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Seasonal cooking

Cold-weather diet generates heat

By PHYLLIS GLAZER, Associated Press
Published January 11, 2006

How do you warm up when it's cold outside? Bundle up, dress warmly, and stay out of drafts, right?

That is right, partly. But, lacking central heating, ancient peoples believed that keeping the body warm also comes from within, and that certain foods could raise the body's temperature. Some of these, not coincidentally, are seasonal foods like legumes and root vegetables. Some are spices, like ginger and cloves.

Today we know that much of what they guessed from observation and intuition does indeed have scientific backing. Eating generates heat and helps warm your body, while the overall warming effect of food known as thermogenesis ("heat making") is due to energy released during digestion. If you find yourself feeling hungrier in winter than in the summer, don't chalk it up to your imagination; a drop in body temperature does stimulate the appetite.

So, what's best to eat in winter, and what's good to avoid?

Cold foods and fluids such as ice cream or cola require energy to bring them up to a viable temperature before digestion. In summer, when you want to cool off, this may not be a problem, but in winter, when the body needs to deal with cold both internally and externally, the attempt to conserve heat means a reduction of blood flow to your skin surface, and specifically to the extremities. That's why in winter your fingers and toes are the first to feel cold.

Eastern medical theories, rather than looking at the temperature of foods when you eat them, consider foods to have innate cooling or heating qualities, that have differing energy effects on the metabolism post-digestively.

Uncooked fruits and vegetables, for example, are considered energetically cold foods. Quickly digested and excreted, they may initially provide a lift, but not long-lasting energy and warmth. Cooked vegetables, on the other hand, particularly those that grow beneath the surface of the ground (root vegetables), are considered some of the most desirable foods for winter.

Is that kooky or not? Actually, not. Mother Nature seems to have provided human beings with specific seasonal raw materials to meet the nutritional needs of each climate.

Before this modern era when almost every kind of food is shipped in to local markets from around the world, people in cold-winter climates subsisted on foods grown well into the colder months, including carrots, potatoes and sweet potatoes, and hearty winter greens like kale and cabbage.

Together with grains and legumes, which also fared well with long storage, they could construct a diet of "warming foods" to see them through the winter months. Cooked and served warm, these foods are most easily digested by the body, allowing the heat created by digestion to help improve circulation and body warmth.

- Cooked vegetables, particularly those that grow beneath the surface of the ground (root vegetables), are considered some of the most desirable foods for winter.

Winter is also an excellent time to incorporate spices like ginger, garlic, cinnamon, turmeric and cloves into your daily diet. These spices contain phytonutrients, antimicrobial and/or anti-inflammatory properties.

Spices in the warm-hot category, including ginger, cinnamon and cloves (which, incidentally, taste great in hot cider, gingerbread and other baked goods), help to increase digestive enzymes, and boost the assimilation of nutrients. Other spices such as cumin, coriander, fennel, dill seed and anise seed aid digestion, particularly in the case of hard-to-digest beans.

The great 12th century Jewish physician Rambam (Maimonides) believed that black mustard seeds and asafetida are also "warm" spices that can be very helpful during winter to aid digestion and help provide relief of winter ills and chills.

[Last modified January 10, 2006, 09:57:04]