Healthy Eating: Ways to Go Green Without Compromising Your Taste Buds

You can literally go green without compromising your taste buds. We all have different taste preferences and this determines what we can or cannot eat. While some people can use pumpkin spice lattes, others need a sugar shock to gulp the lattes.

We are hardwired differently when it comes to taste and a newfound study found out that our flavor preferences can affect our waistline and health in new ways beyond what we imagine.

How extra weight messes with food satisfaction?

While your taste affects your waistline and determines the type of food that you desire. Healthy Top 10s believes that extra weight may actually dim your sensitivity to flavors and the major reason for this is the additional pounds that influence your hormone levels and this changes the way the taste receptors send information to the brain.

One way to go green without compromising the taste buds is to trick your appetite. The stomach works in mysterious ways.  

This tendency to feel too full for one thing on your plate but not another impact all kinds of tasters, says Barbara Rolls, Ph.D., professor of nutritional sciences at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Ultimate Volumetrics Diet.

“It’s called sensory-specific satiety,” she explains, “and it happens when you eat one type of food to the point where you don’t want anymore, yet you can still be hungry for foods with other flavors, textures, and smells.”

What you can do is to munch on fruits that have lots of fiber like apple and avocado. These will help reduce your cravings and reduce the spike in sugar levels.

Processed foods

Processed foods should be reduced to their barest minimum due to their composition of hidden additives like salt and sugar in tomato sauces and salad dressings.

These flavors are often hidden and you shouldn’t blame yourself for not noticing them early but your taste receptors notice them and this fuels the cravings. You can read labels on meals before cooking them or cooking them from scratch when you have the time.

For your salad dressing, try to read the label of the dressings when next you visit the grocery store. Look out for ingredients such as maltodextrin, corn syrup solids, and sodium chloride.

While some of these aren’t that bad, you can create a healthier option at home with olive oil and red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, dry herbs and a host of other things. There are so many ways you can play this to get that delicious and green salad dressing that you crave for.

Cook with a dominant flavor

Rather than making a dinner that has a variety of notes, Dr. David Katz, founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center advises. stick to a one-pot meal with one herb, spice or prevailing taste (like a Greek lamb shank and polenta dish accented with oregano). “You’ll want to stop eating earlier than if you were jumping back and forth among three or four side dishes that taste very different.” Bottom line: When you eat too much of one flavor profile, you grow tired of it.