From my experience and reading, not as professional advice or opinion:
@Ponchu We need to remember is that we are shaped by our food experiences from very young,
This can be a
blessing (for example, knowing which foods are good for our health ) and
a curse (being swayed by advertising and other influences towards eating less healthy food).
Eating is an emotional experience as well as a survival behaviour.
In fact they have done experiments where
they have given children a vast smorgasbord of food to choose from (including ice-cream and other sweets) and
over a number of days these children independently end up choosing a balanced diet.
Now of course that 'balanced diet' could be whatever it is defined as ( ? the Eatwell plate, the food pyramid) etc so we should not put too much store in the result, knowing that Big Food has in many ways corrupted the dietitian training process in many countries.
There is a
solution of zinc which a person can taste and
if they cannot taste the zinc in it that correlates
with zinc deficiency (they will eat zinc-containing foods without tasting the zinc in them) and
if the test solution tastes strongly of zinc to them they are replete in zinc and avoid foods that taste of zinc (
a neat way our taste buds can regulate our food intake).
So how do we deal with the subliminal conditioning by food advertising, our families and others?
There is no easy answer but ... From some off-topic experiments with rats (the furry kind) a researcher got an idea of
how to discourage people with alcohol problems from imbibing. He asked each to name their favourite alcohol-containing drink.
He had them each individually taste and smell their own favourite drink and 1 to 2 hours later he put each in a seat which was rotated at high speed, enough to make them feel dizzy and nauseous, but not sufficient to make them vomit. This procedure was repeated about 4 times over several weeks.
After this treatment the vast majority of subjects would then decline to drink their favourite alcohol-containing drink if offered it personally or to buy it.
Yes, this was
an 'adverse conditioning' experiment and it worked. You might ask how fair is it to subject persons to this type of treatment. These persons with alcohol problems were those that had failed all known treatments - they either had to avoid alcohol or face an early death.
You may not have realised something with yourself or a relative who has been unlucky enough to be diagnosed with cancer and ended up receiving chemotherapy. What does most chemo do? Makes you very nauseous and sometimes vomit. What is done about that? Loads of anti-nausea treatment given which may prevent vomiting and quell nausea, sort of.. Now what if a well-meaning relative or nurse suggest i have my favourite cup of tea before chemo starts? And I get nauseous after the chemo, say 2 hours later? If this keeps happening not only am I going to be conditioned to avoid the smell or any taste sensation of the chemo treatment but also the smell and taste of my favourite tea. The lesson: If one is having treatment, any treatment that may cause nausea some hours later, choose to eat/drink your least favourite food beforehand. (Sarsparella might be a good choice if low in sugar, that is) )?!
Now back to the bread: You might say that you are not going to go through nausea-producing treatment to stop eating your favourite bread, even if the bread does muck up the BSLs.. Fair enough, except,
when you were young you did not agree to have the food industry invading your senses and brain and that of your parents' with advertising. And it may be that if (and this is a guess, not any high fulutin' opinion) you pigged out on bread, and the resulting high BSL was unpleasant enough, particularly if you felt sick, that over time (and enough exposures) the accumulated experiences might put you off that bread.
What this afore-mentioned researcher thought was that smell and taste have important survival value - if something tastes or smells bad we avoid it - such behaviour may save ourselves being poisoned. But also if we eat something and it later makes us feel sick (usually 1 to 2 hours later ) then our body remembers that and we are wary of tasting/smelling/eating it again.
The two important things in the success of his experiment with the alcohol-troubled were:
1) that the smell/tasting was 1 to 2 hours earlier than the onset of nausea, to mimic the usual situation with our use of taste and smell and reactions to food (quite different to the way our senses of sight, hearing and touch work.) It would be useless for our hand to only feel the super-hot hotplate our hand was touching some one to two hours later.!!
2) the nausea was the adverse symptom that triggered this later avoidance of a particular food. If vomiting happened it might still trigger the response , but if the vomiting relieved the nausea, the sensation and feeling of relief could send the wrong signal to our memory and other brain centres and the avoidance behaviour to eating/drinking that food might not happen.
Apologies for the length of this post. I have some fascinating info on food intolerance and how we may end up pigging out on the very foods that upset us - but that is a post for another day!!!
