Subtle tastes of natural food

Are vegetables too bland for you? If you cannot appreciate the subtle tastes and fragrances of natural food, it's because your taste buds are used to the strong flavors of processed foods. Strong tastes do exist in nature. Sweet honey, bitter cocoa, tangy limes and pungent spices and herbs. But in processed food, such flavors are concentrated and packed together to overpower our taste buds; the extremely spicy taste in Dorito chips doesn't exist in any natural food cooked with such spices. Stuffed with sugar, salt, and saturated fat, processed foods like chips, burgers, colas, desserts, are not only terrible for health, but they numb our taste buds so much that we find it difficult to appreciate the subtle tastes of natural food.



Sugary colas get us addicted to sweet tastes. We can no longer appreciate the natural taste of freshly squeezed fruit juices, unless they have added sugars and artificial flavors. For health reasons some of us switch from sugary colas to sugar free colas, but they also have artificial sweeteners to keep us addicted. Americans eat 31 percent more processed food than fresh food and in Britain, Fiona Reynolds, director of the National Trust, says: "Taste is something we're losing, because too many of our meals are packed with additives and flavourings. And because many of us don’t see food production for ourselves, we’re losing contact with where food comes from – and its distinctive taste."



If you regularly tuck into desserts and ice creams, how can you ever enjoy the mildly sweet and crunchy carrots? The subtle tastes of natural food also leave an impact on the mind, because the taste buds are connected to the brain, and different flavors and scents affect different parts of the brain. "We are learning that the same diet of saturated fats and processed foods that are bad for the heart also can be bad for the mind," said neurologist Marwan Sabbagh, chief medical/scientific officer at Banner Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, and associate director of the Arizona Alzheimer's Disease Core Center. "What you eat matters, and that includes how you spice your food."

One way of re-training your taste buds for the subtle tastes of natural foods, is to eat them as soups, stews and smoothies. Take a break from eating processed stuff, and you'll discover the flavors of natural food.