Be Careful What You Put Into Your Mouth

Following up on the subject of "You Like to Eat Pig's Trotters?" (see previous post), Dr JB Lim continues with the following email:

Sent: Sunday, 25 July, 2010 3:31 AM

That is right! Collagen, the jelly-like substance from which gelatin is formed after cooking pig’s legs, chicken feet, joints of beef, etc is certainly nice to taste and eat especially if it is seasoned with sauces, herbs and spices and brewed for a long time. I like the taste myself and take them occasionally for fun only.

But nutrition-wise, it is useless with hardly any value in them. This is perfectly correct.

So you can see not all foods that are nice tasting have health-giving values. One good example which far too many people think is good for health is essence of chicken which can be made by brewing joints and ligaments of chicken for a long time over a low fire in your kitchen. The soup taste nice, but it has little or no nutritive value in them unless a full range of essential amino acids are leached into the soup from other parts of the chicken muscles. The same with beef soup, pork soup, fish cartilage soup, etc.

Sometimes not too nice-tasting food or drinks have higher nutritive values, e.g. soybean milk, bean porridge, milk products, plain boiled legumes like dhal, pea porridge, and vegetable products.

Highly good tasting foods like those fast foods – burgers, hot-dogs, satay, steak, deep-fried chicken, just to name a few, are not just full of trans-fatty acids, heat and oxygen damaged recycled oils in them, but they are highly dangerous and damaging to health as they can cause heart disease and cancers, and degenerative diseases. They are no better than foods laced with pesticides, maybe worse.

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Taste misleads us into early death. Just be careful what you put into your mouth.

JB Lim