Are some foods really capable of reducing appetite?

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Your weekly shopping probably includes products with packaging promising that the food tastes great, stays fresh, and is good for your health. And you can also find products that claim to keep you fuller for longer.

But is it really possible for a food to reduce our appetite?

There is research that indicates that consumption of some foods, such as pepper and ginger, can make us feel less hungry later on. But these studies often use large amounts of food and test the effects on animals, according to Gary Frost, head of the Imperial Food and Nutrition Network at Imperial College London. He claims that these effects have not yet been translated to humans.

But one study looked at the properties of a substance in chili peppers – capsaicin (the active ingredient that gives the spice spiciness) – in curbing our appetite, using amounts closer to the average human diet.

Burning 10 more calories after a spicy meal is too little and will not have any long-term effects. Frost points out that studies like this one, which demonstrate short-term effects on appetite, have failed to demonstrate lasting effects.

In this regard, an analysis of 32 studies concluded that there is no consistent evidence that chili peppers and green tea can reduce people’s appetite.

The effects are small

There is another common item in our diet that is often associated with reduced appetite: coffee. Professor Matthew Schubert, from the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, USA, analyzed the research that has already been carried out to discover that there could be something in coffee that could suppress our appetite.

In some studies, drinking coffee slightly increased the speed of gastric emptying – the time it takes for a meal to leave the stomach and reach the small intestine, which is associated with increased hunger. But no studies have demonstrated any specific physiological facts that could reduce appetite.

Schubert adds that even if future research does discover a way in which coffee reduces our appetite, that effect will likely represent consuming 100 or 200 fewer calories a day, which is not significant.

In addition to specific ingredients, researchers have been looking at macronutrients and how they can influence our appetite.

Fiber is known to make us feel fuller for longer. Population studies indicate that fiber consumption reduces weight gain — but only when really high amounts of fiber are consumed, according to Frost.

“The recommendation is to consume 30g of dietary fiber a day, but most people in the UK consume around 15g. If you increase that to 30g, there will be an effect [sobre o apetite]but it decreases over time,” he explains.

Eating more protein has also been shown to reduce appetite, but this was a very small study. And a lot of research has tried to find out which macronutrients make us feel fuller, but no clear answer has been reached.

“The conclusions seem to indicate that proteins are more likely to satisfy hunger, but they are not so clear and, usually, the effects are tiny, which makes it difficult to compare different types of macronutrients”, explains Yann Cornil, professor of marketing and behavioral science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Instead of looking for specific foods to curb our appetite, we should make sure we drink plenty of water, which quickly stops our appetite, says Martin Kohlmeier, a professor of nutrition at the Gillings College of Global Public Health in North Carolina. Research has indicated that people who drink two glasses of water before meals end up eating less.

Eating more protein has also been shown to reduce appetite, but this was a very small study. And a lot of research has tried to find out which macronutrients make us feel fuller, but no clear answer has been reached.

“The conclusions seem to indicate that proteins are more likely to satisfy hunger, but they are not so clear and, usually, the effects are tiny, which makes it difficult to compare different types of macronutrients”, explains Yann Cornil, professor of marketing and behavioral science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Instead of looking for specific foods to curb our appetite, we should make sure we drink plenty of water, which quickly stops our appetite, says Martin Kohlmeier, a professor of nutrition at the Gillings College of Global Public Health in North Carolina. Research has indicated that people who drink two glasses of water before meals end up eating less.

Kohlmeier adds that the system used to regulate how much we consume is one of the most complex in the body.

“If you think of the body as a big machine, with all the different external components that we need to ingest, you need to have enough water, macronutrients and micronutrients, as well as knowing what we can’t eat,” he says.

And there are several nutrients that will appeal to our appetite if we are deficient in them.

“It’s a whole system that you have to constantly relate and rebuild,” according to Kohlmeier. “How would anyone know what they need and what’s in what foods? There are important and very powerful systems at work to drive appetite.”

Therefore, the best way to manage appetite is to have a balanced diet, so that the body is not forced to eat more to compensate for possible deficiencies, according to the professor.

The problem here is how our appetite can be psychologically influenced, which has been catching the attention of researchers for decades.

A 1987 study explained that seeing and smelling food sends signals to the body to prepare to digest it. And, according to the study, food has a greater effect on appetite when we expect it to make us feel full.

Hunger is governed by beliefs, expectations and memory, according to Cornil, mainly by how much you remember eating. That is, we eat less after a meal that is, in our perception, larger than when we eat what we believe to be a smaller portion.

A study has shown that defining a meal as “satisfactory” influences us to eat less, compared to the same meal if it is considered “light”.

On your weekly trip to the supermarket, you can bring food that promises to keep you fed longer, but it seems like there’s only one way to reconcile your body’s evolutionary processes: eat a balanced diet that contains all nutrients and water. what do you need.

You can’t fool nature and eliminate hunger for a long time, but you can try to keep your body from looking for more calories to compensate for possible nutritional deficiencies.

read the original version of this report on the website BBC Future.

This text was originally published here

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