Weed That's Good For You

Once a week the awesome family that I cook for has an international night. Last nights meal featured cuisine from Okinawa. I prepared a spare rib soup, purple Okinawan sweet potatoes, rice, and a purple sweet potato & coconut cream pie for dessert.

Besides the spare ribs, one of the other key ingredients that the soup called for was roasted seaweed, or as it is also known; Nori. I have always loved this stuff in sushi, though by itself, the flavor and texture profile is similar to fishy, crunchy, paper, that will stick to the roof of your mouth faster than a communion wafer and be twice as difficult to get unstuck.

As you already know, I am somewhat in the habit of impulsively eating what ever may be in front of me and since I work with food every day, there's no telling what may end up in my mouth at any given time. On Tuesday it was raw potatoes, and I'm actually quite thankful for eating them even though it disturbed me at the time. It was only upon reflection of that bizarre unappetizing moment that I realized how often I do eat on pure impulse.

So on Wednesday I made another deal with myself not to eat anything on impulse. I can't tell you how many calories I probably saved myself being armed with my new found awareness. Well, actually I could, but I don't want to embarrass myself here. Admitting to eating raw potatoes is embarrassment enough.

I did in fact eat several sheets of the Nori, but not until after looking at the nutrition label and making the conscious decision that fishy tasting paper really wouldn't be that bad of a snack. In truth, I ate it because I was actually quite hungry and I knew that if I didn't get something right then, I would be breaking the deal I made with myself later. Besides, for its low, low, calories, this food packs an amazing amount of nutrition. Each sheet of Nori is only 10 calories and loaded with vitamin A and Iron.

Today, I am wondering if there may be some magical extracting power to the seaweed. After all, it has been claimed to shrink body tissue if you get wrapped in it at the spa, right? Another claim I have read In the book, Food and Healing by Anne Marie Colbin, also author of The Natural Gourmet, is that seaweed will counteract the effects of radiation. The author recommends people undergoing cancer treatment to include it in their diets, as she herself will eat it any time she gets x-rayed.

The experience I had this morning was that of a cleansing effect and I'm pretty certain it had to do with the seaweed. My stomach was not at all upset, cramping, or in pain of any kind, but I did make three highly productive trips to the bathroom. While I may have just stepped over the TMI line, the point I'm trying to make is that I could actually see and feel that my stomach got smaller with each trip. What's even better is that I was able to obtain scientific proof that I was not imagining these effects.

I happened to weigh myself shortly after getting out of bed this morning. It's just another one of my bad habits. I don't do it every single day, but more like several times a week. After I wondered about the seaweed having this effect, I wondered if I would see any loss on my scale. Some scales, such as what they use at Weight Watchers are so sensitive, that they might detect a sip of water down to a tenth of an ounce. Mine, however, is not. Just a normal self calibrating digital. Numbers never lie and the ones that I was looking at were minus 2 pounds from where they were just a few hours before. Thirty two ounces of matter gone,... and I didn't need to ask where it went.

Next week I will embark on my own little scientific experiment to see if I can repeat the results. I'm very curious and I will keep you posted. More fish flavored paper please!