Happy Food for Life by Henrik Ennart

Author:Henrik Ennart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472974730
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Try it yourself: Mindfully eat a raisin

A classic exercise in mindful eating is to eat a raisin.

1.Look at the raisin as if this was the first time you’ve ever seen one. Discover every detail in its shape.

2.Investigate how many colours you can see.

3.Hold the raisin up to the light. Observe all the darker and lighter areas.

4.Close your eyes, and use your sense of touch. Is the raisin soft or hard? Squarish or round?

5.Smell the raisin. Does it awaken any memories?

6.Listen to the raisin! Hold it up to one ear, squeeze it lightly and roll it between your fingers and try to decide how the raisin sounds.

7.Taste the raisin. Allow it to lie on your tongue for a while before you move the raisin around in your mouth with all of your taste buds at full alert.

8.Finally, take a small bite. Explore the effect. Take another small bite.

9.Feel the signal that your body wants to swallow the raisin, but wait a little longer. Reflect on the raisin’s long journey, from the farm via land and perhaps air to the shop and then up to the moment it was intended for, on the way down your throat.

10.Swallow the raisin. Feel how it affects your body.

Fact: Resistant starch

Starch is how plants store energy. The only thing that distinguishes it chemically from normal sugar is that the sugar molecules form long chains.

When these chains are a little shorter, they can be snipped off by the body’s own enzymes, so that the pieces of sugar are ultimately small enough to be absorbed by the blood. This process begins in the mouth and continues in the small intestine.

The smaller these pieces of sugar are, the more quickly they are absorbed in the body. If we have poor blood sugar regulation and eat a lot of sweet things, we require a lot of insulin – the hormone that makes sure the level is correct – and then the blood sugar may instead fall too much, making us tired and lethargic.

This is what’s normally known as the blood sugar blues. The worse your body handles blood sugar, the more your mood is likely to fluctuate. Sometimes rather hyper and sometimes sad and miserable. It’s the same effect that makes you tired after eating.

So what’s so great about resistant starch? Well, it has such long chains that they aren’t broken down at all by our own enzymes in the small intestine. Instead, they become food for the bacteria living in the colon.

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