Can Herbs and Spices Help You Keep a Healthier Diet?

What did your review cover?

We reviewed seven previously conducted related studies that were mostly about reducing saturated fat and sugar, as well as one that looked at improving protein intake in people over the age of 65 with foods that are easier to chew. The common link in all of them was maybe we can leverage the value of herbs and spices to improve the liking of foods that meet nutritional benchmarks that also feature lower amounts of fats and sugar.  

What foods were studied?

First, we looked at reducing fats in foods. Those dishes included:

• French toast with sausage for breakfast.
• Roasted chicken with vegetables and pasta with a creamy sauce similar to alfredo at lunch.
• At dinner, meat loaf, vegetables and the same pasta as lunch.

We also looked at protein in a lunch enhancement with a chicken salad and rice-and-bean salad – including rice in the latter to ensure we got a complete amino acid profile for that meal in a vegetarian dish. This is especially important for older populations who see their amount of total food and consumed protein drop as they age, at a time where they need to be conscious to eat more protein.

Finally, we looked at sugar reduction in oatmeal, tea and an apple crisp.

One note: Even though we didn't study salt in these studies, we at least met dietary guidelines for salt in the food. We weren’t over salting things to make them super tasty.

Why were these foods chosen?

Obviously, the meals had to be nutritionally complete, but we also wanted foods that are pretty well-liked and you could add flavors to them that are easily replicated at home or with a quick trip to the grocery store. And so if you're reducing the fat, you can do things like replace the cream in the recipe with half-and-half or with whole milk.

Likewise, same with the spices. Garlic powder, onion powder, cumin – these are common spices that people probably have in their pantry already. And so we didn't want to use anything that was unfamiliar, like fresh saffron rods, which are more expensive and fewer people have them in their pantry.

We also wanted to pick food that avoided difficulties in chewing and swallowing, especially for our older populations.

What did you find?

What we found was that when you prepare most of these foods with the lower-fat version, you can achieve the same liking when you manipulate things by adding common herbs and spices.

The exception was with the creamy pasta dish. Because the pasta served was in a creamy sauce, a good part of the enjoyment comes from the mouthfeel. You can't replicate that when you reduce the fat level. It doesn't matter what herbs and spices you add. The flavors can pop, but at the same time, it just doesn't give the same impression.

Adding herbs and spices worked for everything else. Mixed vegetables, great. It worked for the reduced-fat chicken, the meatloaf, the sausage, terrific. But as soon as you start manipulating those things that are reliant on that mouthfeel component, it gets much, much harder.

Alongside mouthfeel, were there other items you found that were challenging with flavor manipulation?

Sugar. It's devilishly hard to reduce sugar and replace it with anything that isn't sweet, per se. And we didn't want to use artificial sweeteners.

Is there anything you can do to reduce the sugar content of commonly consumed foods? And the answer is yes, with the caveat that, at least in our limited sampling, it has to be in a food where the flavor profile is much more complicated – you have more there beyond just the sweetness.

For instance, apple crisp has a number of different contributors to flavor in addition to the sweetness. There might be cinnamon; there might be clove; there might be vanilla. It's a complex flavor mixture. So you can reduce the sugar pretty significantly with people still enjoying it.

On the opposite end of the spectrum: oatmeal and tea. Oatmeal is very plain, so you can add a lot of different flavors to it. However, while we improved the liking a little bit, it didn't get back to what it was like with the sugar added.

And tea has a more complex story, you can add spices but some tea flavor profiles have a cultural context. Some of our respondents were used to black sweet tea, so not having it sweetened resulted in reduced satisfaction with the spiced but no sugar variant.

How much in terms of herbs and spices did it take to improve the liking of a dish?

It doesn’t take much. Everything we studied was a culinary dose – something like a quarter of a teaspoon, a half teaspoon. That little change can make a big difference.

We also always encourage people to use the fresh version of the powdered spice, because if it's sitting in your pantry for 10 years, it probably isn't going to have the same punch as it does if you just bought it.

What is one major hurdle to gaining more widespread adoption of these findings?

We see reports of people cooking less at home. Folks get a lot of takeout food. They get a lot of things that are prepared meals even at the grocery store. So it's hard to get people to imagine formulating dishes with herbs and spices themselves if they don't have any training or experience in doing that. And in both cases, restaurant or prepared food, these foods will be more likely to have more fat, salt and sugar.

This is where I think some of those home-delivered chef kits, in general, are a good, experiential way to learn how to prepare meals, having them taste good with herbs and spices.

Now, some of these chef kits could still have meals that aren’t the healthiest, but they do help you learn the skills and requirements necessary to put together a dish, even if you’re starting with no training or experience.

Where should this research go from here?

Probably two obvious directions. One is longer-term studies to say, OK, so now you've demonstrated that you can improve or satisfy liking with these reduced fat, healthy foods. Can you do it for more than one meal? Can you construct a diet so that over the course of a week, month, several months, somebody can adhere to that with equivalent liking?

That’s been done with salt and reducing fat in milk. If you gradually reduce the amount of salt in your diet, or go from whole milk to skim, you can’t go back. Things become too salty or too rich.

And two, adoption. I think we need more experiments to say: What are the cleverest ways to get people to adopt these habits and carry them out over the longer term? So it's not just, "I did it once and great, we're done."

It's just like getting people to exercise. The best exercise is the one you'll do. And what's the healthiest diet? It's healthy foods that you'll actually eat. How do you make those small adjustments and changes to make better health choices over the long term?

How does the research overlap with the recent work around GLP-1s?

With GLP-1s, if you’re eating less, I think the question researchers are looking at is: How does it impact your food selections? Are you getting adequate protein? Are you getting adequate other nutrients that are essential just for all the systems in the body functioning well? I think we’ll still face the problem of getting people to move toward a healthier dietary intake – and maybe foods with more herbs and spices can be part of that conversation.  

Key points: 

• Research suggests that in some cases, reducing fat content and sugar in common meals can be achieved through the addition of herbs and spices, while also improving satisfaction. 

• When reducing fat and sugar, just a teaspoon of added herbs and spices can improve how much a dish is enjoyed. 

• There are some exceptions, such as creamy pasta sauces, where the mouthfeel of the food changes significantly.