More About The Shangri-La Diet

To recap: As I mentioned in yesterday's blog post about the Shangri-La Diet, the heart of the diet lies in decoupling the brain's association between taste and calories. This can be accomplished two ways:

1) Consuming extremely bland calories
2) Eating foods with unfamiliar flavors

Roberts states that the stronger the brain's association between a flavor and calories becomes, the more we crave that food, and the more it raises our set points, making us hungry and driving us to eat more. This means, according to Roberts, that the rise in obesity associated with the consumption of processed foods and fast foods is largely because these foods -- he calls them "ditto foods" -- taste exactly the same every time we eat them, creating an unnaturally strong association in the brain between that always-the-same taste and calories. This would explain the reason why so many people appear to be addicted to, say, Big Macs but not to home-cooked hamburgers, to Coca-Cola but not to homemade lemonade. Because these foods are unnaturally identical every time we eat them, they jack our set points up to the skies, and make us crave them.

Interesting stuff.

Roberts suggests something called "crazy spicing" to create unfamiliar tastes, so as to avoid this powerful set-point-raising association. In crazy spicing, one sprinkles several randomly-chosen spice blends over one's food, creating unfamiliar flavors. Unfortunately, for many this spoils the experience of eating, since a pizza with cinnamon, curry powder, seasoned salt, and barbecue rub will taste different, all right, but will not necessarily taste good.

Fortunately, there is a less-drastic alternative that I found on the Shangri-La Diet discussion boards. In a variant of crazy spicing called "twisting," one simply varies the flavor of one's food a little bit -- not five different spice blends, but perhaps just one spice or sauce you haven't used on that particular food before. This is less likely to create truly bizarre-tasting food, while avoiding overwhelming taste/calorie associations in the brain, and thus making the food a "lower set point" food.

This happens naturally, to some degree, in home-cooked foods. Without the factory controls of processed foods, home cooked foods are always at least a tiny bit different than they've been the other times you've cooked them -- you used a bigger or a smaller onion, or clove of garlic; you bought a different brand of canned tomatoes; you used a Granny Smith apple instead of a Gala; your "rounded teaspoon" of cinnamon was a little more or less rounded than it was last time.

It seems likely that historically, this would have been even more true. With only seasonal foods available, and the tastes of those foods depending a great deal on the local weather and soil quality, variability would be inescapable. A deer shot in February will taste different than a deer shot in September. Berries grown in a dry season will be different then those grown in a wet one.

It seems to me that one could imitate this by varying food in other ways. This morning I saved the very aromatic grease from my Greek Stuffed Peppers last night; I will use it to fry eggs in tomorrow. Since I've never made this dish before, nor ever fried eggs in lamb fat, much less a combination of lamb fat, butterfat (from the feta), and olive oil, with hints of onion, garlic, oregano, and green pepper, that should be a real "twist" for my eggs. Today I had my fried eggs with a leftover bit of lamb steak and some cole slaw, a combination I'd never had before. I'd seasoned the lamb steak with a spice blend called quatre epices (four spices) that I'd made just the other day; again, another new flavor. And I sprinkled a little Spike seasoning over the whole thing along with my salt and pepper. Oh, and added just a little Bahamian hot sauce. Didn't taste weird or unpleasant; I enjoyed it very much, but it was new.

This is interesting in light of the infomercial flogging of Sensa, and the statements from Dr. Alan Hirsch regarding the role of scent and taste in obesity. It seems as though sprinkling the Sensa powders over your food would, indeed, "twist" them a bit. This would also explain the need to switch Sensa flavors on a monthly basis -- your brain would start recognizing some of the flavors.

However, I cannot square all this with the fact that Dr. Hirsch says that his inspiration to start looking at the role of scent and taste in weight gain/loss was the fact that head injury patients who lose their sense of taste and smell often gain weight rapidly. It would seem that such a situation would fall under the Shangri-La Diet's first method of lowering set point, that of eating very bland calories.

Another aspect of this occurred to me: Could this explain the "golden shot" phenomenon, the fact that some people lose weight rapidly and easily the first time they try a low carb diet, but having strayed from the diet and regained, they find it much rougher going the second time around? All of the low carb foods and food combinations that were relatively novel the first time around would be familiar to the brain the second time, no? Just a thought.

Which is as good a segue as any to another aspect of what Roberts has to say: Along with flavorless foods and unfamiliar tasting foods lowering set point, Roberts says another influence is how rapidly the calories are absorbed from the source. This sounds familiar, no? That low carb diets consist of proteins and fats that are slowly absorbed, and do not cause big swings in blood sugar, is no big news to us. Indeed, Roberts states that the reason a fast food burger is fattening is because it consists both of the burger, which is slowly absorbed but flavorful (along with pickles and ketchup, etc) and the bun, which is bland, but very rapidly absorbed. He feels that either one alone would be less likely to raise your set point and make you fat, though of course we all know which one is going to taste better and make us feel better.

More tomorrow!