Is the occasional craving for simmered hijiki a sign that my body needs minerals?

Introduction

I often wonder. Perhaps the body is equipped with a mechanism where various parts of the body communicate with the brain's center to maintain homeostasis, signaling when certain nutrients or elements are running low. There is no scientific basis for this. I imagined this while thinking about a menu at home, much like the speech bubbles drawn by manga artist Yu Takita.

Today is about that.

(The title photo is of kiwi flowers I was growing)

Things I crave

I often find myself wanting to eat fish. I suspect that components obtained from fish, such as docosapentaenoic acid (DPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), are in short supply in my body. It might be natural to seek out the nutrients the body craves. But when I start thinking about that mechanism, I find it truly mysterious.

I am not well-versed in this and haven't verified it thoroughly, but there are many nutrients necessary for building a healthy body. The mechanism for craving specific nutrients through specific foods has likely not been elucidated. It is fascinating when you think about it. I occasionally crave simmered hijiki. This comes on suddenly. Indeed, hijiki is rich in minerals like calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc, as well as iodine.

I usually have a bag of dried hijiki in a corner as part of my rolling stock, so when the urge strikes, I immediately start soaking it in water.

Let's make and eat it

This simmered hijiki is actually very easy to make. If you soak it in plenty of water for about 15 minutes, it expands many times over in no time. I combine it with whatever root vegetables happen to be rolling around in the kitchen, such as carrots or lotus root, or dried daikon, as well as chopped fried tofu or boiled soybeans. I add one or two things I have on hand depending on the occasion. I usually have something.

I suspect that, unconsciously, the nutrients and dietary fiber from the vegetables I combine it with are also things I am lacking on a daily basis. The fact that they taste delicious when I eat them is likely proof of that deficiency. When I think about it, I wonder why we find things "delicious" when we are lacking them.

Mechanism of information transmission

A mechanism to communicate what is lacking. And I wonder if it exists for each individual nutrient. This is very similar to checking inventory or identifying best-selling products at a convenience store. Perhaps it is not such a complex mechanism. It feels like something I might eventually discover and think, "Oh, so that's how it is."

If we could elucidate the mechanism, we might be able to provide effective nutritional support for patients, and it seems like it could have ripple effects and benefits in various fields. Wait, I could have used this for a research grant application. I wonder if it was a waste to reveal it here like this.

There seem to be many things in our daily lives that we still don't understand, or that we think we understand but don't really. That is why it might be important to be careful and sensitive to the casual moments of everyday life. I think I'll talk to my students about this next time.

Coming up with a theme

Setting a scientific theme and actually executing it seems easy, but it is not quite so. If it cannot be undertaken in this age of advanced science and technology, it is because it contains inherent difficulties. It might just be that it has remained until now. In a world where billions of people live, someone must have thought of and tried to do most things.

How many of them are scientists? And how many of them would show interest in that field? Most people would probably just let the thought pass by even if it crossed their minds. Only a very small number would persist and stay with it. Even with so many people living here, that is what it ultimately comes down to.

Conclusion

I reason based on the mechanisms we currently understand, build a path and hypothesis to elucidate the unknown parts, and then turn that into observations and experiments to get started. Can I devote that much energy to it? Will my interest as a scientific subject be sustained? And can it be linked to some kind of value? That might be hard to achieve with interest alone.

Conversely, scientific inquiry might just begin with the simple curiosity or interest of an individual. I thought about this while eating some well-simmered hijiki.

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