6. Your Emotions Are Making You Make Poor Food Decisions and Could Be Killing You
Emotionally bad taste habits can undermine your immunity, but you can recondition yourself to like the stuff your tongue hates by understanding it better. Here's how.
Remember dry retching over Brussel sprouts when you were five? You perceived their flavor more exquisitely than your parents. Thank your genetics for this. A paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry found kids with saliva that created the highest levels of sulfurous odors when that ate cauliflower, were more likely to hate it. The same kids had identical reactions as their parents, suggesting this may be a genetic trait. Or monkey see monkey do. As a little tacker you had a higher concentration of tastebuds compared to adults and these were also highly attuned to sweetness.
Sweetness offers a prosthetic tickle to your brain’s pleasure centers. It’s a subconscious reminder to when mum’s milk was on tap. The comfort. The emotional connection. You were more adapted to calorie-dense sweet flavors that nourish a growing body. Couple this with the fact that a tiny amount of a bitter toxin can be fatal to a small body mass, and you can understand why sprouts tasted of punishment. To gobble up them up would have been act of treason against your age and evolutionary genetics. This biological battle is waged at dinner tables nightly. Usually, these wars are lost by those with their names on a mortgage.
Feeling Your Food
To further understand your emotion and taste connection, look to a candle lit cake. You got it on special occasions like your birthday. Cake is treat-trigger. A celebratory food. Singing. Togetherness. Love. When you’ve had a bad day and need a pick-me-up, cake triggers happy birthday feelings. When approaching food, it’s worth understanding how and why you eat this way.
Often this it because you have a gnawing sense something is missing. You go through life feeling a lack. Energy. Sleep. Fulfilment. Emotional connections. It’s often too difficult to address these lacks directly so you fill the voids with food. What you think is hunger is often just a psychological emptiness you believe is in your stomach. Food satiates your appetites for inner well-being. This penchant for these positive feelings and emotions might even be the kindling that lit the fires of the world’s obesity that thrives on stress.
Emotional Hunger
There’s a reason stressed spelled backwards is desserts. Your emotion and hunger connection gets stronger anytime you’re stressed out. During the COVID19 pandemic, food-secure people were more likely to eat foods high in carbohydrates, fats, salt, and sugar, found a paper in the journal Nutrients. When stressed, people turn to comfort food. Calories trigger your stress fighting emotions. From Halloween to Valentine’s Day, food is focal.
Conversely, if you hate Brussel sprouts, those negative emotions are magnified, especially if you were scolded or denied dessert for avoiding them. Experiences like these forges a subconscious trigger that’ll possibly make you want to wear a sprout-dodging grill forever. These emotions form the first line in your taste triangle, and the next two lines might be less obvious.
The Curse Of First Experiences
Think of the first wild snake you saw. If you’d never heard of snakes and one slithered past, you may have felt excited. Only once you learned snakes can kill, did you become terrified. Bitter foods are that snake. First memories and tastes are deeply connected. Tastes and smells trigger fond or foul memories. Its why freshly baked cookies transport you to nanna’s house in summer holidays.
The brain region that creates a memory of a time and place is your hippocampus, found a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience. The brain region that stores memories about new tastes is your taste cortex. It was once believed these areas were separate beasts. Today, these researchers discovered they are one snake with two heads, thanks to a functional link between these two brain regions. Waves in your brain even glue smells to your memories, via neural networks, found a paper in the journal Nature. So, when you consider that your sense of smell is responsible for 80% of what you taste, it’s easy to see the taste-smell-memory connection. It’s why your first experience of a food can set up a lifetime opinion of it.
Tasty Inception Point
Most food was tasted for the first time when you were young enough not to have to pay for, or cook, it. It just arrived. Plonked in front of you. There. Eat that. You rubbed it against your high volume of super sensitive taste buds. If it didn’t taste great, you weren’t invested. You didn’t you care if it kept you healthy. You were invincible. You judged on taste alone. If it lit up your cerebral cortex with sweet pleasure, it was eaten. More please. If not. You didn’t care.
Your perception of taste is founded on these memories. Good memories get repeated. Bad memories barely get an echo. When a positive echo fails to bounce off healthy foods because you hated them as a child, that’s when you can get your health can begin to sound flat. Couple your first impressions with emotional attachments and you get a one-two combination that impacts your adult perception of certain foods. Think of it as making a choice at Subway when you were 8 years old and sticking with that order until you die.
Subconscious Perceptions
Your taste genes and emotional connotations are only part of the reason you enjoy certain foods. The third and final piece in this triangle is that you’re unknowingly attracted to aspects of foods or drinks. A paper in the Human Molecular Genetics found people’s preferences for sweet or bitter beverages is thanks to the genes related to their psychoactive properties. Caffeine’s bitter kick. Alcohol’s buzz. Chocolate’s high.
Your pleasure centers are stimulated, not just by the flavors, but by the net effects delivered by bitter foods. This highlights the behavior-reward-loops you enter where you tell yourself that you enjoy the taste. Yes, you do become accustomed to it, but give a shot of the world’s most expensive cognac to a little kid and you’ll see them offer thanks using a face like a grieving pug. If you feel more relaxed after a brandy or are more alert after a coffee when you need energy a reward loop is set. And it’s a loop you’ll likely repeat so often they become a personality trait.
Bitter Personality
To suggest someone has a bitter personality may not mean their hostile or have the demeanor of a wet hornet. Instead, it should mean that they’re more likely to hurtle down a black run ski slope. People who are partial to taking risks, chasing novel situations and who taste bitterness more intensely are more likely to prefer bitter pale-style beers, suggests a paper in the journal Food Quality and Preference. Even though bitterness tasted fiercer to them, they chose it over other all other taste options. Bitter foods are like licking The Shining to thrill seekers.
In short, bitterness impacts your brain in the same way hunger negatively impacts your perception of the world, found a paper in the journal of American Psychological Association. Being hangry is probably not a problem if you have a sandwich nearby. In life-or-death situations, a hangry mind keeps you fed. Anger gives you energy to get food aggressively and filled the bellies of your spear-chucker ancestors. From this you can see that bitterness is more than a flavor. It's a state of mind, an emotion created through a collection of memories that’s impacting your decisions in ways you’re not even remotely aware of.
The Taste Triangle’s Apex
This triangle of taste shows that taste is complicated. However, this bug is something that lives deep inside your brain’s wiring, and it can code emotions to specific foods in a good and bad ways. How can you rewire in the name of better health? Ayahuasca trips? Hypnosis? No, it’s simple. Exposure to foods you’d normally hate, where you eat them in ways where you learn to like them. You might not like cauliflower but who doesn’t like grandma’s cheesy cauliflower bake served with a roast dinner?
That’s one aspect, the other way to retrain your tastebuds is consider bitter foods as the exercise you use to get fit. Few people want to run or exercise. You must do it, or you die and look terrible. It’s an inconvenient cost of being human. If you’re unfit, you need to start slow. You can’t run marathons sans training. Even small training sessions reward you physically but also gives you a runner’s high and dopamine kick that ignites your brain’s pleasure centers. With exercise, small incremental improvements will guide you towards a healthier and leaner self. Bitter foods are exercise for your tongue. Take the challenge. Do the things you don’t want to do, and you’ll be rewarded by enjoying other foods far more, in the same way that you enjoy putting your feet up on the couch after a run.
Bittersweet Tip 8: Muscling Brussels
To eat Brussel sprouts you’d have to be hungrier than a reporter chasing a welfare cheat. Spelt with capital letter, these veggies are lower case in enjoyment. Here why what doesn’t killer only makes you stronger because this is what they’ll deliver:
High in vitamin C, K, and fiber
How to eat more? If you want to dislike them even more, boil them forever and eat on their own. To eat them the delicious way, halve them and sauté with garlic, olive oil and a little chili then sprinkle with grated parmesan cheese. You can roast them with honey and balsamic vinegar to take them in a sweeter direction. They even pair well with thin slivers of bacon. Couple any of these recipe ideas with a roast dinner and your sprouts will be a serious crowd pleaser.