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VIDEO: Wellness Coach Deborah Kesten - Food Preparation, Does It Affect The Taste?

Wellness Coach Deborah Kesten explains if the taste of food is affected by the preparation.

Deborah Kesten:
Yes, the way you prepare food affects its taste and enjoyment. A lot of us grow up with the concept in the culture of grandma cooking with love or prepared with love. This is kind of an unusual comment about food and nutrition, but I will share it anyway. I interviewed Dr. K. L. Chopra, and he is the father and mentor of Deepak Chopra, and he talked about infusing food with love and consciousness when I interviewed him, and it’s based on Hindu scripture which is 3500 years old. And I kind of went on this nutrition journey around the world after speaking with him to find out more about cooking with love because he was espousing cooking with love, literally, and in the Hindu scripture of the Bhagvad Gita.

And so, I have actually done an experiment, this is true, and I have learned this from a physician named Leonard Lasgow, and I do this with students. I have taught graduate students, and I actually infuse my entire being with love and compassion, and with food in front of me, I will just kind of hold that love and compassion and direct it toward the food with gratitude for about two minutes. And I will also have similar food or beverage nearby that is not infused with love, and I do a taste test and a smell test about 10 to 15 minutes after I infused the food with love, and every student, there’s always one that nothing, but every student, 99% of the time can smell a difference and taste a difference.

Something happens, indeed there is something to infusing food with love, and it’s the same kind of thinking that goes into what’s now called mind-body medicine. When you fill your thoughts with meditative loving, neutral, non-hostile awareness, it seems to have a healing effect on your own body and your own being. And I am suggesting the same dynamic habits of food and whether it be on the plate in front of you, and certainly and definitely and a hundred million percent sure, it affects the way in which food’s metabolized, meaning if you are eating when you are in an anxious frame of mind, depressed, nervous, certainly.

We have the expression, you know, the food sat like a lump in my stomach. We’ve heard that. It doesn’t metabolize well, and I am suggesting that eating in a calm, relaxed, meditative frame of mind helps metabolize food and enhance health and well-being.

About Deborah Kesten, M.P.H.:
Deborah Kesten, M.P.H., is an international nutrition and lifestyle researcher and educator, with a specialty in preventing and reversing obesity and heart disease. She was the nutritionist on Dr. Dean Ornish’s first clinical trial for reversing heart disease through lifestyle changes, and Director of Nutrition on similar research at cardiovascular clinics in Europe. More recently, she has created the pioneering Enlightened Diet, a “whole person” optimal eating and weight loss program, the results of which were published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. With more than 200 published health articles, she is the award-winning author of The Enlightened Diet, Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul and The Healing Secrets of Food, a comprehensive, evidence-based nutrition program about the power of food to heal physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.

Visit Deborah Kesten at her website

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