In particular, bitter melon has been linked to diarrhea, vomiting, and stomach pain Also, talk with a healthcare professional before supplementing with bitter melon if you have any underlying health conditions or are taking any medications, and be sure to use as directed.
Note that people who are pregnant or on certain medications — particularly blood sugar-lowering medications — should speak to their healthcare provider before consuming high amounts or taking supplements. Still, in moderation, bitter melon makes for a flavorful, nutritious, and easy addition to a healthy, well-rounded diet. Learn about the relationship between bitter melon and diabetes. Bitter foods sometimes get a bad rap in the culinary world, but they may boast a variety of health benefits.
Here are 9 bitter foods that are good for…. Herbal teas may do more than just soothe your stomach. They may also help lower your cholesterol. Also known as horned melon or African horned cucumber, kiwano is an exotic, peculiar-looking fruit from the central and southern regions of Africa…. Do you have an unexplained bitter taste in your mouth?
We explain possible causes and how to treat it. Though its greatest appeal may be its flavor, honeydew melon is also nutritious and may provide several benefits. Here are 10 surprising benefits of…. Research shows you can prevent, halt, and even reverse type 2 diabetes with proper diet and lifestyle. Fresh foods and nutritional supplements are key. Pumpkin is a delicious type of winter squash, native to North America and particularly popular around Thanksgiving and Halloween.
Here are 9…. This tasty, although odd-looking, melon is packed with nutrients. Its health benefits might surprise you. If you've seen monk fruit extract or sweetener at your grocery store, you might wonder if it's better for your health than sugar. Here are the…. Health Conditions Discover Plan Connect. The Chinese variety is typically long, pale green, and covered with wart-like bumps. Bitter melons can also be subdivided by the color of their interiors, ranging from dark green, jade, celadon, cyan, ivory, and white.
Bitter melon is cultivated solely as an ornamental vine in North China because of its colorful, ripe fruits— orange reflexed pericarps and scarlet red contents that closely resemble Bittersweet. Bitter melon succeeds in the hot, humid climates of South China, around the Yangtze River basin white fleshed varietal , in areas like Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, Hainan cyan , Jiangxi, Hunan, and Sichuan provinces. Though previously thought to be purely valuable as decoration, bitter melon is gaining popularity in North China as a greenhouse crop.
Most cookbooks with bitter melon recipes written in English forewarn the cook to blanche, parboil, or somehow precook the fruit before incorporating it into a dish.
Though the large, fleshy seeds are edible, most cooks scoop away the seeds due to their additional astringency. Salting before cooking the melon is common to both reduce moisture and de-fang the bitter taste.
Just as the scientific studies above explained, fat, spice, and salt can balance or contrast the bitterness of the melon. Danny Bowien, chef of Mission Chinese Food and one of just a few chefs cooking bitter melon for a primarily unknowing crowd, came to love bitter melon in a very strange way. Once the Mission Chinese pop-up took up occupancy at Lung Shan, a Chinese take-out spot in the Mission district of San Francisco, Bowien took an interest in the foods the Chinese cooks made each other for family meal.
There would be weeks at a time where they would just make one thing, like a cafeteria. Bowien then went to work playing with the excess bitter melon the restaurant kept around in abundance, knowing he wanted to balance it with a smoky flavor. It hits every flavor— sweet, spicy, bitter, smoky, meaty, everything but sour, basically, but it has some acidity. Even at Lung Shan, the cooks, native-born Chinese men, fried, steamed, or boiled the bitter melon before cooking it a second time in a stir-fry.
Bowien continues to mess around with bitter melon, stuffing the whole fruit with a farce and steaming it in a very Cantonese fashion, or using it in the stuffing of a dumpling with beef cheek, a similarly fatty element like the bacon. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four sensory evaluation stations, based on the order in which they arrived for the study.
Each station had one of the four food dishes containing bitter melon. After initial sampling, each participant proceeded to the next station such that the order was always the same chili, tomato sauce, curry, soup. Each participant was given a sensory evaluation form along with approximately tablespoons of each food dish served over 1 tbsp approximately 15 g of rice or pasta in the order they were to complete the sensory evaluation.
Participants were asked to taste each of the above food samples one at a time in the order on the form. Water and saltine crackers were provided for participants to cleanse their palates between sampling as a measure to offset "cross-over effect" bias. Participants were requested to refrain from discussing their opinions with others and compliance was monitored by study coordinators.
During data analysis, numerical scores were generated by authors based on the above mentioned hedonic scale. Participants also listed factors that would improve acceptability and increase consumption frequency for each dish.
Sensory evaluations took approximately 10 minutes to complete. Upon completion, participants answered questions related to their current consumption, knowledge, and attitudes, as well as to their intentions to consume bitter melon dishes as a meal in the future, over a period of two weeks. The second part of the survey form was designed to determine previous bitter melon consumption as well as future intentions to consume bitter melon-containing dishes after receiving bitter melon-associated health information.
Initially, individuals were placed in one of the Stages of Change SOC applicable to dietary studies based on their answers to questions provided in an algorithm format as shown in Table 1 [ 29 ]. The model is based on six stages: precontemplation , defined as a stage when an individual has no intentions of changing behavior within six months and remains resistant to change, contemplation , defines an individual who has limited awareness of potential problems or risks and contemplates making changes, preparation , defines an individual who is planning a change through specific action within the next month, action , defines an individual who conducts the specific behavior, maintenance , classified as the point in which the behavior has been occurring for at least six months and termination , the point at which a previous behavior is completely eliminated and is no longer a possibility when temptation arises.
In the last part of the survey, participants received "attribute-specific" and "consequence-specific" health information in writing as described by Wansink, et al. Knowledge about bitter melon traits or characteristics of action was provided by attribute-specific information. For example, "research with animals and humans have shown that bitter melon can lower blood sugar levels" provides information about bitter melon attribute or quality. The consequences of such attributes were provided separately.
An example of consequence-specific information included in the survey was "eating bitter melon may help lower your risk for type 2 diabetes or heart disease". Surveys were randomized such that half of the participants read the attribute-specific information first while the other half read the consequence-specific information first. After receiving each set of information, participants were asked to again list how many times they would be willing to consume each dish as a part of meal over a two-week period.
They were asked to check only one box for each sample that included zero times, one time, two times, three times, four times or five times per week. This was designed to assess changes in willingness to consume each dish given varying levels of knowledge about bitter melon. Additionally, individuals initially classified in the pre-action stages precontemplation, contemplation, preparation were asked after each set of information to check one of three boxes to indicate that they were either "not thinking," "thinking," or "planning" on consuming bitter melon in the future.
This was included to determine if providing health information affected stage movement for these participants despite palatability of bitter melon. SOC classification was reevaluated for individuals in the pre-action stages after each set of health information to determine if the information had an effect on stage movement. Frequency distributions among the hedonic scale categories were determined for each of the three sample attributes texture, bitterness, and smell as well as the overall sample rating.
Similarly, a two-way ANOVA model with Bonferroni post test was used to determine if participant consumption intentions for each sample were affected by participants receiving "attribute-specific," "consequence-specific," or both types of information about bitter melon compared with those receiving no information.
All 50 participants completed all or part of the sensory evaluation and survey. One participant survey was excluded from the analysis due to unreliable demographic responses. One of the 49 participants included in the analysis did not provide their age. Overall acceptability of specific attributes varied among the four food samples.
Mean hedonic scores for attributes and overall liking are presented in Table 3. Mean hedonic scores greater than 5 midpoint were considered acceptable while those less than 5 were deemed unacceptable. Except for the curry, all samples were considered acceptable to some degree. The tomato sauce received the highest overall mean hedonic scores, followed by the chili, soup, and curry, respectively. The curry received significantly lower mean hedonic scores for all attributes except smell, Table 3.
The bitterness of curry, chili and soup was considered unacceptable based on the hedonic scores Table 3. Although there was a range of responses for each dish, it is evident that most people largely disliked the curry to some degree while most liked the tomato sauce which received the highest mean hedonic scores for all attributes, including bitterness 5. Figure 2 shows the frequency distribution among hedonic responses for the overall liking scores for each food dish.
Responses for the chili and soup were mixed and more difficult to determine their acceptability from only distribution responses. The remaining participant responses were near evenly split between the degrees of liking or were neutral as indicated by a "neither like nor dislike" response. Overall mean hedonic scores for the chili 5.
The primary theme of comments on how to make each dish better was to decrease or somehow mask the bitter taste or aftertaste Table 4. However, the distribution of scores for bitterness and the other attributes varied by food dish. Although there were no significant differences in the mean values for consumption intentions among the chili and soup, the actual distribution of responses varied among these dishes data not shown. Consumption at least once every 2 months was used as the means to classify an individual in the "action stages" according to the SOC algorithm shown in Table 6.
Based on responses to the questions in Table 1 , the stage distribution of participants was determined after they evaluated each sample, but prior to receiving health information about bitter melon. Table 6 shows the number of individuals classified in the pre-action and action stages for bitter melon consumption prior to receiving health information. After receiving health information about bitter melon, stage distribution shifted for those participants initially classified in the pre-action stages.
Figure 3 depicts the percentage of participants in the various pre-action stages before receiving information and after receiving either attribute-specific or consequence-specific information. There was no significant effect on stage distribution based on the order of attribute- or consequence -specific information Table 6. The number of participants increased in the contemplation and preparation stages. Stage changes after participants received health information were mostly between the precontemplation and contemplation stages although some movement occurred between the contemplation and preparation stages.
Movement across more than one stage was not observed in this study. These results are expected based on the nature of individual behaviors within each stage.
Traditionally, bitter melon has been used as a vegetable in a variety of ways in Asian cuisine, and as the main ingredient its bitter taste can be overwhelming. Bitter melon-containing food dishes are not popular in the Western world due to its bitterness, which is an acquired taste. We therefore conducted a pilot study to incorporate bitter melon into few popular food dishes regularly consumed in Hawaii.
Our results indicate that chili, soup, and tomato sauce were more palatable compared to the curry dish which was considered unacceptable due to its "bitterness". It is possible that a sampling bias could have existed solely by the use of the term "bitter melon" in the recruitment process.
Participants were aware from signs used to advertise the study, that it would be a tasting or acceptability study of bitter melon. Additionally, one of the main attributes singled out for hedonic evaluation was "bitterness" which could have drawn more attention to this potentially negative food trait even before the tasting began. To date, there are no published palatability studies of food dishes prepared with bitter melon.
In one related study, hedonic ratings for bitter melon "pleasantness" before exposure to a bittersweet beverage for seven days and post-exposure were 2.
But how do you go about dissecting this strange-looking ingredient? Or it can also be stuffed by cutting into thick rounds and coring. Sign up for the best of Food Republic, delivered to your inbox Tuesday and Thursday.
Home Recipes Drink Travel. Tiffany April 4, What to look for Each oblong fruit grows to about 10 inches avoid buying any that are bigger than that. Photo: Simon Law How to prepare it Unless you get a small, young bitter melon recommended , avoid eating the thick, waxy skin.
0コメント