Do You Know with Dr. Dwain Woode

What is the Impact of Taste on Diabetes Management and Well-being

• Dwain Woode

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Have you ever wondered how the flavors of your childhood impact your health today? Join me, Dr. Dwain Woode, as we embark on a flavorful journey through the world of taste buds and their surprising influence on our well-being. From the heartfelt stories of my father's unforgettable cooking to the nuanced H.E.A.T. model, we explore our dietary choices' emotional ties and health impacts, particularly in managing diabetes. This episode invites you on a transformative 2024 quest, encouraging a discovery of how we can retrain our palates not just to prevent illness but to embrace a taste for vibrant health.

Imagine a tapestry of taste woven with the threads of culture, tradition, and personal experience. This episode dives into the essence of sweetness, the double-edged sword of salt, the zesty adventure of sourness, and the complex character of bitterness and umami. As we traverse the culinary landscape, I share the cultural imprints that shape our food preferences and how they influence our health. We'll explore the excitement of food diversity and the joy of rediscovering the foods that resonate with our heritage and personal stories.

Food isn't just fuel; it's an art, a science, and an opportunity for innovation in our everyday lives. In this episode, we tackle the common hurdles to embracing healthier food choices, shattering the myth that nutritious meals lack flavor. I'll arm you with practical tips for incorporating fresh herbs, spices, and healthy fats into your cooking repertoire. By reframing our approach to taste, this episode is more than a conversation—it's an invitation to craft a lifestyle rich in flavor and grounded in health, steering you toward the life you've always envisioned. Join us as we savor the journey to a more delicious and healthful existence.

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Dwain Woode:

So my dad was an amazing cook. In fact, when I sit down or when I get in the kitchen, the things that I cook, I'm trying to recreate the things that he made, the dishes that he made, the way he cooked it. When I sit and I talk, or when I go to New York and I talk to my brothers and sisters, there are these things that he used to do that we try to create. We haven't quite made it yet, but my choices about what I eat and how I eat in a large part comes from the things that he cooked, but not just him, but my mom and my grandmother and my grandfather and all the people that raised me. And so whenever we think about food, whenever we think about the things that we like, it all comes from our experiences. And tonight we're going to talk about taste. We're going to talk about how that influences our health and the choices that we make. As we work on new year, new you y'all. If you're new to me, I'm Dr Dwain Woode, that's Wood with an E. The E stands for endocrinology. Here on the channel, I educate, I empower and I encourage you to take charge of your health, your life, avoid complications and go to the next level. We're creating the life we've always wanted.

Dwain Woode:

And in this year 2024, our new theme is New Year UU. We have been working in this year on how do we put diabetes in remission, how do we reverse diabetes, how do we get off of some of those diabetes medications. And we've been talking here, as we've been going through, about our model. Right, that is, our heat model, the model that we've been using for the things that can interrupt us, the things that can push us in one direction or the other as we are trying to make healthy decisions, and that's what we're going to spend some time talking about. That last component of the heat model, that is, taste. The heat model is a model that talks about triggers, and these triggers are things that push us in one direction or the other as we are trying to make healthy choices. As it relates to our food. Well, why is food so important? It's important because, as we have been working on improving our health and putting our diabetes in remission, you'll remember, we started out by defining what are why. Why do we want to be healthy? What are the things that are pushing us in the direction of making decisions to be healthy? Right, so you were supposed to come up with that.

Dwain Woode:

The tool that we introduced a very powerful tool is the tool of fasting, and we've been going through the fasting over the last couple of months. If you've not done so, go ahead and watch some of those shows. We'll be actually starting our fast tomorrow evening as we go through Wednesday, thursday and Friday, usually starting on Tuesday night, but we'll be coming in and doing some check-ins, but one of the most powerful tools that we've been using is this tool of fasting and tonight, as we get to the end of the show, we'll be also showing some of our monitors so that you can actually see what those numbers are. I've got my monitors over here. Of course, you see my blood sugar there on the screen and we'll be kind of going through those as we get throughout this evening.

Dwain Woode:

But we've been talking about fasting. We talked about medications that you should probably get off of, medications you should get on. We talked about emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence, one of the tools, one of the additional tools that we've been working on and as we work through the HEAT model, we talked about habits, we talked about emotions, we talked about access last week, and the final component of the HEAT model is this idea of taste. Idea of taste and much, as we talked about, of our emotions. Much of the things that we do in life right are driven by emotions. They're driven by the way we feel. They're driven by those ideas that we have as we interact with data that's coming to us. Remember our body, our minds, our eyes, our ears, our sensations. We have over 4,000 people, 4,000 signals that are coming to us at any one time, and our bodies can't take those all in, and so it assimilates those, it summarizes those and it gives us an interpretation of what those signals are, based on our history, based on our experiences and based on how we're feeling at the time, and then those emotions then drive our behavior. Similarly, food is our preferences. Our taste is influenced by those very same things.

Dwain Woode:

You heard me telling the story about my dad when I was growing up and how he cooked. In fact, he makes this dish, y'all. I'm going to have to come over here so I can just say this, and my wife is going to kill me for saying this, but that's okay. My dad makes this dish that my wife loves, in fact, the very first time. I think she well, I shouldn't say I think the very first time that we went to visit them in New York, my dad cooked this dish and she loved it, and I don't want to say that that's why she got she married me. But I'm starting to wonder. But y'all, he was an amazing cook and as I get into the kitchen even now, like if I go into the kitchen right now, I'll cook something and I'll taste it. And there are times where I cook things and I'll just put it in the refrigerator and it'll just be there because it just didn't taste right. And you know what I'm looking for. I'm looking for that taste, I'm looking for that blend of flavors that my dad had, the way he put things together right.

Dwain Woode:

So how do we navigate this complex milieu, if you will, so that we can get health benefits? How can we look at food, how can we deal with food in a way that it pushes us and helps us move in the direction of health? Because our taste buds and the things that we like dictate how and what we are going to eat, dictate how and what we are going to eat, and the eating that we have, the eating that we do, dictates the choices that we make, and the choices that we make dictates the result that we have. There's this model that my wife is an obesity coach a weight management coach, I guess I should say that and there's this model that she uses in her coaching, and it's called the model, and the model says that the things that happen to us have no meaning until we give them a meaning, and the things that happen to us, it's just an event, and it is our interpretation of that event that then pushes us to feel a certain way, and the feelings that we have drive our behaviors and the behaviors drive our outcome. And so, as we are looking at food and our taste, the taste is driving the choices that we make, and those choices that we make in terms of what we eat are the things that then drive what the outcome is for our food and for our health. Make sense, all right, so let's take a look at where we're heading.

Dwain Woode:

So, first of all, we want to talk about some basic tastes. Basic tastes, and you guys know all of these, right? So sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the one that you may not recognize is this one that's there, that's called umami, and umami is a relatively I don't want to say it's a new one, but it's one that's been there, that we you, you know sometimes we weren't really sure is it a real thing or is it something that just somebody made up? So finally they said yeah, it is a real thing. And so we're going to talk about all of these sweet, salty, sour, and then, of course, umami, and let's hop over to sweet. So sweet, sweet.

Dwain Woode:

This is often associated with sugars, right, it's a taste that signals energy From the very first time that we sip our mom's milk. It's the taste that we're biologically programmed to look out to seek. So it's a thing that we want. And, as a matter of fact, in a baby, the baby's smell is so strong that when mom walks into the room, the baby can smell the milk and we believe that it is the sweet, it is the sugar in the milk that the baby is actually smelling and the baby reaches out for that. It's the. You know.

Dwain Woode:

We talk about babies who are rooting, right, so mom has the baby and the baby will start rooting to find that smell. Right, because they're looking for that flavor, they're looking for that sweet, and sweet foods can be a source of immediate energy. You know this, right, if you've ever felt lightheaded or dizzy or faint, if you've ever had low blood sugars. When you take something in that is full of sugar, that's sweet, immediately you feel better. In fact, when you are fasting, right, if you feel lightheaded, or even if you're not fasting, if you go somewhere and you're not feeling well, what's the first thing that people ask you hey, did you eat breakfast, did you eat lunch? Because they're associating the sweetness, they're associating that carbohydrate, they're associating that sugar with energy. In today's world, with all the processed foods, balancing our love for sweetness and healthful choices is more important than ever. Right, because it is usually the sweet that drives us.

Dwain Woode:

Now here's an interesting thing about sweetness, and I had a conversation just today with someone in the office and I was explaining to them the difference between fasting and cutting back on calories. Because people say, hey, isn't fasting just another way of cutting back on calories? And the simple answer is yes, it is a way of cutting back on calories, but there is a cheat code in there, y'all, and the cheat code has to do with sweetness. It has to do with sugar. When you are cutting back on calories, you're still in the process of putting things in your mouth, putting things in your body, you're still getting those carbohydrates. And when carbohydrates go up, when sugars go up, then your body has to produce insulin to combat the carbohydrates that have just gone up. That insulin drives increasing weight because it is a storage hormone and it also drives your cravings. So during the process of cutting back on calories, you still have those fluctuations in blood sugars and you still have those cravings. When we're fasting, we're not putting anything in, so there is not the spike in blood sugar or carbohydrates, there is not the spike in blood sugar or carbohydrates, there's not the spike in insulin to combat the carbohydrates, and so we're not then putting on weight and we are not having those cravings. So that's one of the benefits of the fasting. But this all has to do with sweetness.

Dwain Woode:

The next one, of course, is salty. And, man, I love salty. Now, I love sweetness, right, because those are the things that give me energy. I'm going to use that. But salty, man, there's just something about eating a salty chip or a pretzel. When I was growing up in New York, we had those giant pretzels, you know, with the big pieces of salt on them and you'd put some mustard on there. And, oh, my goodness, when we went to Coney Island or went downtown Brooklyn. Yeah, sorry guys, I didn't mean to trigger anybody. So salt is governed by the presence of minerals like sodium. One of the things that we sometimes will say to people is, if we're trying to cut back on sodium, we'll say, hey, use one of those other sweeteners, salt seasoners, and they will replace sodium with, sometimes, potassium, right? So that's a whole other conversation. To have Conversations happen.

Dwain Woode:

It's essential for maintaining our body's fluid balance, which is why, when we're fasting, we say, hey, make sure that you are checking in, taking care of your electrolytes, right? It's a taste that can enhance the presence of flavors. Have you ever had some food that you've eaten and the food is supposed to be good? Right? You smell it, the smells are there and the texture is there. You eat it, you put a piece in your mouth and it just doesn't have enough salt. I've had that before right? So the saltiness enhances the flavor, right? So the the sweet that we talked about, is energy.

Dwain Woode:

The saltiness enhances the flavor, but in excess it can cause other health problems, things like high blood pressure. It can also cause fluid retention, right, because, like we said, it helps fluid balance. So if we have too much, then we start having fluid retention. That's why a lot of people will have swelling in their legs, they'll have swelling in their back, and the doctor will say, hey, I want you to cut back on the salt right. And the doctor will say, hey, I want you to cut back on the salt right. And so, of course, learning to appreciate the subtleties of salt without overindulgence is a key in achieving a balanced diet.

Dwain Woode:

Now sour, sour, now this one. I'm going to say I'm not really a sour person. There are certain things that I like that you know are sour. I don't like the acidity that it comes from it, right, but that's what sour gives you. When you taste something that's sour, it's the acidity that is in it. That is kind of things like citrus or fermented foods. It's nature's way of saying, hey, there's some vitamin C, right, and some or the organic acids in it. Now, as we're going through this, right, I want you to be thinking about what these different flavors are, because one of the things that I want to, one of the things that we're going to need to learn, is we're going to need to learn how to combine these flavors so that we can have food that's healthy but still tastes good, right, food that's healthy but still tastes good, right? So sour is nature's way of saying, hey, there are some organic acids in here, there are some vitamin C in here, right, and it can invigorate the palate. So when we taste something that's sour, the fluids in our mouth begin to flow, right, and it stimulates the appetite. And so sour flavors can lead to an appreciation of a wider variety of foods. Because if we just stick with salty and sweet, those are there, but when we add the sour in there, man, that just really kicks it up another notch. Okay, and then. And then let's see where am I? Yep, here we are. So that's our sour and then bitter.

Dwain Woode:

Now, bitter traditionally in our history is something that is designated as protecting us from toxins, so toxins in the wild. So as part of Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts, or if you're an outdoors person or if you're in Pathfinders or in any of those kind of clubs, one of the things they teach you when they're teaching you with plants is they teach you how to know and recognize plants, right. And the kind of rule, the kind of general rule, is if it's bitter, then that's not a good thing, right, but it can have this kind of complex relationship to our diet. It highlights these phytonutrients that we sometimes will see, and there are some foods that, even though we eat them, they still retain kind of that almost bitter taste. Things like leafy greens, right, certain teas will have it.

Dwain Woode:

I grew up eating, as you guys may know, that I was born in South America and I grew up eating something called coraila, and coraila is what everybody now knows as bitter melon, right, and bitter melon. It is just like it says, guys, it is bitter, and we used to cook it, and they cook it kind of like you would cook zucchini or squash, and so, yeah, it was bitter, and it's one of the things that, although I grew up eating it, I don't know, I think if certain people cook it, I still can eat it, but when I cook it I have not mastered yet the art of getting the bitter out of it, right? So learning to enjoy bitter taste can once again open up the world, because we've got the sweet, we've got the salt, we've added the sour in there and now we've got that just hint of bitterness. Oh man, it can also help with the digestion and with detoxification.

Dwain Woode:

And then umami, umami, so umami, is that savory taste, right. This is what I look for when I'm cooking. This is what I want right here, right? So it usually signals the presence of amino acids and those are the building blocks for proteins, and it's found in meats, cheese, mushrooms, fermented products. So that's that rich flavor that you get. It's kind of like, you know, when you do that bouillon or when you're making that roux, and you drop the stuff in there and you start to season it up and it's boiling down. You got the sausage Well, it hasn't boiled yet. You got the sausages that you put in there and you kind of fry them up and it's the reason that we deglaze pans, right. We get that flavor right. So it adds depth, it adds satisfaction to dishes. It's the taste that makes food deeply gratifying. It's that richness. It's why you go to that expensive restaurant, right? Because they have that rich sauce that they drizzle just so over your favorite piece of meat or your favorite vegetable, right? That's the reason that it's the umami that sometimes will do that for us, okay.

Dwain Woode:

So how are our taste preferences formed? Well, our taste preferences are formed by culture and environment during our adolescence and our adulthood, and through our experiences and our openness to do and try different things. So let's talk about that. So culture and environment so we eat the way we were brought up, most of us, unless there was something that happened during that process that pushed us in one direction or the other. Like if something happened where you said, man, I'm never eating like my family. And some people are there, right, there are some people who lost loved ones and they attributed the loss of that loved one, their death, to the way that they ate. And so now that they've grown up, right, I know people that say, hey, I'm not ever eating like that, so they've made a change. Or there are some people who are brought up in a way where they were very restricted, right, they couldn't eat certain things. And so those people, on the other hand, they go to the other extreme and say, man, my family didn't ever let me eat cakes and cookies and candies and ice cream, and so that's exactly what I'm going to eat. So there are those extremes and there are those places that people go, and I shouldn't say extreme. It's the place people go, based on, once again, their experience and their culture and their environment. But for the most part, most of us began our adulthood and for a lot of our current adulthood. We eat the way we eat, we season the way our family seasons, we saute the way they saute.

Dwain Woode:

As a matter of fact, there's this funny story. I think my pastor may have told it. I heard it somewhere. So there's this. Oh yeah, we heard it. It was in a marriage conference that my wife and I went to.

Dwain Woode:

So there's this wife, right, so she got married, her and her husband got married and she's a young wife and she has this pan that she makes I don't know what it was right Some dish in that she makes. I don't know what it was right Some dish in, and somehow the pan got destroyed and so she stopped making the dish. And her husband keeps asking her. He said hey, honey, I love that thing you used to make. Can you make this? She's like I don't, I can't because there's this particular way you make it in this dish.

Dwain Woode:

And so, anyway, her mom comes to visit, right, and I think her mom had given her the dish, and her mom she's talking to her mom and she says hey, mom, I don't know, I can't make this dish anymore, maybe. The mom asked her to make it. She said I can't make it anymore. She said why? She said because the dish that you gave me, that made it right, is gone, is destroyed, so I can't make it anymore. And the mother said the only reason I made it in that dish was because that's all we had.

Dwain Woode:

Notice, that's all they had when mom and dad were coming along. This is what they had to make that particular dessert I think it was a cake or something. But this young lady had seen her mom make it each time in this exact same container or dish or whatever, and so mom gave it to her. So she brought into her marriage that this was the way to make it. But it was just something that had developed over a course of time and it wasn't anything particular to it. It was just that's what mom made, that's what mom had, and so our tastes are in a large part defined by and influenced by, our culture.

Dwain Woode:

So I am South American, slash Caribbean in my history, and so the things that I like, the things that I, the tastes that I like, are from that culture. You may be from an Italian culture, you may be from somewhere in Europe, somewhere in Africa, one of the African countries. You may be from somewhere in Europe, somewhere in Africa, one of the African countries. You may be from a Latin American country, right. So all of those cultures have a particular way of eating. You may be from the South, you may be from the Northeast, you may be from out West, from the Northwest, from mid-America, and there's a certain way that the people that you were around ate, and some of it listen to this y'all some of it they ate the way they ate because the things that were available when they were there are the things that they had to use. For example, last month was Black History Month and I did a show, I did a couple of talks on slave food. So in a large part, the African-American southern food, southern cooking, has to do with the foods that were available and that had to be used, and so that comes down as a history.

Dwain Woode:

I can't tell you the number of people that I see in the office and we're talking to them about changing diets and altering, and so I remember this guy is probably about 70-something-year-old guy I saw in the hospital for the first time. So he was in for something else and I saw him for diabetes because, um, I think he was just diagnosed with diabetes and so I went in, I was fresh out of school at the time, fresh out of fellowship, and so I'm talking to this guy about food and, and you know, going through my thing, like we do, as us physicians do, and he said to me he's, doc, this is the way that my wife cooked, or cooks. He said my mama taught my wife how to cook like this, my grandmama taught my mama how to cook and my great grandma taught my grandmother how to cook. He said I'm 76 years old and this is how I eat, so our culture influences it.

Dwain Woode:

As we move into our own lives, right, as we move into our own lives, we begin developing different tastes, like my son now is growing right, so he's an adolescent and he's developing a taste for foods that are slightly different from the family. So, in addition to the cultural things that he has picked up, the cultural things that we do, he now has picked up and is picking up things that he likes, certain foods that he likes when he's with his friends. They eat a certain way, and so there are things that he will now pick up from them that are distinct from the way my wife and I cook and the way we cook in our home. So he's going to add those there as he goes into his own life, as he gets his own family. There are going to be things that are going to be available for the part of the country that he goes to. And some of you know this, right, you left where you were and you went to a different part of the country and that's, you know. Whatever was there, you ate, right. So you went to the restaurants, you went with friends, you went to church and those are the things that you guys ate.

Dwain Woode:

And then our experiences and our openness to try new things. Experiences and openness to try new things. One of the things that I am excited about in terms of this young man that's growing up in my house is all of the things that he has open to him, all of the experiences Right has open to him, all the experiences right, and I'm excited to see the new things that he's going to try, the behavior he's going to develop. And all of us, as we came along, we picked up some things from home. As we got into our adolescence and adulthood, we amalgamated some of those with other things that we saw, and then our experiences opened us up and, if we were open. We learned new things and we're not just talking about food, right. We learned new skills and new behaviors and new ways of doing things and we thought, oh, there was only one way of doing something. But now we found out, oh no, there's something else doing something. But now we found out, oh no, there's something else. So that's how our taste preferences, that's how our taste preferences happen, and it is an amazing thing to see that develop and know how that happens.

Dwain Woode:

Well, so what is the role of taste in our food choices? Well, you know, our taste is driven by the choices and nutritional quality. Our taste is driven by choices and nutritional quality. So there are some of us who make specific choices to eat specific things because we know that's nutritious for us. It's kind of like one of my favorite cartoons when I was growing up was Popeye the Sailor. You remember that I yam, that I am and that's all that I am. So Popeye carried it in his pocket. And I don't know how Popeye had that big can of spinach in his pocket, but anyway, he carried it and whenever he got weak, or remember Brutus would get at him or somebody would capture him or he needed to do something, popeye would pop out that can of spinach and he'd swallow it and all of a sudden, those little tiny arms, the muscles would pop up and sometimes you see like a cannon in it or you see like a steamship, a tanker or I don't know, or a tank right, or aircraft carrier or anyone, one of those boats. So those are things that sometimes we make choices. But remember those things. If you take some spinach and you give it to a child, guess what? They're not eating it. Why? Because they have not made the connection between nutrition and also they may not have. They don't like the taste, because it has that slightly bitter taste.

Dwain Woode:

Okay, so there are lots of health implications for the choices that we make in terms of our food, and so what we want to do is we want to rebalance our taste for optimal health, and there are a lot of things that we can incorporate. One of them that we've talked about in another context is this idea of mindful eating, and mindful eating is the process of being present with the food that you're eating, being here, understanding the purpose of the food. We did a show where we talked about the role of food in terms of nutrition. If you've not done that, go back and watch that. It is in our Mastering Diabetes. It's in our Mastering Diabetes playlist. That's out there. So the role of mindful eating. So what is the role of food and how am I enjoying this food?

Dwain Woode:

Sometimes the reason we don't enjoy food is because we are watching TV, we're playing a game, we're on our cell phone, we're watching a movie, we're not present, and so the food goes down and we're done and we're not satisfied because we never really tasted it right. It just made it through, and then we've got to cultivate a taste for health. I just made it through, and then we've got to cultivate a taste for health. There is nothing stronger than a choice that I am going to be healthy and I'm going to put a pin there, y'all, because I want to say something about me. So for a long time in my experience, I did not make a choice for various reasons to be healthy. I was learning about health, I was learning to be a physician. I was learning all the things.

Dwain Woode:

I would be up and you guys may or may not know the training schedule when we were coming through. I think things are a little different now, a little bit more humane, but I remember going in because we had to be there to be on call, and so call started at seven o'clock. Well, in order for me, right, because of some of my challenges, in order for me to be able to be ready to present my patients at seven o'clock, sometimes I would show up at 3.30, four o'clock in the morning so I can go read the charts, you know, read the labs, get those labs together, make my presentation and be ready to present those patients to either the senior or to the attending. If I was the senior, or sometimes my interns, those that were below me they would come in and they would ask me questions of the patients. So I had to know about the patients, so I'd go in early, so, coming in at 4 o'clock, and then you're on call all night, right? So 7 to 7 in the morning is when you're on call, and then you had that entire day that you had to work and then maybe go to clinic in the afternoon. So we're there 24, 36 hours or more, right, and that's on an every other day basis. And then not to talk about clinics and anyway. So as you become a senior.

Dwain Woode:

So my history in medical school and residency, it was very traumatic, right. I guess that's the only word I could use. And so I developed very bad habits eating habits, coping or lack of coping, skill habits, right. And so, as I got into my later life, those skills or those habits continued to follow me. Those habits continue to follow me, yeah, and many of us are right there right now. Right, many of us are right there right now. So there's a lot that has to happen for us to begin retraining, right, we got to cultivate that taste and we got to begin retraining our palates so that it does or it pushes us in the direction of where we want to be, right. So, the role, the role of taste, the role of taste, right. Um, and so what are some common challenges that people will face as they attempt to change their taste? What are some common challenges?

Dwain Woode:

Number one preference for high-fat, high-sugar foods. That is what our society has built into us. So, aside from the things that have developed as part of our history, part of our childhood, part of our own development, advertising, the design of foods. As a matter of fact, I was watching a show today and the chef was talking about these very tastes, right, the sweet and the salty, and the sour, and the bitter and the umami, and he was talking about how to put it together so that when you sit down, you just want to have more of that food. Notice, it's not healthy that we want to have more of the healthy food, we just want to have more right. And there's this idea of the bliss point that I've talked about before, where there's the perfect amount of fat, the perfect amount of sugar and perfect amount of salt, and that's what advertising does, so that when you eat that, you're like this is so good. So we have a built-in preference for high-fat, high-sugary foods.

Dwain Woode:

The other challenge that people will have is that they are unfamiliar with healthy foods. They've never learned how to cook it. They've never learned what some of those different things are. We all pretty much eat about 15 to 20 different things and that's it. We stick within that group of foods that we eat all the time. So they've never expanded beyond that and so they're unfamiliar with, maybe, some healthy foods. They think that healthy foods have less flavor. In fact, one of our community members in our community meetup was asking me there's this dish that she likes and she wants to make. And she was like hey, how do I make this? So it's healthy, so it tastes good, and so we gave a couple of suggestions and we'll talk a little bit more about how we do that. But, yeah, most of the time when we say, oh, I'm eating such and such, the people who are not in our circle will say how does that taste?

Dwain Woode:

In fact, this afternoon let me tell on myself I was in the office and I was explaining to one of our pharmaceutical reps the spikes that we have in blood sugars as a result of something like a milkshake. And as I'm talking about this milkshake, y'all in my brain, my brain says you need to get a milkshake. And so I started to. We started talking about healthy milkshakes and so they were describing the milkshake and I me right, see, right now I'm talking to you about food, right? And me, the endocrinologist, the guy who's in there talking about food I said man, that must taste nasty, right? Because we think if it's healthy, it's less flavorful.

Dwain Woode:

Another challenge is that it is time consuming y'all, time and convenience. I don't have time to do that and prepare for that. And then there are some social and cultural influences. We eat the way the people around us eat. That's one of the reasons that quote unquote diets don't work, because if you are on a particular diet and your family is not on the diet now, you've got to cook two separate types of foods. Or if you go somewhere and the people that you're associating with are not doing the thing you're doing, then you've got to make a choice, and a lot of times, we make the choice to be in community rather than be different. Ooh, ooh, that's a good one. Okay, hold on, let me pop over here. Hear what I said. We make the choice to be in community rather than be different, because we don't want to be different, we don't want the community to ostracize us, so we don't do that. So we don't do that. So how then? How then do we begin introducing new foods? How do we begin introducing new foods?

Dwain Woode:

Number one we want to do so slowly and start small. You can start by incorporating small amounts of new foods into the dishes you already like. So begin putting those things in there, so you can add some kale to a smoothie. Or mixing some arugula, some quinoa into your rice, arugula into your salad. So start small. Don't all of a sudden go home and, like a lot of people will do, they'll throw everything out and say, okay, I'm going to be healthy. Well, guess what? That's not going to work.

Dwain Woode:

Number two you want to mix and match. So combine new flavors with textures that are familiar to you, things that you like. So put something that's bitter with something that's sweet, or something that is citrus with something that's sweet or something that's salty. So play around with them, so create new mixes and matches. It's the only way that you're going to be able to be successful, because, once again, we all will eat around the same number of things if we're not careful, if we don't catch ourselves. So experiment with cooking methods, right? Instead of frying something, steam it Instead of steaming it. You know, it gives a different dimension, right? So grill it, saute it, don't bake it, don't bread it, you know. Just do something different, and this can reveal things that you may like.

Dwain Woode:

A lot of us don't like things because we've never tried it. I remember when my son was growing, we would put things on his plate. He's like oh, I don't like that. I said how do you know? You haven't tried it yet. And so we make him, we put things on his plate and we make him eat. Oh, we made him Eat different things. Hey, you got to try some of that. After you try it, then you can say, okay, I don't like it, but you can't say I don't like it if you don't try it. Approach new foods with curiosity. Engage your curiosity. Make this a fun process. Y'all In the office today I was telling someone who was there we were trying to figure out.

Dwain Woode:

He said, well, what can I eat? What's going to raise my blood sugar? And I said this is the fun part of what we do, right For my patients. This is the fun part of what we do. In order for me to know what's going to raise my blood sugar, I got to try it. In order for me to know what I like, I've got to try it. I may not like it and say I'm never going to that again, but you can't say that unless you've tried it. Engage in it. Look at this as an adventure.

Dwain Woode:

A lot of people like to travel and some people say, oh, I'm not going to that place because it can be whatever. But this person said, no, I'm going to that place because I want to know what it's like and then be patient and persistent. This is your health. This is your health. You can make choices. It doesn't happen overnight, but it can happen if you allow it to happen. All right, if you allow it to happen, all right. So start, small mix and match experiment, engage your curiosity and then be patient, be patient, be patient. And then here are some flavor enhancers, y'all Flavor enhancers.

Dwain Woode:

Utilize fresh herbs and explore the world of spices. There's salt, there's pepper, there's garlic powder, there's onion powder, and after that most of us stop. Most of us stop in terms of our spices. We know Italian seasoning, we know thyme, we know rosemary, we may know garlic, we may know cilantro, we may know basil, and after that most of us stop. There are so many spices out there, y'all, there are so many herbs that you can flavor the food with. The better you flavor it, the more the brain says, hey, I like that thing. So we're incorporating new things. And so what are we doing? We're well, we'll come to that in a minute. So master the art of roasting. When you roast things, man, there's a flavor that comes out of it that you cannot believe, and some of us, we don't do that.

Dwain Woode:

So take some asparagus, take some eggplant, take some zucchini and some squash and chop them into chunks. Right, get a foil pan or whatever kind of pan, a baking sheet, and get some light spray or get some a little bit of, I'm going to say, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, right, get some of that and just mix it together Some salt and pepper and other seasonings and just put them in the oven and broil it. Oh yeah, broil it for about I don't know two, three minutes, cover it with foil, put it back in for two, three minutes and then take the foil off and broil it for another minute. Amazing, amazing taste. One of the things that I've done and this is I don't even know how I got this right so I took some portobello mushrooms, right, those big ones, and I cut them in quarters and I got a balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing and I drizzled it over it and mixed it up, some salt pepper, some other seasonings and I put that thing in the oven. And, man, when that came out, it was amazing.

Dwain Woode:

Have you ever had a portobello mushroom hamburger? Just the portobello mushroom. Not even meat, right, not even beef, not even that. Just it, right, that was the meat, was the portobello mushroom. It was amazing. Anyway, sorry you guys, I'm getting hungry now.

Dwain Woode:

Okay, so use citrus and vinegar. Remember I said that when you use citrus. It enhances, it opens up the flavor. It opens up your taste buds. It allows you to see and feel and taste other things. Incorporate healthy fats right, I said extra virgin olive oil. Avocado would be a good one that you could put in there, right? So begin incorporating new things, new fats, in there, because, remember, fat, salt and sugar are the three things that the industry, the food industry, is using to affect you, to convince you to do something. You can use it for yourself, you can use it to help your palate look for other things and then embrace umami and season smartly. So embrace umami that is in your foods, right. What types of things can give you that flavor? Well, mushrooms will do that. I just talked about portobello mushrooms. They're amazing, right for giving you that protein flavor. All right, put it in there and then season smartly. Don't just put all. It's the real.

Dwain Woode:

I started talking about making a roux earlier, you remember? That's the reason that some foods in some restaurants are so good. They don't just put all the seasoning in there at one time. They brown the meat and they drain off the oil, and then they brown the vegetables, or saute the vegetables. They glaze the pan, then they put the sauce that they have back in the pan. They put the meat back in whatever I'm talking sausage Put the sausage back in there. Then they put the vegetables that they sauteed, then they put some fresh vegetables and they cover it. They let it simmer for a couple minutes and then they go. They put some more seasoning. What are they doing? They're building the complexity of the flavors in the food so that, when you taste it, when you eat it, amazing. This does not just have to be done in an unhealthy way, you can do this in a healthy way as well. So all of those things.

Dwain Woode:

So what are we ultimately talking about? Y'all, let me back up here. So what are we ultimately talking about? Y'all, let me back up here. So what are we ultimately talking about? What we're talking about is taste, right, we're talking about that last component of the heat model, right? Habit, emotions, access and taste. Of the things that are there, the one that's probably involved in all the others is the taste, because our brains associate a taste with an emotion. It associates a taste with a particular time and it associates a taste with our access to certain things. Let me say that again, of the things that are in the heat model, the one that's probably associated and incorporated with everything else, is this idea of taste, because our habits that we do think about this.

Dwain Woode:

The first time you ate some certain things, it was nasty, you didn't like it because your palate wasn't used to it, and you sat down, for example, with the family, and every time you sat down with the family, the family ate that thing. And you tried it again and again and again and again, and after a while, right, you can be across town, around the country, across the globe, if somebody makes that thing for you and you eat it. You associate that taste with the fact that your family used to sit down on Tuesdays and eat it. Right, right, one of the reasons I get hot dogs and pizza and Chinese food when I go to New York is because I associate the taste with the emotion of being with my dad and my family. Right, the memory comes back, the memory begins flooding me, me even. I'm talking to you right now. I remember the first time that he took me to coney island. Right, the memory, those emotions are stirred up.

Dwain Woode:

And then our access. Right, our access. Even if something is on the table, y'all, if we don't like how it tastes, we're not going to eat it, right? So taste is involved, so the things that push us in a particular direction habits, emotions, access and taste and our goal here is to begin looking at our reason for the things that we're eating. What does that taste mean to us? What does it remind us of? What has caused it? Is it just programming from the industry? Is it just the fact that they found just the right combination of those fat, carbs and fat, sugar and salt? And once you got it, you were addicted. So how do we reprogram? We begin first by understanding the reason for the things that we eat. This is Dr Dwain Woode, that's Wood with an E. The E stands for endocrinology. Here on the channel, I educate, I empower and I encourage you to take charge of your health, take charge of your life, avoid complications and go to the next level, creating the life you always wanted. And for this year y'all new year, new you.

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