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heavyweightheart: “ Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred)...

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heavyweightheart: Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state. Pleasure affects our metabolic pathways; it’s a facet of the complex gut-brain connection. If you’re eating foods you don’t like because you think it’s healthy, it’s not actually doing your body much good (it’s also unsustainable, we’re pleasure-seeking creatures). Eat food you enjoy, it’s a win-win. what no seriously what? ETA: I’ve been looking for the study, and the closest I got was this: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1032.6606&rep=rep1&type=pdf which is not quite that but has many of the same elements. The link in the OP is to a NY Times op ed, which is suspicious to me. The research above is not looking at what the op ed is talking about–it is primarily focused on what it takes to up the iron absorption from Thai food in an area with endemic low iron, if I’m reading it correctly, and is not looking at whether “pleasure” increases food absorption. Literally everything I’m reading points back to either the op ed or uses the same same vague wording “Research in the 1970′s” in a way that makes me think there’s a bit of a pseudoscience circle jerk going on here.  My biggest suspicion is raised at this underlying assumption that “Thai women don’t enjoy Swedish food, Swedish women don’t enjoy Thai food.’ Without some subjective evaluation of the enjoyment of each meal, that’s a kind of spurious leap to make, I say as a half-Ashkenazi Jew/half WASP of some Scandinavian descent who fucking adores Thai food. Pinning everything on “enjoyment” and using pureed food as a control is a little spurious when we already know that rice flour impedes iron absorption more than whole rice does, for example. It might just as easily be “Pureed food requires no chewing, and the failure to sufficiently mix amylase and other dietary enzymes through the chewing process impedes iron absorption.”  It’s exactly the kind of spurious flimflam that so-called science news writers seem to generate every chance they get, mixed in with a healthy dose of pure 70′s woo-woo and patronizing racism so typical of the time.  I’m not saying that it doesn’t make sense to enjoy food. Of course we should enjoy our food. But there’s so much fuckery here that I would not base literally anything on it.   The whole point of the research was to see what the best practices were to get iron levels up in Thailand, not to say, “Oh, look, Thai people magically absorb food better if they like it.”  Especially high on my bullshit meter is the idea that you can’t absorb something if you don’t enjoy the food it’s in. I say that as someone who MUST get a lot of supplemental nutrients in pill form, and I have lab work showing that said supplements, completely void of gustatory delight, actually do help bring my levels up. Even if this was true for iron… you absolutely cannot just “guess” that that applies to every other nutrient. I get zero joy from popping magnesium pills, but they sure do help stop my asthma in a clinically significant way.  Do I have to back up my words with research? The burden of proof is on the scientific claim. If this was all that, most likely someone would have done research in the meantime.

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