EXPANDING YOUR PALATE FOR BETTER HEALTH OUTCOMES
March 01, 2023
Palate, Appetite & Variety
The most beneficial reason for expanding your palate and reducing your discomfort around certain flavours is to encourage variety within your diet. Variety takes the thinking out of nutrition; ensuring a wide range of micro/macro nutrients and diversifying your microbiome. A wide palate encourages; experimentation, adaptive seasonal eating, joy for food and reduces fear/stress around cooking. When looking to expand your palate, it’s also important to consider whether there’s a root cause for a “picky palate”. Infection, smoking, caffeine and nutritional deficiencies (such as zinc and b12) can affect your ability to taste. Stress, digestive insufficiency, mood disorders and chronic illness can also affect your appetite. Investigating these factors may help to remove important roadblocks.
Moderating Sweet & Salty
Our brains are wired to search for glucose and electrolytes to keep us functioning and maintain homeostasis but this desire easily leads to excess intake. Incorporating spices to meals can reduce the necessity to over-salt dishes and adding cinnamon to sweet dishes can help to balance blood sugar. Pairing sweet foods with protein and complex carbs can support sustained energy and reduce the GI spikes that spur on further cravings. Opting for whole foods such as fruit, which have a complex flavour profile helps incorporate sour and/or bitter flavours. Staying hydrated and reducing stress can also help to mitigate sweet and salty cravings.
Amplifying Sour
Sweet and sour are the first tastes we develop as infants; however, we show preference to sweet and aversion to sour. Basic culinary wisdom teaches us to mute sourness/tartness with sugars, harming food quality. For example caramelising fruits can destroy heat sensitive nutrients such as vitamin C and polyphenols. Consequently, many of the high calorific, highly processed, nutrient-lacking sweets that have been popularised use isolated sugars with pro-inflammatory dairy/wheat and very minimal sourness still detectable. Many of our naturally sour foods support digestion via enzymes, probiotics and vitamin C.
Harnessing Spicy
It’s a common misconception that spicy foods such as chilli destroy taste buds. They do however invoke a localised and reversible numbing to minimise the potential pain caused by capsaicin. Whilst this may suppress your ability to taste sweet, bitter and umami flavours within the meal, it does not affect salty and sour tastes. Whilst spice has a suppressing effect on sweet flavours, sugar is also a modulator of capsaicin’s pain effects. This means that balancing all five flavours with a spicy dish is much more of an art, but can help to encourage taste for sour foods, reduce over salting and hide bitter foods. Spicy food is also a perfect tool for palate expansion as it helps to push past comfort zones with flavour. Epidemiologically, spicy food eaters have been associated with lower incidence of obesity due to added spice helping to moderate portion control and satiety.
Disguising Bitters
Bitters support digestion, improve absorption of nutrients and modulate appetite. They are one of the most beneficial flavours to incorporate when opting for better gut health but they are probably the most neglected flavours within western diets. However, you can still experience the benefits of stimulating bitter receptors within the body, even if you disguise their flavour. Hiding them within a meal that has all five flavours can acclimatise your palate to bitter tastes slowly whilst still reaping the rewards. For example; matching rocket with lemon vinegrette, putting fruits in with your salad greens and opting for fermented and spiced cabbage such as kimchi.
Exploring Umami
Umami foods reduce the necessity for excess salt, lower fat intake, improve palatability of meals and improve nutrient absorption in the elderly. Whilst umami is subtle, a lot of umami foods have textures that some people find difficult. Mushrooms, seaweed, miso and bonito flakes can seem a little funky to the uninitiated but they are incredibly easy to hide with a broth or sauce and pay massive flavour and nutritional punches.
By Ayhsia Hansen - BHSc Naturopath, ANTA registered Nutrition, Herbal Medicine and Massage
First seen in the Seasonal Magazine: Autumn 2023
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