- It was thought that humans were unaware of the amount of energy in the food they ate, so they tended to eat the same amount of food by weight, regardless of energy density.
- However, new research has shown that humans may have more nutritional intelligence than expected.
- Studies have shown that in a real environment, people now limit what foods they eat according to the calories they contain.
In our daily lives, we are surrounded by well-proclaimed, palatable, energy-dense, high-fat foods that help people exceed their energy expenditure and contribute to weight gain and obesity.
So far, people
A new study by researchers at the University of Bristol suggests that humans unknowingly limit the size of their diet according to the caloric content of their food.
Researchers say this comes from the inherent nutritional wisdom and intelligence of people, or the ability of people to react to the nutritional components of the foods they are eating or planning to eat.
The study was published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition..
Talk to Today’s medical news, Dr. Jeff Branstrom, a professor of experimental psychology and one of the authors of the study, explained that the traditional way to look at eating behavior is to “take food and then manipulate food.” .. Later, he said, researchers usually add extra calories or protein to foods and examine participants’ reactions to see if there are any changes.
In the current research, researchers
The researchers also included “free life” participants in their study, who are participating in the Diet and Nutrition Survey of the British Parliament. They recorded all the food and drink that participants consumed in their diet diary for 7 days.
The researchers analyzed a total of 32,162 meals after excluding snacks (4 kcals / gm). Researchers recorded caloric content, grams, and energy density (kcal / gm) for all meals.
Researchers used a two-component model of diet size. They used volume as the main signal for low-energy foods and calorie content as the main signal for foods with higher energy densities.
Talk to MNT“As the diets became more energy dense, the caloric content of those diets actually began to decrease,” said Annika Flynn, Ph.D. researcher in nutrition and behavior, the lead author of the study. I explained.
According to Flynn, this means “people actually adjusted the amount of food they put on the plate according to the energy density of the diet they were trying to consume,” and the diet they were eating. It suggests that it is sensitive to the contents of.
Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect and not involved in the study, said: MNT:
“The impact on our understanding of appetite and nutrition is widespread. […] We may be fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of obesity. Instead of consuming calories unknowingly, perhaps there are several aspects of the modern food environment that force nutritionally wise individuals to consume too much food. “
“”[This study] It challenges the long-standing prevailing assumption that humans have a kind of primitive, hingeless desire for calories. Rather, we seem to have the ability to measure the calorie density of the food we consume and unknowingly assess how much we should eat. “
— Mark Shutzkar
When asked if overweight people would see the same behavior, Flynn said their dissertation did not take that scope into account.
However, Flynn states that he used mean-centric analysis to take into account individual differences.[..] Try to deal with the fact that larger people may eat larger meals than smaller ones. “
Research is still in its infancy. According to Flynn, the next step is to look at individual differences to see which groups of people and individuals have different levels of nutritional sensitivity.
This study deepens our understanding of nutritional intelligence and how it changes. But, according to Dr. Branstrom, “we’re just scratching the surface here.”
He said it might be helpful to refocus on the story of human “more complex interactions” with regard to calorie differentiation.
“”[We need to think about] This ability to distinguish calories is either innate, learned at the individual level, or formed as part of a collective form of learning that occurs within and across generations. mosquito, [forming] Is it part of our collective cooking or collective diet practice? “
— Dr. Jeff Branstrom
“All these questions are fascinating and you’ll probably want to investigate them in different ways,” Dr. Branstrom added.
The takeaway message of this study is that, at some level, humans may be able to self-adjust their calorie intake and naturally adjust the size of their diet to reduce the negative effects of overeating.
