Herbs and Spices, Not Flavour Enhancers

Picture the scene. You decide to eat better. You buy fresh vegetables, fry them up, add a little salt — and then you sit there and it tastes like… well. Like steamed obligation. Two hours later you reach for a bag of crisps, and that hits instantly — no effort, and it tastes of everything at once.

Most people draw one conclusion from this: "healthy food just doesn't taste good." Wrong. What's happening here has nothing to do with the vegetables. First, we in the West have largely lost the ancient craft of seasoning — the know-how people used for thousands of years to turn plain ingredients into something that tastes incredible. And second, the food industry has spent years training your palate on a flavour profile that barely exists in nature — one built, on purpose, to make you eat more.

How I first noticed this

When I started taking my nutrition seriously in my early twenties and cooking for myself, one question kept nagging at me: why does the food at a good Asian place taste so incredible — and the stuff I make at home taste of almost nothing? I fried my vegetables, I tried hard, and something was always missing that I couldn't name.

There were two answers, and both changed how I think about food.

The first: the cheap takeaway around the corner often leaned on MSG — a flavour enhancer that gives the brain a savoury, almost meaty fullness (chefs call that taste umami). A shortcut. A signal.

The second answer is the interesting one. Walk into a genuinely good traditional kitchen — a real Chinese, Thai, Indian or Persian one, an unpretentious Italian trattoria — and the food is built from an astonishing range of herbs and spices, layer on layer. And here's what took me years to grasp: nearly every one of those spices and herbs carries, alongside its flavour, an actual effect in the body. That's where the two roads split.

MSG isn't your enemy — but it isn't your friend either

A lot of people tell themselves a story about this that simply isn't true — so let's set it straight. MSG is not poison. It's a naturally occurring substance — it's in tomatoes, in parmesan, in mushrooms, in human breast milk. The famous "Chinese restaurant syndrome" — the claim that MSG gives you headaches and a racing heart — traces back to a single letter to a journal in 1968 that later turned out to be a hoax. Controlled studies never managed to pin the effect down, and food safety authorities classify MSG as safe.

There's a distinction that tends to get lost here, and it matters: a flavour enhancer never acts on its own. It's one building block — what actually matters is what it's built into: the ultra-processed food, assembled from fat, sugar, salt, starch and amplified flavour so that you struggle to put down what you've started. And that this whole build drives you to eat past hunger is about as cleanly demonstrated as nutrition science gets.

A team led by Kevin Hall at the US National Institutes of Health had people live in a clinic for four weeks, feeding them an ultra-processed diet for two weeks and an unprocessed diet for two weeks — matched for calories, sugar, fat, salt, fibre and macronutrients. People could eat as much as they liked. On the ultra-processed food they ate about 500 calories a day more, without trying, and gained weight — on the same nutrition, just unprocessed, they ate less and lost weight.

There's a name for what makes these foods so easy to overeat: hyper-palatable. Food engineering combines fat, salt, sugar and starch in ratios that almost never occur in real food — the so-called bliss point, the peak of reward. An analysis of the US food database found that more than 60% of the products there fit that pattern. Flavour enhancers are one tool in exactly this kit: they lift the reward signal without putting more substance behind it. No study isolates how much any single enhancer contributes — what's proven is the effect of the whole build. The enhancer raises the reward signal inside it; it isn't the lone culprit.

This is where it loops back to evolution. Our reward system is built to seek out energy-dense, salty food — in a world where that was rare and kept you alive. Industry reverse-engineered that ancient system and now feeds it on a loop. The signal that once led us toward nutrient-rich food now misfires: it leads to the bag, where very little of value is left.

The other road: seasoning that works

Now for the flip side, the part that fascinated me back then. The herbs and spices of traditional kitchens aren't only flavour carriers. Botanically they sit among the richest sources of plant compounds we have. In a large analysis of more than 3,100 foods, spices and herbs ranked right at the top for measured antioxidant density — with over a thousand-fold differences between individual spices.

Let's look at a few of the classics — and I'll keep a clean line between what's actually proven and what's tradition.

Turmeric and ginger — the inflammation calmers

Yellow turmeric, with its active compound curcumin, is the most-studied kitchen spice there is. Across many controlled trials it measurably lowers inflammatory markers in the blood. Ginger, its sharp cousin, points the same way and is also one of the few home remedies with genuinely solid evidence against nausea.

Coriander and the detox question — here it gets interesting

You'll often hear that coriander (cilantro) helps "flush" heavy metals out of the body. This is exactly the kind of claim I look at twice — because it sounds good and gets repeated everywhere. The clear read: there are signals in the test tube and in animals, but in humans there's no solid proof.

Savory — the story that says it all

My favourite example comes from my own kitchen, and it took me forever to work out. I tolerated beans far better when my mother cooked them than when I cooked them myself. One day I asked her why. Her answer, completely matter-of-fact: "Well, when you cook beans you put savory in. Then you can digest them." In German the herb is even called Bohnenkraut — literally "bean herb."

So I looked it up — and there's something to that old kitchen rule. Beans cause gas because they contain certain complex sugars (the raffinose family) that we lack the enzyme to break down. They travel undigested into the large intestine, where bacteria ferment them — hence the gas. Savory has been used for centuries as exactly that: a digestive companion to pulses.

Worth noting: the biggest lever against the gas is still proper soaking and thorough cooking (a pressure cooker in particular breaks down a good share of those sugars). The savory is the traditional partner on top — and it tastes wonderful with them. But the real point is something else entirely: here was knowledge passed down across generations that I had nearly lost. My mother still had it. I had to learn it again.

The cultural amnesia — and what it costs us

That's the pattern. For thousands of years people were remarkably skilled at preparing food so it tasted superb — and from experience they knew that certain herbs and spices also do something. In Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese cooking, seasoning is to this day half flavour, half application: some things are meant to warm you in winter, some to cool you in summer, some to wake up digestion.

Those last claims are traditional systems, not biomedical proof — I'm not selling them to you as trial data. But they reflect an attitude we've largely lost in the West: food as something you understand and shape, rather than just consume.

We barely hold that knowledge any more. Traditional cooking lore gets passed on less often — there's no time, the link between generations frays, and in the end you reach for the ready-made thing that "just works." That's understandable. But it has a price: grow up on the hyper-palatable profile and your expectation of flavour shifts. Real vegetables then taste "of nothing" — and not because they have nothing to give, but because the yardstick has shifted.

Variety on the plate — and in your gut

There's one more reason the spice drawer earns its keep, and it concerns your microbiome — the community of trillions of bacteria in your gut. A rule of thumb from the research: the more different plants land on your plate each week, the more diverse your gut flora. And the lovely part: herbs and spices count as plants. Every fresh herb, every kind of spice is a point on the board.

And spices specifically play a part here too — a trial shows it. In a controlled feeding study, deliberately adding herbs and spices over four weeks shifted the make-up of the gut flora — with more of the bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids (helpful by-products that the cells lining the gut feed on).

How I season — and what's in our recipes

Enough theory. Here's how it looks day to day at ThriveZone: we build flavour in layers rather than pulling it from a sachet. Aromatics as the base (onion, garlic, ginger), then the herbs and spices that set the profile, then something fresh and a hit of acidity at the end. Look through our ThriveZone Meals and you'll find that same principle:

• Ginger & garlic carry the Asian dishes — the Asian veg pan with salmon, the bone-broth soup, the chicken satay salad.
• Turmeric, cumin & coriander give the chicken & chickpea tagine its depth — and run through the chicken bone-broth soup.
• Oregano & Mediterranean herbs shape the Mediterranean line: roast vegetables with chicken legs, Mediterranean lentil salad.
• Cinnamon rounds out the sweet anchors — protein pancakes, overnight oats, the nut & seed mix.

Your starter spices — what belongs in every kitchen

Build a small core collection and you get surprisingly far. Here are the ones I'd call essential — each with the reason why:

One practical tip that makes the biggest difference: buy spices in small amounts and actually use them. Aroma fades — a two-year-old jar at the back of the cupboard tastes of little. Fresh and often beats big and old.