obesity (Page 25)

When you’re dieting, the natural thing to do is to reach for a diet soda, but this may actually prevent you from losing weight, because it confuses the body’s natural ability to count calories based on sweetness.

Since the body doesn’t register artificial sweeteners the same way it does sugar or fructose (the sugar in fruit), it doesn’t realize that food has been ingested and it still feels hunger. Since many diet foods do have calories, despite having no sugar, they can cause you to crave more food than you normally would because you never feel full. And while diet sodas have no calories, drinking lots of them may disrupt the body?s ability to regulate the intake of other food.
read more

People on low-carb diets find they miss potatoes the most. Now it may again be possible to eat a steamy bowl of mashing potatoes loaded with butter or gravy, or a huge baked potato with “the works,” since horticulturists have invented a low-carb potato.

“Consumers are going to love the flavor and appearance of this potato and the fact that it has 30 percent fewer carbohydrates compared to a standard Russet baking potato,” says Chad Hutchinson. “The potato doesn’t look or taste like anything that’s now on the market, and it’s not a genetically engineered crop.”
read more

Scientists have found that if you’re offered a variety of different foods, you’ll eat more. Researcher Brian Wansink found that people offered M&Ms or jelly beans will eat more if they’re offered many different colors, even if they all taste the same. People who were offered 10 colors of M&Ms ate 43% more than people offered seven colors. Another of his inventions is the refillable soup bowl. He found that with this bowl, women ate 30% more soup and men ate 40% more. When he gave people different sized buckets of stale popcorn, the people with the largest buckets ate 31% more even though he says it “tasted terrible.”
read more

The smell of good food coming from the kitchen always makes us hungry, but scientists now say these smells can actually make us eat less. Dr. Alan Hirsch, who has invented fragrance crystals to sprinkle on food, says the smell “fools your brain into thinking you’ve eaten more and thus you eat less. You can eat whatever you want to eat. You eat whatever you normally would eat. You’ll feel full faster, you’ll eat less.”

Dieter Donella Banks says, “I was actually shocked because I’ve been trying to lose weight?ever since I was in high school?so when I started losing weight, I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes you don’t even get to finish the entire meal. It’s not by choice, you know. Once you sprinkle and then you start eating, then you’re full.”
read more