July 2009 Archives
How Umami Are You?
In the current issue of EL, we have a story on umami, the
fifth flavor (following sweet, salt, sour and bitter). Here's a new, interesting
tidbit I just read about our ability to detect this rich and rewarding flavor:
A new study from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, an
independent nonprofit research institute based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
has shown that how much -- or how little -- you taste umami is a matter of
genetics, specifically in how the T1R3 taste receptors on your tongue are
coded.
The research team asked 242 individuals to discriminate
between the taste of weak L-glutamate and salt. Approximately 5% were unable to
tell the two tastes apart, indicating that certain people are highly
insensitive to umami and thus have difficulty detecting low levels of this
taste quality.
In other words, the intensity of your umami experience is
individual. It's all about the code on your T1R3 taste receptor.
Interestingly, the researchers speculate that "because these
same receptors are also found in the gastrointestinal tract, liver and
pancreas, coding variation in the T1R3 gene may also influence how proteins and
amino acids are processed metabolically." I'll be curious to know what research
eventually uncovers about the role genetics play in protein metabolism....
Fascinating!
This salmon would be perfect with just a pinch of To Kill a Mockingbird
I love eating alone in restaurants. It's just me, a good book, and no pressure to make idle chit-chat. But on my recent excursion to Iowa City for a workshop, I made a point of putting down my book at least during the main course.
I've been trying to pay more attention to what I eat while I'm eating it, aware that if I'm nose deep in a good book while I chomp away, I'm missing out on the pleasure of what I'm eating. Plus, it's been shown that people who don't pay attention while they eat snarf down waaay more than people who are paying attention. (For more on the fascinating psychology behind how much we eat and why, read Mindless Eating by Cornell University food researcher Brian Wansink. Great book. For more on why taking pleasure in what you eat matters, see "Eating With Pleasure," an new EL interview with nutritional psychologist Marc David).
The second reason I'm trying to give up reading during the main course is because restaurant plates are usually so big I can't see over them to my book while I eat -- and its not okay to sit on my knees in a restaurant just to get the height I need to see the printed page!
Turned out for the best, though: being fully present for the funnel cake I ate after the salmon was worth the literary absence.
(And if you find yourself in Iowa City, stop by the Motley Cow for brunch, lunch and dinner; they use fresh, local, organic ingredients and the atmosphere is charming and homey. Plus, their funnel cake is the only fried food I've ever eaten and not immediately felt like I would get type-2 diabetes.)
Get to Sleep!
Some newly released studies on the importance of sleep report information that WE reported five year ago! I know, I know, you remember ALL of this info from our previous stories on sleep, but its all worth repeating. Plus, its good to see that well-vetted research continues to support earlier studies to the same sleep-promoting effect!
A recent issue of New Scientist (Jan 3, 2009) notes this about sleep and type-2 diabetes -- a bit of info that WE reported on way back in 2004: "For some time, researchers have...suspected that sleep has a crucial role to play in the physiological realm. That has now been emphatically illustrated by the discovery of a connection between sleep deprivation and Type-2 diabetes. Several large-scale genomic studies published last month in Nature Genetics (Vol 40, p1399) have revealed a link between blood sugar levels and the biological clock that cues our sleeping and waking cycles...The research suggests that the link is a protein that recognizes the sleep hormone melatonin. It's clear that the less one sleeps, the less insulin one produces, though exactly how melatonin affects the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas remains to be worked out. The intriguing possibility is that this is somehow related to the fact that sleep-poor individuals also tend to be at increased risk of obesity and immune problems."
Here's this tidbit from the August 2009 issue of Natural Solutions -- another connection we made back in '04: "A new five-year study found that middle-aged people who got just one more hour of sleep each night were one third less likely than their slightly sleep-deprived peers to have the artery-stiffening calcium deposits that can lead to heart disease."
We tend to think of sleep as "down time," but these studies (and host of other emerging research) shows that sleep is quite a quite active time indeed. Don't skip out on sleep!
There is much, much more on the importance of sleep in our archives. Read these, and then hit the hay!
Sleep Deficit: The Hidden Debt That is Hurting Us All (November 2008)
A Brief History of Sleep (June 2009)
You Snooze, You Win (November 2007)
Snooze Foods (November 2004)
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