ingredients inside those fermented sour jars.
Cabbage on The Inside
First ingredient on the list is cabbage. It’s another cruciferous vegetable, rich in the inulin described in previous paragraphs as well as glucosinolates which contain sulfur. Yep, that’s the rotten egg whiff powering your flatulence. For the defenseless plants, glucosinolates are their shield against pests. It’s not as if plants can raise a leaf to fight back when a beetle decides they’re on the menu.
Cabbage and all cruciferous vegetables for that matter are so top heavy with glucosinolates that a paper in The Journal of Nutrition discovered they can positively influence people’s gut bacteria which led to improved digestion when eaten daily for just two weeks. Okay, this publication has already been here. Digestion is improved by cruciferous veggies. What you should be interested in is how this shores your defenses against disease while helping you absorb more nutrients from your dinner.
Bubbling With Benefits
When these foods are eaten, higher levels of the phytochemical indole-3-carbinol (I3C), are found in the digestive tract. In the lower bowel, I3C creates a healthier environment for stem cell development, which helps regenerate the bowel surface faster. The presence of I3C can also aid immune cells that stop widespread inflammation in the gut. Some experts suggest that this may reduce the amounts of disease-causing species in the gut and even fight cancer, but there is no conclusive evidence to support this.
The fermentation process unquestionably does offer some benefits because it allows cabbage to craft an environment that serves as a breeding ground for microorganisms that aid healthy digestion. This probiotic growth only happens when vinegar isn’t present. This means you need to watch out for store-bought options that bypass the natural fermentation process to achieve that sour taste. Look for the words ‘naturally fermented” on the jar. Also become a bubble spotter. Like a crab in a pond, bubbles mean something is living within.
Drinking Away Disease
What about that sweet kombucha you see influencers cuddling with both hands on their social media? It is a fermented drink made from a tea fungus. This offers similar health kicks to traditional bitter English tea. Immunity elevation. Warding off cancer. Side stepping heart disease. Although it’s mostly sour, when left to ferment to full potency, it is fiercely bitter in flavor.
The fruity flavored knocks-off you find at the supermarket have not only been poured early in kombucha’s life cycle to negate their natural bitterness in favor of the sour. Yes, they are still full of gut healthy probiotics, are high in antioxidants and very heart healthy. It’s just that you’re drinking the tame equivalent of baby spinach that’s less arresting to your bitter-adverse tastebuds.
Eat And Be Merry
What this means is that you can still enjoy that gut churningly spicy 1am Mexican burrito from a random food truck in a dark alley. However, you may want to regularly counterbalance it with prebiotic foods that give your gut the ammunition it needs to digest all the nutrients and stay strong. You’ll be healthier for it because you’re getting more out of every bite.
Your food is more than just a selection of macro nutrients. Bitter foods are loaded with information that speaks to your biology. They’re not just calories for energy. Chris Evans knows this and it elevated his digestion so it could absorb the protein he needed to fill out his Captain America suit in all the right places.
Bittersweet Tip 13: Fuel The Furnace
Cabbage is brain food, by function and form. While it may look like a run of the mill green ball, it’s kept people healthy for centuries through its incredible health benefits that are only just being realized. Fighting inflammation. Improving digestion. Helping your heart health. Calming down your blood pressure. It’s got a lot to add to your diet so here are a few ways to eat more of it.
1. Slice in half, roast and drizzle with mustard or chili
2. Hide it in stews, casseroles or soups
3. Make coleslaw and lather that upon your hotdogs
4. Add a few thinly sliced leaves to any stir fry
5. Slice thinly and add it to your tuna mayo sandwich