Final Transcript: First 45 Minutes of “Culinary Medicine Training” Santa Barbara, CA, June 2010: unedited, direct.

Dr. La Puma    You guys all filled out a survey online, and as I said in the e-mail to you you’re all top communicators, you’re all top connected, you’re all interested in social networking, but your interests are kind of split down the middle.  Half of you wanted more about cooking techniques and how to make healthy food taste good, and half of you wanted to learn more about communicating the message, about how to inspire.

So I thought we’d do some of each, and the first thing I thought was that I would tell you a little bit about culinary medicine and what its mission is and why I think leadership is influence.  That’s probably the best single definition of leadership I know, how to influence and whether you influence, and in that way you can understand the people who clean this restaurant as having influence and the possibility of leadership, because if you walk in and the floor’s dirty and the mats are dirty and the silverware’s … then you’ll think, “Oh, they don’t care,” but that person still has the possibility of being a leader in their organization.  That’s a really important point because even if we don’t run businesses or head companies or wherever we are, wherever we work we have influence on the people around us.  So you guys as trainers and you in pharmacopeia all have leadership possibility and that’s what I was really interested in and why I wanted you to come.

I think of culinary medicine, which is a term that I probably didn’t make up, someone else made it up, but I’ve tried to make it popular as the blending of the art of cooking with the science of medicine with its mission being restaurant quality meals that help prevent disease and even treat disease.  This takes a number of different forms and not just inside of institutions but also in everyday kitchens.

And, the people who seem most attracted to it actually fall into two realms.  They’re people kind of like Lisa who had health problems or have a health problem and think, dang it, I’m not going to take medication.  I’m going to do this myself.  Then there are other people who love the idea that they can have more than festitory and olfactory and beautiful, flavorful value, and those are a lot of really young people, people in their 20s, for the most part, who are part of the DIY movement, where the classes they want to take are how to butcher a whole animal, tan the hide, and make moccasins or a skirt.  Then there’s a third group actually which are Boomers, which I’m a part of, and we’re convinced we’re going to live forever with no loss of quality and be very happy about it – die at 99 playing tennis, having sex twice that morning.

Culinary medicine is as much a concept as it is a subset of any field.  I don’t really think of it in opposition to conventional medicine, … medicine, neuropsychopathic medicine or homeopathic medicine or holistic medicine or what …calls integrated medicine.  I think if it was part of one of those, it would probably be part of integrated medicine.  But it actually is more food specific and not so nutrient specific.  It’s really about the value of whole foods.  Even though we’d like to identify resveratrol in wine as the tannin that probably has anti-aging properties, we really don’t know what it is in wine, any number of its 300 chemicals that is good for you other than the alcohol which raises your HDL and probably protects you in other ways.

So although people really like to know those things, and I’ve given you about 50 of them, because the one thing that people really latch on to about this book and the ideas in it are what I call the “water cooler” facts.  And I gave you about 50 in a previous brochure that we have, but they’re the little bites in the margin.  And so to get people to buy into the idea, if I tell people it’s the art of cooking blended with the science of medicine, they go, “Oh, that sounds kind of neat.  I don’t know what it means, but it sounds kind of neat,” that’s one thing.  If you tell them if you leave a watermelon on the kitchen counter, you get 139% more betacarotene and 40% more lycopene just because the watermelon makes it, how you store your food makes a difference, they can bite into it.  And that’s one of the reasons …tips are so successful and why I try to do the same thing in culinary medicine.

So the way in is two ways.  One is by giving people bite-sized bits.  You think somehow you’re cheapening it because you’re not giving them the whole concept or the philosophy, but they’re not ready for that.  They’re ready for bite-sized bits.  The second way in is an emotional connection, and you … and Katie with clients that you care for, you already have emotional relationships with those people just because they come to you for training.

W            Hello.  We’re closed for lunch.  I’m sorry.  Have a nice day.  Thank you.

Dr. La Puma        And that …

W            (Inaudible.)

Dr. La Puma    … you have an emotional connection with people because there’s almost nothing that connects people more emotionally than food.  Now of course that is a double-edged sword, sometimes.  But the very fact that you’re able to provide it and connect them to their home is even more powerful.  So bite-sized bits and emotional connections are ways to inspire people.

I should probably say that we’re going to break around 3:00, have something to eat.  Before that we’re going to have a little tasting where I’m going to teach you some cooking things.  And we’ll end at 4:30 to 5:00 p.m.  And I have a couple of presents for you. And that you should ask questions at any time, because I’ll just rattle on.

W    Can I just ask a question?

Dr. La Puma    Sure.

W    When you were talking about how to get people inspired or involved, would you say that your grandparents or your mom always tells you, “Drink orange juice when you have a cold” or that those are kind of like the little tidbits that you’re talking about that people latch on to?

Dr. La Puma    They would be if that was true.

W    Isn’t that called folk medicine?

W    That’s kind of what people do already, but they’re not really educated necessarily, so this is more educated.

Dr. La Puma    I think so.  The kind of facts that I’m talking about are in the margins of the book and on this sheet, but they have to do with the mechanism of food, how food works in the body or how food works when stored or how food works when cooked.  If you add black pepper to a curry, you absorb the curcumin and the turmeric and curry.  And curcumin is, helps to moderate inflammatory bowel disease, its thought to be helpful in combating Alzheimer’s, it’s a strong anti-inflammatory in joints, because you don’t actually absorb the curcumin unless you add black pepper to your curry, but black pepper to curry is an easy thing to do.  It’s something I can do at the table that’s good for me.  So it has an action in it, the anatomy or the analysis of a water cooler fact is that it has an action, it’s immediately accessible, it’s something you want to tell somebody else.  It’s called “water cooler” facts because, of course we used to have water coolers, now we have bottled water, that you would gather around at the office and it’s that kind of infectiousness that people then want to know more about that.  That’s really why I wrote the book, because, as Rich probably knows, you don’t write books to make money.  There are a lot of other ways to make money.  In fact, every other way to make money is better than our way.  But you write books really, I write books for two reasons.  One is to get something off my chest.  I have something to say and want people to hear it and I write a book about it.

The other is to try to be generous, to try to share ideas and get other people talking about those ideas, and to put ideas on the table to make it a topic of discussion.   The book I often use as a big business card, because it allows me to begin to have a conversation with somebody about what’s important to them, about how they use food, what their life is like.  And it’s just amazing how many stories people tell about how food has affected their life.  And almost always someone will open up immediately about diabetes or heart trouble or their aunt with a stroke, and this question that I will try to answer, at least as an initial first step, what do you need for that is one that a lot of patients have but we haven’t, in the medical profession, done a very good job of addressing.  In fact, trainers and farmers are doing a better job of addressing it.  I think our new health care team is actually farmers and trainers and people who meet in the drug store aisles and next door neighbors, because doctors have often fallen down about what to tell people.

So with our varied backgrounds actually we are more I think a health care team than many physicians are in this area, nutrition, especially in and around food.  And there’s a little element of folk wisdom to it, but what makes it different in my view is that Western science is finally catching up to Asia and we’re showing more mechanisms of action which makes it more acceptable to us …science.

So, I wrote this book because it would be a good business card for Chef MD as a company, because I wanted the ideas to be on the table and now actually it’s kind of working.  People are beginning to talk about food as medicine and not look at you like you’re crazy or that you’re a wacko, off in a place that doesn’t mean anything.  That I think is because the economic landscape is changing and because people are eating out less now and cooking more at home and they want to know how to make food that’s good for them and will not make them fat.  Obesity has a lot to do with this.  And Mrs. Obama, bless her heart, is a big reason why.

So that’s a little bit about the culinary medicine is, why I wrote this book and why I think the ideas are important.  And  a little bit also about what I learned from the survey that we did online with you.  Before we look at the materials, are there any questions?

W    I have a question about doctors and why, are doctors, because I have been sort of doing this on my own for at least a few years, maybe more, and most of my regular doctors if I asked them questions like that, they’re like, either they don’t know or they’re afraid to say something that they don’t know is absolutely scientifically fact based.  Like they won’t give you any advice, most of them.

Dr. La Puma    Jen, what would you say to that?

Jen    I’d say …We don’t really get very much information in medical school unless you have more of a primary care focus or wellness, public health kind of focus, then I don’t think we get very much information about it.  As far as counseling patients about obesity, there’s not really any reimbursement, which isn’t really a great thing to say, but that doesn’t foster people to learn more about it.

W    Things like anti-inflammatories, like when I went to a rheumatologist when I was first diagnosed with fibromyalgia, they could only offer me antidepressants and sleeping pills and that was it.  There was no mention of what things might be good for inflammation or, it’s curious.

Dr. La Puma    There are really good reasons for it.  One, I got four hours in medical school and two hours in cooking school of nutrition instruction.  So the knowledge base isn’t there.  Nutrition classes still aren’t required in most medical schools.  So doctors don’t really know what to say, and as Jen points out, they’re not paid for it.  And doctors are like other workers, we do more of what we’re paid well to do.  That’s kind of one of the reasons we’re in this big healthcare crisis.  We give lots and lots of procedures, because that’s what’s well reimbursed.   Of course the fear of liability and malpractice suits is still price strong, incentives are all to overdo instead of to use lifestyle.  But when lifestyle is run against medication in the best …trials, it beats it 2:1…in diabetes prevention.

Of course I think food is the most powerful clinical intervention we have.  Doctors aren’t paid to prescribe it or paid to write recipes on prescription pads.  And if we were we would have to know what to write.  So it’s actually a fixable problem.  I’m giving a talk to 300 bariatric surgeons in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks and I’m giving them recipes on prescription pads so they can tear them off and give them to their patients.  Of course, their patients who have had gastric bypasses or lap bands need relatively high protein recipes and they need to separate the …and solids, and they need to learn the whole lifestyle stuff that they didn’t learn to begin with.

But, nevertheless, it’s easy for most clinicians to say, “Well, my 90 days are up, so come back once a year.”  But they still need lifestyle training.  Just like Celiac Disease, which of course is curable through food, these two groups, I think, are powerfully incented to use food as medicine and their clinicians are powerfully incented to learn how.  But you need those incentives in order to put it into a clinical realm, because otherwise I think it’s farmers, it’s well informed students, it’s entrepreneurs who are filling this gap.  And why not?  I mean, the gap is there to be filled, there’s a great hunger for it.

The reason I’m interested in having clinicians fill it is because it really means from a doctor if she says to you, “Let’s look at your diet.  I think it’s affecting your arthritis.”  If your doctor said that, you’d think, well, really?  How would it affect it?  And you’d want to do the right thing.  Other questions?

M    How many of these types of sessions do you do for M.D.’s?  I saw that one group in Chicago…  How many a year do you do?

Dr. La Puma        I do maybe three.

M            Are you the most prolific speaker to M.D.’s on this topic?

Dr. La Puma        I don’t know.  I don’t know how to measure that.

M    I’m just saying because if it’s only three a year and there’s only ten guys like you, that’s only 30 a year for every…

W    I would say that you are, because I’ve looked for…

Dr. La Puma        … you are.

W    There are probably two dozen, starting with Andrew Weil and that whole school of people who kind of blend spirituality, …and medicine and diet and holistic approach.  There are probably two dozen that are out there.  I think he’s unique, from my research, which is the only reason why I’m here, about what he’s doing that I want to move into, which is why it’s good to partner and find out what other people are doing.  There isn’t anybody with his approach, but there are a lot of people who have that sort of, maybe they have the vitamin approach that has to do with food absorption or they have the farming, grow it edition, they are different aspects but they’re similar.  They’re in that band of people bridging the gap and integrating things for prevention instead of what you call it, medicine, was it repair, what did you call it, procedure, whatever.

Dr. La Puma    That’s really good.

W    I’ve never seen the term “culinary medicine” before.  With your book and when I saw it, I was like, “Yes, that’s what it is.”  All the stuff that I’ve been so interested in all these years, that’s it.

Dr. La Puma    What I’m not sure of is whether it’s a niche market or a mass market from a business standpoint.  I think it’s a niche market.  I think there are people like you, people like every one of us, but I’m using you as an example, Lisa, because you raised your own health condition, who are just keenly interested in it and want to make it, in fact it becomes part of their lifestyle.  But at a mass market level it’s larger if it is not so much disease specific and food specific or for a particular condition.

W    But if you scratch the surface of almost anyone, you’ll find some condition that they’re interested in working on.  So many of my friends or so many people that I talk to, there’s something that they’re interested in, whatever it is.  So I think it…

Dr. La Puma    I do.  I agree.  If it was recast a little bit as Lori Ann alluded to, as healthy eating or healthy recipes, so that’s kind of how we’ve targeted ChefMD.com, it’s about healthy recipes.   Some of them are vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, Mediterranean, but it’s a healthy recipe site with free video, nutrition facts.  We put it all up on YouTube and want people to access it and use it freely.  But that actually is part of the communications part, where if you’re going to do this yourselves, I think you want to find a niche of people who are keenly interested, and whether that’s people with arthritis, or people with fibromyalgia, or people with heart disease, or people who are trying to lose weight, which always is the largest group, it seems to me that to make it commercial viable it helps to have a niche.

My undergraduate degree is in creative studies, so I really like generalism.  I did general internal medicine fellowship and …scholarship, because I like seeing the whole landscape.  But from a business perspective I think it’s more effective to focus on a single condition and a single group that believes.

W    I would say, from middle America in Columbus, Ohio, that there is a niche of people that’s into the slow food movement that I’m in to and it just …food is social and fun and makes you feed good health-wise.  That’s kind of maybe the niche that you’re talking about?

Dr. La Puma    It is.

W    That’s a pretty big niche.

W    It’s pretty big, but it’s specific on the demographic.

Dr. La Puma      (Inaudible.)

W    Slow food and sort of organic, doesn’t that all….

W    When you look at some of my patients, I have a 140 or 150 pound four-year-old or five-year-old that are from the Appalachian Mountains, that I spend an hour talking to them about what does this child eat, and he eats three bowls of Fruit Loops, he eats a Wonder Bread sandwich with mayonnaise for a snack, mac and cheesy, two of those little things for lunch.  Then they say we always have chicken and pork chops for dinner, they’re always fried, and they didn’t know that that was not as healthy as grilled.  Then he’d drink four of the 16 ounce Mountain Dews a day and so that’s …

W    (Inaudible.)

W    … trouble.

Dr. La Puma    Believe it or not, you really are kind of at polar ends.

W    That’s kind of super extreme, but a lot of people will get really defensive when you talk to families about, well, you might not want to eat that, or fried, or when you’re trying to tell if they’re there to see you because the child is overweight and they want there to be a problem you can fix.  And then when you say that there isn’t a hormone problem and try to talk about food, you have to do it in a way that doesn’t make them defensive.  But when you tell them that everybody has room for improvement, then they start getting their defenses down.  And then when you tell them that there are certain things you can do and it may be something really easy, like one fact, that I think that would be the bigger amount of people.

But the Appalachian Mountain people, they don’t know and they didn’t ever feel comfortable enough to ask and so I just asked them.  Then I spent an hour talking to them about basic things, but then whenever I ask them to at least change to the diet Mountain Dew, they were real apprehensive about that, because the father, who’s really thin, is the one that wanted the Mountain Dew, and he didn’t want to change.  Actually, I saw him back six months later and he didn’t gain any weight, which was a success and they did cut out all their calories in juices.  So they did make some improvements and they didn’t fry chicken as much.  They only did it four times a week ….

So his BMI percentile for age dropped, but I don’t think that there are super amounts of those people, but the slow food or people like us, I would say, are very specific and they’re very educated, they’re very proactive kind of people, I guess.  I don’t know.

M    Even in the marketplace, how many Whole Foods stores are there versus Ralph’s and Whitman’s and …  It’s a 20th of them.  So right there you can kind of tell, it’s still a niche.

W    This goes back to the basics of culture, food and the economy, because here you have the Appalachian region, which is one of the most agriculturally rich regions in the world but it goes back to perception about economy.  When you go from having a single room house with an outside bathroom, and you go into some sort of social, what you think is growth, maybe this Mountain Dew is like a special treat that then gets abused.  Because there’s no difference between an indigenous culture having first source foods and us having whole foods; it’s the same but different.  So it’s like all these really weird fine lines between economy and society and perception, and it’s really difficult to say where is it and where did it shift for this individual or group of people that they lost touch with their consciousness about what is it that sustains them and how it sustains them.  Very interesting.

M    It certainly reminds me of the …

W            (Inaudible.)

W    But when you really ask them, like a focus group for pregnant women that I did in a low socioeconomic area, my focus group question was what makes it hard for you to eat healthy?  Do you know what eating healthy is, how do you grocery shop?  All kinds of questions like that.  Predominantly the age groups were 17 to about 25 of 70 women that had just had a baby or were pregnant and they really just don’t know how to eat.  Their influences are by their parents, what their parents ate, and their grocery shopping is influenced by whether they have their kids with them or not and predominantly by price.  So they’re not going to buy organic if it’s more expensive, whether they know that it’s healthy or not, because they’re just focused on what it costs and that their kids only want to eat fish sticks and chicken nuggets and mac and cheese and they don’t want to eat anything else.  They don’t even try.

W    …processed food is full of fat and artificial things…

W    When you look at the child’s menu, they’re horrid.  The kids, they don’t even try any for kids, it seems like.

Dr. La Puma    The fast casual restaurants, the fast food restaurants have really specific economic drivers.  Those industries, which I worked with a little bit, are really a lot like sheep.  If one goes then the next will.  But it takes a big consumer push.  They can produce healthy food for kids.  Our kitchen’s capable of anything.  Hospital kitchens, the same thing, they can produce healthy food for patients.  Institutions and universities, they’re all run by Aeromark and Sysco and other, not all of them, but most of them, are, they have 40,000 recipes in its database.  It can produce healthy food.  It’s just now that people are realizing that there are economic incentives to do so.

I think that some of …   There’s a piece on NPR on main medical center … which re-vamped its cafeteria so that the ice cream and candies were not facing you when you were checking out at the cash register, but instead were behind you.  They don’t have … to take them out and their contracts probably won’t permit that, but at least they’re facing them a different way.  I’m going to work with our hospital, I have an appointment at the end of the month to see the CEO, medical board, because when you walk in our hospital, you turn left to go in the gift shop, the very first thing you see is a display of bear claws and right next to it the display of Hagen Daaz.  I told Ron that I didn’t think that food belonged in the hospital.  He said, “Well, some people think you should have a choice.”

So there is that and there’s a lot of give and take, but it ought not to be the first thing you see when you walk in the door.  And it’s much easier for people to change their environment or the institutions to change the environment and present environmental, healthy choices than it is for individuals to resist the Mountain Dew if it’s at home.  If it’s at home, you’ll drink it.  If it’s not at home, it’s harder.

So my weight loss practice is a lot about environmental change, because that’s how you get people to create change that stays.  But culinary medicine, I think, has something to say to all of these places – schools, to institutions of all kinds, cafeterias in hospitals.  There’s actually a vast array of places where it can have an impact.  I think how to have an impact really starts with food and in the kitchen as much as possible when you’re dealing with individuals, because it makes it so much more accessible than just lecturing.

Kind of along those lines, maybe you can look at the materials that I sent, because the first three of them are about cooking.  The very first material is an outline for today that I’ve been loosely following.  The second is a piece from the Healthy Kitchens/Healthy Lives conference, which is the CIA, Harvard conference that we were talking about previously from Cynthia Goode, who is a dietician and has a doctorate in dietetics.  It addresses low cost foods that are healthful. It’s just a place to start, but I kind of liked it as a pantry.  Is everybody where we are?

The second culinary thing is a piece I found in Professional Cooking for Canadian Chefs, which is a, …is a classic text that you get in cooking school.  Not just in Canada.  There’s one for U.S., too.  People often ask me, “How do you know what tastes good together?”  I have three ways.  The first is, I use a list like this, I use this as a touch point, because there are lots of other cultures that have figured out what tastes good together for years, and they have to do with things that are grown there or farmed there.  These are classic combinations that will always taste good together that you can always use.  And if you understand some of the principles behind it, you can substitute.

So I saw this and I thought it might be useful for if you haven’t seen it before, because we don’t normally think of paprika, caraway and we might not think of lemon grass or drying …  But I liked seeing that and I thought you might like seeing it because they’re combinations that do always work.

Then the third cooking handout is the three courses that I sent to David Eisenberg.  He asked me what I would like to teach next year at the Harvard CIA conference and I sent him these three descriptions.  Then when I was thinking about our seminar today, I thought that maybe you would like them, too, and to talk through them.  And we’re actually going to do the second one of these, the What’s Missing: Detecting and Balancing Flavors in a little while.  ..tomato sauce.  But this first, how to season and how to add interest in flavor and texture without adding significant calories or sodium is based on an acronym that I made up about ten years ago in Chef Clinic in Chicago that we used for cooking …way that is interchangeable.

So it turns out that good cooks, when they want to make something taste better do any number of these things.  I didn’t include “add fat” or “sugar,” but those work, too.

If you have a dish that is missing something, chances are it’s acid, and we’re going to use …as an acid in a little bit.  What are some other common acids?

W    Vinegar.

Dr. La Puma    Vinegar.  Any number of, balsamic, sherry, apple cider, distilled, raspberry, wine.  Rice wine.  Rice wine vinegar usually has, there’s unseasoned and seasoned.  So, some rice wine vinegar has salt in it and sugar.

W            (Inaudible.)

Dr. La Puma        So acids are interchangeable.  Every citrus fruit as well.

M            So what was the third major acid?

Dr. La Puma    Vinegar, citrus, wine.  But within vinegar there are eight or ten types, off the top of my head.  But in citrus there are hundreds of varieties of citrus.  If you go to the farmer’s market tomorrow and you go all the way along the fence is a lady from South Holland who specializes in citrus.  If you haven’t been here before, you should go to the Saturday farmer’s market at Koda and Santa Barbara Street, from 8:30 to 12:00, because you’ll see what’s in season here.  It’s also great people watching and the food is terrific.  There’s a lady from Sao Paulo who specializes in citrus and grows things you’ll never see anywhere else, including bergamot.  Do you know what bergamot is?  It’s a citrus that forms the essence of Earl Grey tea, but actually as a rind it’s dry and aromatic.  The …it looks like a hand.  It’s a citrus that doesn’t have any flesh that’s used as a freshener in Thailand.  Four or five different kinds of … and grapefruits, and of course oranges and …

I remember the first time I made guacamole with one of the chefs at Tocque le Bon where I worked for years, Tracy said that she made guacamole over the weekend with tangerine juice.  And I thought, and that worked?  It actually did work.  It’s a little sweet, so you have to balance it with other herbs or balance it with other juice, but you learn to do that if you’re a good cook.

So, acid perks up almost everything.  So next time you’re wondering whether to add something for flavor but you don’t want to add more calories, try acid.

W    Can I ask why scientifically why on your tongue does it do that?  Is it because it was too …something like that?  You always talk about balance in cooking, what is that?

Dr. La Puma    Boy, is that a hard question to answer.

W    I always imagined it had something to do with that, but I don’t really know.

Dr. La Puma    I don’t think I really know.  The tongue map that we were all taught is wrong.  There’s no tongue map.  That’s made up from 1954.

W    You mean certain flavors are based in front of our mouth, back of your mouth, that’s not ….

Dr. La Puma    Nonsense.  There are three groups of tasters.  There are super tasters who have about 1,100 taste buds per square centimeter around the tongue, …mucosa, the inside of your cheeks and the back of your throat and into your nasopharynx, which is behind your nose.  And for those people, Annie one of them, everything tastes so intense.  In fact, it’s one of the reasons that a lot of people put too much salt in food, because they’re trying to drown out the other flavors that are bitter.  They super taste bitter.  They super taste sour.  Every taste to them is accentuated.  Women are much more common, about 10:1, probably 15% of all women are super tasters.

There’s big group which are normal tasters who have between 100 and 1,100, I think, taste buds per square centimeter, scattered all over your mouth.  That’s one of the reasons when you taste wine you go….because you’re trying to get it into all those little pockets where you have taste buds and draw oxygen over it.  This works, by the way, for lots of other juices and fruits….  And those people are more able to balance sweet, sour, salt and bitter …  Maumee, I made a mushroom puree for you and that’s what it is.  Maumee is the, there are five flavors,  sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and … is the flavor of roasted mushrooms, roasted meat, dense soy sauce, tamari.  It’s a rich, savory meaty glutamic acid kind of substance.  It’s what monosodium glutamate tastes like, but without the sodium.

I would also tell you ….  It’s thought to be the fifth flavor.  There are other senses that you have, you know, hot in your body.  A chili pepper tastes hot because it irritates a nerve. It irritates your fifth cranial nerve, which irritates the inside of your cheek.  So do bubbles from Perrier.  They kind of  jangle that nerve  but it feels good, and that’s why capsaicin in chili tastes hot, that’s why bubbles from a Perrier or champagne tastes like bubbles, not because they’ve had any of these other five tastes, but because they irritated a nerve inside the lining of your cheeks and that’s a pleasant sensation.

Flavors are much more than taste.  Flavor is aroma, it’s texture and what the people who have studied this page in …call the X Factor.  What they mean by this is the, and I wrote this down for you, is kind of the emotional moment, where you are at the time, what your other senses are saying.

W    That’s kind of like smell, too.

Dr. La Puma    Smell and aroma I put together.  Smell is about 80% of taste.  If you can’t smell, you cannot taste.  That’s why in cooking school, and I’m not going to do this today, they make you bite into a pear and then bite into an onion and see if you can tell the difference.

W    I’ve done that.

Dr. La Puma    Was it fun?

W    It’s weird, because when you bite into the onion, you can’t tell until you let go.

Dr. La Puma    Right.  And why is that?

W    …oxygen?

Dr. La Puma    That’s right.  Do you know the compound that you’re smelling?  It’s a sulfuric compound, which is probably one of the protective compounds on …vegetables.  Sulphur compounds are powerful and they help to detoxify carcinogens in the liver, which is probably why almost every ….has been linked to producing GI cancers.  …