21/12/2015
Vitamin P – Pleasure – is a vital element that makes our meals nutritionally complete and makes life worth living. Like all organisms on the planet, we humans are genetically programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. A cat chasing a mouse is seeking pleasure, while the unfortunate rodent is doing its best to avoid pain. Indeed, any behavior we can imagine can be seen as either of these, or a swirl of both. This is particularly apparent in light of our eating. When we eat, we’re seeking the pleasure of food and avoiding the pain of hunger. Indeed, destiny has fashioned for us a body that’s wired for joy.
The simple scientific equation for the profound biochemical effects of pleasure is this:
When you’re turned on by food, you turn on metabolism.
In a study at the University of Texas, participants with very high cholesterol levels were placed on a low-fat diet, however, they were allowed to splurge every other day on a milkshake and a ham and cheese sandwich. According to conventional wisdom, they should have experienced a significant rise in blood cholesterol, but there was none. The only elevation they showed was that of enjoyment. Despite the high-fat content of the splurge foods, their cholesterol-raising effect was somehow mitigated by the chemistry of pleasure. It isn’t hard to imagine that the splurges were the only relaxed and celebrated moments in an otherwise bland and stressful diet. And that decrease in fight-or-flight chemistry could have been, by itself, enough to lower cholesterol…
In another unusual study, researchers from Sweden and Thailand joined forces to determine how cultural preferences for food affects the absorption of iron from a meal. A group of women from each country was fed a typical Thai meal – rice, veggies, coconut, fish sauce and hot chili paste. As fate would have it, Thai women enjoy Thai food but Swedish women don’t. This proved to be a crucial metabolic fact, because, even though all the meals contained the exact same amount of iron, the Swedish women absorbed only half as much as the Thai women. To complete this phase of the study, both groups received a typical Swedish meal – hamburger, mashed potatoes, and string beans with the exact same iron content. Not surprisingly, the Thai Women absorbed significantly less iron from their Swedish meal.
Next, the Thai women were separated into two groups. One group received the aforementioned Thai meal and the other was given the same exact meal as well, but that meal was first placed in a blender and turned to mush. Just imagine your favorite evening meal all whipped together into baby food. Once again, the same results were seen for their Swedish counterparts who had their Swedish meal turned into a frappé.
The inescapable conclusion is that the nutritional value of a food is not merely given in the nutrients it contains, but is dependent upon the synergistic factors that helps us absorb those nutrients. Remove Vitamin P: Pleasure, and the nutritional value of our food plummets.
Add Vitamin P and your meal is metabolically optimized. So if you’re the kind of person who eats foods that are “good for you,” even though you don’t like them, or if you think you can have a lousy diet and make up for it by eating a strange-tasting vitamin-fortified protein bar, or if you’ve simply banished pleasure because you don’t have enough time to cook or find a sumptuous meal – then you likely aren’t doing yourself any nutritional favors. You’re slamming shut the door on a key metabolic pathway.
