3 of Hearts - Food for Thought

What is it?

Food for thought, indeed!

It’s always a good idea to be mindful about food preparation, what we’re eating, and where we’re eating it – food is our medicine (when chosen correctly!), after all!.

Whether you’re cooking for just yourself, friends, or family, the whole world of nutrition can get confusing. If you’d like some advice or are eager to bust some nutrition myths, why not sign up and get an appointment with our expert nutrition coaches – they’re all dietitians and keen to help you make those right choices.

3 of Hearts- Eat Well - During your meals this week, be mindful. What flavours are you tasting? How was the meal prepared? Food for thought!

How to do it?

Be mindfully conscious when making grocery food selections and planning for food preparation. Reinforce positive associations with healthy choices in food and integrate them into tasty recipes. Finally, attempt to make healthy food become a sensory pleasure in terms of a comfortable environment and/or an enjoyable social experience.

Nutrition can be a powerful tool to influence your health but it’s important to discover what works best for your body within a healthy pattern and to maintain a positive relationship with food. Moreover, enjoying meals with no extra fear or stress is another essential component of health. It is imperative to rely upon trained health professionals such as nutritionists and credible sources of information such as professional, government, or academic materials since this will help reduce the chances of misinformation or falling victim to unsafe nutritional fads (Krenek et al., 2024).

Our excellent nutrition coaches will be able to provide expert guidance to help you achieve more “food for thought.”

Why do it?

Culinary medicine is an expanding field which merges the art of preparing & presenting food with the science of medicine to target disease processes or general health. A principal part of culinary medicine is integrating delicious food with healthy food. This application fuses both the flavour and the nourishing nutrition. The influence of food on health spreads out beyond the nutrient compounds composing its structure. Sensory and emotional pleasure, such as different tastes and textures or happy dining memories with friends and family, are also important to encourage healthy food choices. This can all help to manage stress levels and therefore help to prevent and manage disease (Krenek et al., 2024).

What’s the science behind it?

In a review by Bedard et al. 2020, a qualitative assessment outlines 22 different key dimensions used to define eating pleasure. The most prominent dimensions cited were sensory experiences, social experiences, food characteristics besides sensory attributes, food preparation process, novelty, variety, mindful eating, visceral eating, place where food is eaten, and memories associated with eating. Despite not being uniform across studies reviewed the authors highlight eating pleasure is mostly, at 57.1%, associated with positive dietary behaviour outcomes. Thus, the authors contend eating pleasure may be an ally in the promotion of healthy eating.

Small changes CAN make a big difference – that’s what The 1% Club is all about.

Do you want to know more?

Tasty healthy recipes:
https://culinarymedicine.org/community-class-recipes/

Traditional Maori foods:
https://www.newzealand.com/int/feature/traditional-maori-foods/

References

Bédard, A., Lamarche, P. O., Grégoire, L. M., Trudel-Guy, C., Provencher, V., Desroches, S., & Lemieux, S. (2020). Can eating pleasure be a lever for healthy eating? A systematic scoping review of eating pleasure and its links with dietary behaviors and health. PloS one, 15(12), e0244292.

Krenek, A., Mathews, A., & Dahl, W. (2024). Food as Medicine: Can nutrition be a prescription?.

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