春節將至，對平時肉類攝取過多且工作緊張的現代人，可不要再增加腸胃負擔了。今年，臺大團隊以「健康蔬食」為主題，運用各種蔬菜、豆類、奶類、堅果並結合地中海式飲食型態，精心設計出十道創意素食料理。 Check out some of the healthy & scrumptious Lunar New Year dishes recommended by our experts at the NTU Hospital!
Great news for foodies - 'Umami' taste buds have been found to be important for overall health, researchers say http://bbc.in/1yKbH03
The ability to taste umami in food could have an effect on overall health, particularly in older people, Japanese researchers suggest.
Sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami are the five basic tastes.
In a small study, taste tests revealed that elderly patients who had lost their taste for umami also complained of appetite and weight loss.
Boosting saliva flow in their mouths appeared to stimulate their taste buds and improve their eating habits.
Umami is a Japanese word, meaning delicious and savoury, which has been shown to be distinct from saltiness.
It is found in foods that contain high levels of glutamate, such as cured meats, shellfish, soy sauce, cheese and green tea, and other foods rich in protein.
Taste test
Writing in the journal Flavour, scientists from Tohoku University Graduate School of Dentistry in Japan developed an umami taste sensitivity test and used it on 44 patients.
Those who had problems tasting umami complained that food was no longer palatable and they were not eating normally.
All of the patients were aged over 65 so their loss of taste could be due to aging, the study said.
But the researchers also suggested that diseases suffered by elderly patients and side effects from their medications could cause reduced salivation, leading to taste disorders.
Seaweed tea
They found that giving them kelp tea (made of seaweed) helped to get saliva flowing and that in turn had a positive effect on their taste sensations.
The increase in saliva from the umami taste was "long-lasting", whereas the increase in saliva after stimulation with a sour taste "diminished immediately", the study said.
"The sense of umami taste promotes salivary secretion, and saliva strongly influences oral functions such as taste senation.
"Thus, umami taste function seems to play an important role in the maintenance of oral and overall health."
Umami taste receptors are thought to exist in the gut as well which means they may also play a part in digestion.
鮮味有一種淡味但難以形容的持久味道。鮮味會引導舌頭分泌唾液，帶來一種毛茸茸的感覺，刺激喉嚨、口腔的上方和後方（請詳閱Yamaguchi, 1998）。[19][20]鮮味本身並不美味，但會使多種食物令人垂涎，在配合香味方面尤甚。[21]但有別與其他基本味道，鮮味不含蔗糖，只在相當狹窄的濃度範圍內帶來愉悅效果。[19]最適宜的鮮味味道視乎鹽的份量而定；同時，低鹽食物能以適量鮮味保持令人滿意的味道。[22]事實上，Roinien et al.顯示，當湯水含有鮮味時，低鹽湯水的愉悅感、味道濃度和理想鹹度較高，而不含鮮味的湯水的愉悅感較低。[23]在某些人群組別中，如老年人，可以從鮮味中得益，因為其味覺和嗅覺靈敏度已因年齡和多種藥物而受損。喪失味覺和嗅覺有可能形成營養不良的狀態，從而增加患病的風險。[24]
It's grrrr-eat! With 120 varieties, 20 toppings and 12 different milk options, UK's first cereal cafe opens in hipster heart of London for people who love the taste of childhood (beards optional)
Brick Lane's Cereal Killer Cafe is brainchild of twins Alan and Gary Keely
Heavy on nostalgia, the cafe displays collectible toys and plays 90s music
Offerings include: Royal Wedding-themed varieties and Halloween flavours
PUBLISHED: 12:37 GMT, 10 December 2014 | UPDATED: 17:31 GMT, 10 December 2014
The UK's first specialty cereal cafe has just opened its doors in London's Brick Lane and it's already causing quite the stir.
The Cereal Killer Cafe is the brainchild of identical twins, Alan and Gary Keely, from Belfast and boasts an impressive offering of the breakfast staple.
Along with 120 varieties of cereal, the restaurant - set up in the hipster epicentre of the captial - also offers 20 toppings and 12 different milk options.
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The Cereal Killer Cafe is the brainchild of identical Irish twins, Alan and Gary Keely from Belfast
As winter settles in and temperatures plunge, people turn to food and drink to provide a little warmth and comfort. In recent years, an unconventional type of warmth has elbowed its way onto more menus: the bite of chili peppers, whether from the red jalapeños of Sriracha sauce, dolloped on tacos or Vietnamese noodles, or from the dried ancho or cayenne peppers that give a bracing kick to Mayan hot chocolate.
But the chili sensation isn’t just warm: It hurts! It is a form of pain and irritation. There’s no obvious biological reason why humans should tolerate it, let alone seek it out and enjoy it. For centuries, humans have eagerly consumed capsaicin—the molecule that generates the heat sensation—even though nature seems to have created it to repel us.
Like our affection for a hint of bitterness in cuisine, our love of spicy heat is the result of conditioning. The chili sensation mimics that of physical heat, which has been a constant element of flavor since the invention of the cooking fire: We have evolved to like hot food. The chili sensation also resembles that of cold, which is unpleasant to the skin but pleasurable in drinks and ice cream, probably because we have developed an association between cooling off and the slaking of thirst. But there’s more to it than that.
Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, became interested in our taste for heat in the 1970s, when he began to wonder why certain cultures favor highly spicy foods. He traveled to a village in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, to investigate, focusing on the differences between humans and animals. The residents there ate a diet heavy in chili-spiced food. Had their pigs and dogs also picked up a taste for it?
“I asked people in the village if they knew of any animals that liked hot pepper,” Dr. Rozin said in an interview. “They thought that was hilariously funny. They said: No animals like hot pepper!” He tested that observation, giving pigs and dogs there a choice between an unspicy cheese cracker and one laced with hot sauce. They would eat both snacks, but they always chose the mild cracker first.
Next, Dr. Rozin tried to condition rats to like chilies. If he could get them to choose spicy snacks over bland ones, it would show that the presence of heat in cuisine was probably a straightforward matter of adaptation. He fed one group of rats a peppery diet from birth; another group had chili gradually added to its meals. Both groups continued to prefer nonspicy food. He spiked pepper-free food with a compound to make the rats sick, so they would later find it disgusting—but they still chose it over chili-laced food. He induced a vitamin-B deficiency in some rats, causing various heart, lung and muscular problems, then nursed them back to health with chili-flavored food: This reduced but didn’t eliminate their aversion to heat.
In the end, only rats whose capsaicin-sensing ability had been destroyed truly lost their aversion to it. Dr. Rozin came to believe that something unique to humanity, some hidden dynamic in culture or psychology, was responsible for our love of chili’s burn. For some reason apparently unrelated to survival, humans condition themselves to make an aversion gratifying.
Not long after, Dr. Rozin compared the tolerances of a group of Americans with limited heat in their diets to the Mexican villagers’ tastes. He fed each group corn snacks flavored with differing amounts of chili pepper, asking them to rank when the taste became optimal and when it became unbearable.
Predictably, the Mexicans tolerated heat better than the Americans. But for both groups, the difference between “just right” and “ouch” was razor-thin. “The hotness level they liked the most was just below the level of unbearable pain,” Dr. Rozin said. “So that led me to think that the pain itself was involved: They were pushing the limits, and that was part of the phenomenon.”
In the human brain, sensations of pleasure and aversion closely overlap. They both rely on nerves in the brainstem, indicating their ancient origins as reflexes. They both tap into the brain’s system of dopamine neurons, which shapes motivation. They activate similar higher-level cortical areas that influence perceptions and consciousness.
Anatomy also suggests that these two systems interact closely: In several brain structures, neurons responding to pain and pleasure lie close together, forming gradients from positive to negative. A lot of this cross talk takes place close to hedonic hot spots—areas that respond to endorphins released during stress, boosting pleasure.
The love of heat was nothing more than these two systems of pleasure and pain working together, Dr. Rozin concluded. Superhot tasters court danger and pain without risk, then feel relief when it ends. “People also come to like the fear and arousal produced by rides on roller coasters, parachute jumping, or horror movies,” he wrote in the journal Motivation and Emotion—as well as crying at sad movies and jumping into freezing water. “These ‘benignly masochistic’ activities, along with chili preference, seem to be uniquely human.” Eating hot peppers may literally be a form of masochism, an intentional soliciting of danger.
Dr. Rozin’s theory suggests that flavor has an unexpected emotional component: relief. A 2011 study led by Siri Leknes, a cognitive neuroscientist then at Oxford University, looked at the relationship of pleasure and relief to see if they were, in essence, the same. Dr. Leknes gave 18 volunteers two tasks while their brains were scanned: one pleasant, one unpleasant.
In the first task, they were asked to imagine a series of pleasurable experiences, including consuming their favorite meal or smelling a fresh sea breeze. In the other, they were given a visual signal that pain was coming, followed by a five-second burst of 120-degree heat from a device attached to their left arms—enough to be quite painful but not enough to cause a burn.
The scans showed that relief and pleasure were intertwined, overlapping in one area of the frontal cortex where perceptions and judgments form, and in another near the hedonic hot spots. As emotions, their intensity depended on many factors, including one’s attitude toward life. Volunteers who scored higher on a pessimism scale got a stronger surge of relief than did optimists, perhaps because they weren’t expecting the pain to end.
ENLARGE
Carolina Reaper peppers ASSOCIATED PRESS
The world’s hottest chili, according to the Guinness World Records, is the Carolina Reaper, developed a few years ago by Ed Currie. His website features videos of people eating the peppers, and they are studies in torture. As one man tries a bite, his eyes open with surprise, then his chair tips back and he falls on the floor. Another sweats up a storm and appears to be suffering terribly, but presses on until he has eaten the whole thing.
Watching these, it’s clear that whatever enjoyment might be derived from savoring chili flavors, true satisfaction comes only in the aftermath: the relief at having endured, and survived.
—Adapted from Mr. McQuaid’s “Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat,” to be published on Jan. 13 by Scribner.
Eating hot chili peppers allows us to court danger without risk.
