Cold Truths About Food

As the humid cloak of true summer is upon us, many of us are ready to prove that there's nothing comfort food can't fix. The list of digestible summer coping mechanisms is a short one, usually beginning with ice cream and ending with lemonade. Today, we're talking about temperature and food, so we'll start with a cold food turf war that's getting hotter every summer.

Ice Cream VS Frozen Yogurt

Ice cream, which is dietary guilt incarnate, has slowly been surrendering its summer market share to its yuppy cousin, frozen yogurt. Frozen yogurt companies have enjoyed significant annual growth for the last few years. This is due to the fact that frozen yogurt is healthier than ice cream—or so you believe. (A survey conducted by the frozen yogurt chain, Menchies, found that 95% of respondents thought fro-yo was healthier.) Would you care for a smidge of rain to go with that yogurt parade?

Frozen yogurt boasts 17 grams of sugar per half-cup, whereas ice cream weighs in with 14. Advantage: ice cream.

When it comes to fat, though, ice cream loses its edge, with 7 grams to frozen yogurt's 4. Advantage: fro-yo.

Frozen yogurt does contain probiotics, but the freezing process often renders them useless. Many manufacturers refortify their yogurts with more probiotics. These products have a seal proclaiming Live and Active Cultures, guaranteeing they contain 100 million cultures per gram. (This is still 1/10 of the weaker commercial probiotics sold in the FFL supplements section). Make sure you seek the seal if you're looking for bacterial aid in digesting that lactose.

Digestion and Temperature

Please understand that this section is the unimpressive result of a mind-numbing safari through the annals of Internet misinformation. Like any idea (e.g. the Supreme Court is a reptilian cabal poised to destabilize our country), many incompatible claims are made about the digestion-temperature relationship. Many sources assert that digestion is profoundly influenced by the temperature of the food you're eating (or water you're drinking). Many of these sources cite other articles by reputable name-brands in scientific writing, like Discovery. But follow the intellectual trail far enough, and you'll find yourself on soft ground. The origin of many of the notions about food temperature (and especially beverage temperature) is the Ayurveda.

Ayurveda is an ancient tradition of wellness native to India and it comes packaged with everything the term "ancient tradition" signifies. In other words, there may be much wisdom in Ayurvedic practice, culled from centuries of practice, but it is important to recognize that the Ayurveda was conceived long before we understood anything about the chemical reality of digestion. It is Ayurveda's claim that drinking cold water while eating will "put out the fires of digestion." This thinking is ultimately responsible for the notion that one should refrain from drinking while eating, and especially avoid cold water.

The reality, though, is that digestion requires water, and in fact will pull water from other places in the body to do its necessary work. Drinking during a meal may well promote digestion.

As far as food temperature itself, some studies conclude there may be a digestive delay when eating cold or warm meals, and some conclude the opposite. The takeaway here is that food temperature is not a decisive enough factor in digestion to make a fuss about.

Heat and Flavor

Hi deary. It's cold outside. How would you like a nice, lukewarm bowl of soup? I'll fix you a big tepid bowl of broth. Make sure you stir it because it's developed a bit of a viscous meniscus.

This is not something you'd like a grandmotherly person to say to you on a frigid day. When it's freezing outside, everyone loves a bowl of piping hot soup. But you know how the soup is actually way too hot, and you then have to watch it steam for a couple minutes before you can eat it? When you receive soup, you wait for it to cool to a temperature that you would despise if it arrived that way. It's weird.

If you ate it right away, you'd risk scalding your tongue, of course, which can erode your taste buds. Moreover, clinicians have shown that taste sensitivity decreases at 95 degrees Fahrenheit and above. So you're really getting the best flavor out of your soup by waiting. That said, the aromatic molecules that convey deliciousness to you (and begin your digestive process with saliva) before you ever taste the soup are much more active at higher temperatures. So you're really preparing your body and mind to properly receive the soup by getting it while it's hot. It all makes sense.

Other, non-soup foods have a more complex relationship with temperature. Beer gets more bitter as it gets warmer—hence the American beer market's traditional reliance on "ice cold" advertising. Cheese tastes more sour as it's served at higher temperatures. Ice cream's molecules are too excited at room temperature to be entirely palatable for many people, making melted ice cream too sweet, even though the solid version is just right.

Cooking seems like an earthy, holistic discipline (and it is), but it's also a matter of colliding molecules and electrical impulses. Breaking taste into its elemental aspects isn't very romantic, but it can produce interesting results.

Researchers have found that heating and cooling areas of the tongue can produce sensations of taste. Simply stimulating certain tongue nerves can induce the sensation of sweetness, for instance. Will heated toothpicks slowly replace candy as the after-dinner decadence of choice? If they did, it wouldn't be the most sci-fi thing to happen this year, or even this month... in fact, I have to go and Google how to file a patent. Until next time!