10. How Black Widow, Scarlett Johansen, Uses Bitter Foods For Tough Digestion
Hollywood's A-List use a secret weapon to get themselves into the big screen shape using this garden variety vegetable
The 80’s had Sigourney. The 90’s had Uma. Today we’ve upgraded leading lady of toughness in the form of Scarlett Johansen. Previously, not a physical actor, Scarlett forged her Avenger worthy physique through hard training and eating bitter foods.
Train Magazine interviewed her in their twelfth edition and got a valuable insight to her diet. When asked how she got ready for the first Avengers movie, she had this to say. “It's a 5am in the gym thing,” said Johansen. “I don't think I'll ever get used to that. But my diet is a cleaner than normal - a lot of kale.” This cruciferous vegetable is key to improving her digestive fortitude. Better digestion is the domino that helps all aspects of your life.
Avengers-Level Digestion
The Avengers are each powerful on their own. They can bash gamma-infused abominations, king-hit Red Skulls and KO Killmonger, but for the big stuff they band together. Aliens. Robots. Gods. They tighten defenses and work together. Your digestion offers the same pathway for improvements against your everyday foes.
Improving your digestion generates many positives. You lose weight. You feel happier. You gain muscle. Sleeping better is equally transformative. You build more muscle. You lose excess body weight. You get more energy. One improvement can make all your systems work in a harmonious symphony, regardless of the order. It all starts with one ringmaster: your digestive system.
Digesting Health
Who really wears the pants in your body? Hint: it’s not just your legs. Perhaps it’s the fatty CPU whirring above your shoulders? Afterall, your brain is an organ evolved by your gut, built to serve by making sure it thinks the right things to get the food it needs. Conversely, the gut is merely an organ evolved by your brain to feed it what it needs to remain alive.
Whose is really in charge? Is it the brain or gut? The brain suggests the gut. The gut suggests the brain. Neither is truly in the driver’s seat. While this may be a philosophical question, the answer is that these two organs are mutually dependent. This is one of the reasons why you have gut feelings about everything from your friendly postman to flickering shadows in the dark alley.
Personalize Your Digestion
While brain health enjoys the red-carpet, gut health often occupies the nosebleed section. Oddly, gut health is an often-overlooked part of the strategy needed to build muscle, get leaner and improve your well-being. What enters your body determines the diversity of your gut microbiome that live in your intestines, which is home sweet home to trillions of microorganisms.
Poor gut health is linked to a host of health problems such as: inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, autism, and diabetes, found research in The International Journal of Molecular Sciences. Protecting your gut doesn’t require a nutritional fad or Smurf-sized bottles of milky bacteria. A wide spectrum of foods that include fiber, anti-inflammatory agents and probiotics create the gut environment needed to digest your food.
Protective Mechanisms
Despite your gut’s preciousness, most of us still act like a lady or gentleman on the street, but a hulk at the buffet. It’s worth showing a little empathy to your gut and stop treating it like garbage disposal unit. It is a sensitive barrier between the outside world and your internal physiology. Even healthy food would kill you if it entered your blood stream. Inject a blended Sharma may save time but you’ll end up eating hospital food indefinitely. When your gut wall is compromised, even by a hair’s breadth, it can create something called leaky gut syndrome.
This is where the larger particles of the foods you eat pass into your blood stream. It triggers an immune response and your body attacks what it views as an invader. Your stomach is left to feel the nerves of a bag of cats at a greyhound race. It’s why your gut is often linked to many autoimmune disorders, where ailments like reactive arthritis are directly caused through increased gut permeability. Good digestion is the bedrock of health. And this starts with tightening up your internal blockades. An area where bitter foods, like kale, excel.
Bitter Hero To The Rescue
To plug any potential leaks, you can start with something familiar. Garden variety broccoli will do. This bitter vegetable is skilled master at photosynthesizing inner stomach health, says a paper in the Journal of Functional Foods. Animal models show broccoli in the diet helps tolerate more digestive issues such as leaky gut and colitis. And if you hate broccoli, there’s more bad news.
These benefits extend to all cruciferous veggies such as kale, cabbage, cauliflower, and Brussel sprouts. Research on squeaky rodents doesn’t make these findings a fact. The lab coats suggest these effects would be present in humans thanks to a common receptor in your gut called AHR. This regulates your stomach’s reaction to environmental contaminants and fights toxin exposure while lowering inflammation. Easy wins for full body health.
How Much Punching Power Is Enough?
The mice in the study had a diet that was 15% broccoli. For humans this amounts to roughly 3.5 cups of broccoli, or about one big head. Is that an insurmountable amount of broccoli to eat? Perhaps! However, if you distribute this volume amount across multiple meals and get it from other bitter cruciferous vegetables (arugula, bok choy, collard greens) then 3.5 cups of the right kind of veggies is more than manageable to enjoy the rewards of a cast iron gut.
Not only will help optimize your health, but the USDA suggests that eating 9 serves of fruits and vegetables each day will give you the best chance at maximizing out the number of years you get to live. What’s more, compounds like these indoles are reported to block cancers in some research. All that starts with loading up the bitter flavor that’ll help keep your internal gut walls more tighter than Black Widows Avengers costume in her signature three-point stance.
Bittersweet Tip 12: Hide the Leaves
You don’t make friends with salad, mostly because leafy greens, like kale, are more likoe food’s food. It’s not hard to sympathize with people who dislike them. All that chewing. The bitter tang. Bits stuck in your teeth. Just because they’re difficult, doesn’t mean you can’t outsmart them using dietary trickery.
1. Add to smoothies or juices that have sweet fruits like mango and pineapple.
2. Conceal in soups, stews, and casseroles
3. Use frozen organic leafy greens and add to pasta sauces.
4. Add to omelets or frittatas
5. Lob them into any homemade dips like hummus
The bottom line is that if you don’t like it, you should still eat it, so do it in ways where you don’t have to taste the bitterness. And when you do, give a little shout out to your ancestors who died figuring out which bitter leaves didn’t kill humans.