- Humans were thought to be unaware of the energy content of the food they ate, and thus were thought to have a tendency to eat the same amount of food by weight, regardless of its energy density.
- However, a new study finds that humans may be more nutritionally intelligent than previously thought.
- Research shows that in a real-world setting, people have reached a point where they limit the foods they eat according to the calories contains.
In everyday life, we are surrounded by well-promoted, energy-dense, high-fat foods, making it easy for people to exceed their energy expenditure. contributing to weight gain and obesity.
Until now, it has been generally accepted that people possess a Will Overeating high-energy or high-calorie foods, consuming them in the same way as low-energy or low-calorie foods.
A new study from researchers at the University of Bristol suggests that humans unconsciously limit the size of their meals according to the caloric content of the meal.
This, the researchers say, stems from the inherent nutritional wisdom or nutritional intelligence, or people’s ability to respond to the nutritional content of foods they eat or plan to eat.
The study was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
speaking to medical news today, Dr. Jeff Brunstrom, a professor of experimental psychology and one of the study’s authors, explained that the traditional way of looking at dietary behavior is to “take food and then manipulate it.” He said that researchers usually add extra calories or protein to the meal and study the participant’s response to see if there is any change.
In the current study, the researchers study participants’ responses to meals consumed in a controlled environment. They monitored and recorded the meals of 20 healthy adults who lived in a metabolic hospital ward for 4 weeks.
The researchers also included “free-living” participants who took part in the UK’s National Diet and Nutrition Survey in their study. They recorded all the foods and drinks that the participants consumed through a diet diary for 7 days.
In total, the researchers analyzed 32,162 meals after excluding snacks (4 kcal/g). The researchers recorded the caloric content, grams, and energy density (kcal/gm) of all meals.
The researchers used a two-component model of meal size. They used volume as the main cue for energy-poor foods and caloric content as the main cue for more energy-dense foods.
speaking to MNTthe lead author of the study Annika Flynnone Ph.D. researcher in nutrition and behavior described a “tipping point” where “as meals became more energy-dense, the caloric content of those meals actually began to decrease.”
According to Flynn, this means that “people actually adjusted the amount of food they put on their plate in response to the energy density of the food they were about to consume,” suggesting that people have sensitivity to the content of foods they eat. They were eating.
brand schatzkerauthor of “The Doritos effect” and who was not involved in the study, said MNT:
“The implications for our understanding of appetite and nutrition are far-reaching. […] we may be fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of obesity. Rather than mindlessly consuming calories, perhaps there is some aspect of the modern food environment that forces nutritionally intelligent people to consume too much food.”
“[This study] it challenges an entrenched and pervasive assumption that humans possess a kind of primitive, unhinged lust for calories. It seems, rather, that we have a built-in ability to measure the caloric density of foods as we consume them and subconsciously assess how much we should eat.”
—Mark Schatzker
When asked if he would expect to see the same behavior in overweight people, Flynn said his paper didn’t take that scope into account.
However, Flynn said they accounted for individual variation by using mean-centered analysis to “[..] it tries to address the fact that a bigger person can eat a bigger meal than a smaller person.”
The study is still in its early stages. The next steps, according to Flynn, are to study individual variations, to see which groups of people and individuals show different degrees of nutritional sensitivity.
The research adds to our understanding of nutritional intelligence and how it changes; however, according to Dr. Brunstrom, “we are only scratching the surface here.”
He said that refocusing the narrative around “a more complex interaction” that humans have with regard to calorie differentiation could be helpful.
“[We need to think about] where does this ability to discriminate calories come from: is it something innate, is it something that is learned on a personal level or is it something that is formed as part of a collective form of learning that occurs within and between generations, [forming] part of our collective kitchen or collective food practice?
— Dr. Jeff Brunstrom
“These are all fascinating questions, and we’ll probably want to explore them in different ways,” added Dr. Brunstrom.
The take-home message from this study is that, at some level, humans can self-regulate their caloric intake and naturally adjust meal sizes to reduce the negative effects of overeating.
