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Show Notes for Podcast 27: Eat It Again! How Repetition Rewires Your Taste

Welcome to the CarbSmart Podcast, where your decision to embrace low-carb nutrition becomes a fun and delicious lifestyle. I’m your host, Dana Carpender, here to guide you through the ins and outs of everything low-carb. If you’ve just recently gone low-carb, say as a New Year’s resolution, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer difference from your old diet.

Faux-tatoes instead of mashed potatoes. Lunches that don’t include sandwiches, heavy cream and flavored stevia in your coffee instead of creamer. I am here to cheer you on and give you good reason to stick it out. A reason that doesn’t have to do with the scale or your health.

Keep listening.

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Every taste is an acquired taste

Many years ago, when my sister was a private school teacher, her pay was painfully low. She had to scramble each spring to find a summer job. For a few years, she worked for a company that brought over French foreign exchange students. She had to find them host families, and then during the week, she drove them around the San Diego area in a van, showing them the sites and giving them a taste of American culture.

Speaking of taste, every single French teenager she worked with simply adored liver pate, but found peanut butter revolting. From this, it becomes clear every taste is an acquired taste. If you’re just starting your low-carb journey, you may find that some things taste…funny. Not bad, just different from what you’re used to, different from what you grew up on. Please remember that all tastes are acquired tastes.

Do you know how old I am?
“How old are you?” I hear you cry. I’m so old. That I walked home for lunch every day. Through elementary school, mom largely relied on simple stuff for our lunches, canned soup, frozen pot pies, or macaroni and cheese, or frozen pizza and wagon wheel shaped noodles with jarred spaghetti sauce and Parmesan.

The jarred sauce she used back in the 1960s was Ragu Old World Style. I don’t know if the recipe has changed over the past 50 odd years, but it currently contains tomato puree, which is water and tomato paste, salt, olive oil, sugar, dehydrated onions, dehydrated garlic spices, garlic powder, onion powder.

That was the jarred spaghetti sauce of my childhood, and I often had it at lunch. My mother did make awesome homemade spaghetti sauce for family dinners. I wish I had that recipe.

Then at 19, I quit sugar and white flour. I started eating whole wheat noodles and I switched over to a jarred sauce that had no sugar.

It tasted… funny. Not bad, mind you, I was willing to eat it. It just tasted different. It wasn’t what I’d grown up on, but I wasn’t going back to eating sauce with sugar and it, so I stuck with it. Pretty soon, that sauce was what my taste buds expected, and it tasted great. A few years later, I was at my mom’s house. She was serving pasta and for some reason hadn’t made her amazing homemade spaghetti sauce, so she was using Ragu Old World Style. It tasted funny, bland and sickly sweet. It was hard to believe that I had ever liked it so much.

Around the same time, a few years into being sugar and white flour-free, I stopped into a corner bodega in Chicago at the checkout was one of those racks you see at checkouts everywhere loaded with snack cakes. As a sugar addicted kid, I was a sucker for anything chocolate and cream filled. Hostess cupcakes, Ho-Hos, Twinkies, any of it. I thought, let’s see how I feel now. I bought, I forget, one of those things. I took one bite, the rest hit the trash can. Outside my tastes had changed so much. I found it not only tasted just funny, but downright nasty.

Remember that all tastes are acquired tastes

This doesn’t mean that you can learn to like everything. I, by way of example, dislike bananas. I have always disliked bananas. I disliked the flavor, the smell, the texture, all of it. I certainly tried bananas in my childhood, tried and even made banana bread as a gift, as an adult. If I were going to acquire a taste for bananas, I would’ve done so by now. I just don’t like them seeing as there are about 28 grams of carb a piece. It’s just as well.

But if, say, you’ve always breaded and fried pork chops, but have wisely eschewed breadcrumbs. The chances are excellent that you can find other ways to cook pork chops that you’ll like just as much.

They’ll taste funny at first, until they don’t, and you’ll have acquired a new taste. If you’ve been addicted to caramel macchiato, 35 grams of carb, 33 of them sugar according to the Starbucks website. Consider coffee with sugar free vanilla and caramel syrups. Da Vinci Gourmet, Torani and Monin. All make excellent sugar-free coffee, flavoring, syrups, and heavy cream – two grams of carb. It will taste funny at first, not what you’re used to, but how could it taste bad? In a week or two, you’ll have acquired a new taste. Just remember that different, doesn’t mean bad when something tastes unfamiliar, but pretty good. Forge ahead.

Indeed. I encourage you to try one or two new low-carb recipes each week. Pretty soon you’ll have a whole repertoire of favorite low-carb recipes, main dishes, side dishes, quick and easy stuff, slow cooker recipes, holiday recipes.

Obviously, I would love it if you bought my cookbooks, but there are other low-carb cookbooks out there, although, do be careful. I have seen cookbooks labeled low-carb that included all kinds of carbie junk.

Plus there’s always your neighborhood library and the internet, so go thou forth and acquire new tastes.

Have you started acquiring new tastes?

I encourage you to do so rather than using low-carb breads and such to make your low-carb diet resemble your old diet. Those can be useful. Bridge foods helping you to find a new normal, but not only are they, yes, processed foods often overpriced and sometimes deceptively labeled.

Listen to my next podcast, re total versus net carbs. But these are also reinforcing the idea that a carb-centered diet is normal and desirable, something you’re going to miss forever.

Episode 27 Recipe: Low-Carb Cocoa-Peanut Porkies

Speaking of which this week’s recipe is for Cocoa Peanut Porkies from my cookbook 500 Ketogenic Recipes, a super simple cookie bar that draws raves from everyone who tries it. It’s been posted at CarbSmart.com in the past (with video), but that recipe called for Nevada Manna Sugar-free chocolate chips now long gone. I have had to adjust the recipe to use Lilly’s sugar free chocolate chips. If you love chocolate and peanut butter, and unless you’re one of those French teenagers, my sister worked with you, probably do. You have got to try these.

Go to https://www.carbsmart.com/podcast27recipe.

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Low-Carb Cocoa-Peanut Porkies Recipe – Updated for 2025

The idea for these came from my childhood – my mother used to make Cocoa-Peanut Logs, a recipe on the back of the Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies box. I had been using sugar-free chocolate chips to make chocolate chip cookies, of course. I don’t recall how the idea of using them this way came to me. I do remember that the first time I tried this, I thought, "Dana, you have gone right 'round the bend, making pork rind cookies." Hah. They're fantastic. I have gotten more glowing feedback on this recipe than on almost any other. Try them. Really.