Salad

• It’s OK if you do, there are plenty of foods in the world, and lots of different ways to prepare them.
• If this idea makes you miserable, fear not, with time and a little effort you can make friends with salad.

Why don’t I like salads?

• We have evolved to enjoy the sweet or umami (savoury) taste of higher energy foods, because starvation is a more immediate risk than long-term health.
• Vegetables aren’t particularly high energy but they are jam-packed with dietary fibre, vitamins and minerals, and health-promoting compounds called bioactives.
• The very things that make plant foods bitter, are the things that make them good for us.

• Humans have at least 25 different receptors that detect bitterness, and we each have our own genetic combinations.
• This means we don’t all have the same starting point when it comes to interacting with salads and veggies.
• But the steps toward learning to like salads and veggies are the same regardless of your starting point.

It takes time

• Repeat exposures to bitter foods can help us adapt over time.
• Repeat exposures help our brain learn that bitter vegetables aren’t posions.
• Read more:
  Food as medicine: why do we need to eat so many vegetables and what does a serve actually look like?

Add masking ingredients

• The good news is we can use lots of great strategies to mask the bitterness of vegetables, and this positively reinforces our taste training.
• Salt and fat can reduce the perception of bitterness, so adding seasoning and dressing can help make salads taste better instantly.

• Adding fruits to salads adds sweetness and juiciness, this can help improve the overall flavour and texture balance, increasing enjoyment.
• Experimenting with texture (for example chopping vegetables smaller or chunkier) can also help in finding your salad loves.

Challenge your biases

• Challenging your biases can also help the salad situation.
• A phenomenon called the “unhealthy-tasty intuition” makes us assume tasty foods aren’t good for us, and that healthy foods will taste bad.

The bottom line

Vegetables are good for us, but we need to be patient and kind with ourselves when we start trying to eat more. Try working with biology and brain, and not against them. And hold back from judging yourself or other people if they don’t like the salads you do. We are all on a different point of our taste-training journey.
Emma Beckett has received funding for research or consulting from Mars Foods, Nutrition Research Australia, NHMRC, ARC, AMP Foundation, Kellogg, and the University of Newcastle. She also works for FOODiQ Global. She is a member of committees/working groups related to nutrition or the Australian Academy of Science, the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Nutrition Society of Australia.