Your weekly purchases may also include some foods that say that the food inside the packet will be very delicious, fresh for a long time good for your health. You may also find it written on some packets that this food will fill your stomach and you will not feel hungry again for a long time. But the question arises, can there really be food that suppresses our appetite?
Gary Frost, a dietitian at Imperial College London, said that although some experts say that eating certain food items, such as chilies and ginger, reduces our appetite, these experts' research often examines the effects of large amounts of food and this research is done on animals rather than humans. Gary Frost says the effects on humans have not yet been studied.
However, a study has come out in which it has been seen whether an item found in pepper (capsaicin) really reduces appetite. Capsaicin is the element that gives chilies a pungent taste. At the beginning of her rise research, Professor Mary Jon Lodi, a dietitian at Bowling and Green University, began to gradually increase the no. of peppers in her diet. When he felt that people living in his area could not eat more fast food, he expanded the scope of his research to see if eating capsaicin kills hunger.
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For this purpose, he called 25 people to his laboratory six times and gave them bowls of tomato soup to drink. After drinking the soup, these people stayed in the laboratory for four and a half hours to see how the soup affected their appetite and how their physical energy fluctuated during this time. After the scheduled time, they were given another meal that they were told to eat as much as they could
On the day one gram of chilies was added to their soup, and in the next four-and-a-half hours, they saw a reduction of 10 calories, meaning they consumed more energy. Those who ate chilies only once a month said that after drinking chili soup, they thought less about the next meal, meaning that their appetite decreased.
However, when they were given food, they ate 70 calories less than those who usually ate peppers three or more times a week. Professor Lodi repeated the same experiment by putting peppers in capsules instead of soup, but he saw that the participants of the experiment did not lose appetite, meaning that the peppers worked only when they were put in the soup.
According to him, one important thing comes out of this and that is that the peppers work only when we feel their sharpness or bitterness on our tongue.
Like Professor Lodi, 32 other experts have also done research and they also show that eating chillies or drinking green coffee does not always affect our appetite and only temporarily reduces our appetite.
Another thing in our diet that is said to kill hunger is coffee. Matthew Schubert, an assistant professor at California State University, reviewed this type of research to see if coffee actually contains something that reduces our appetite.
In some of these experiments, it has been seen that after drinking coffee, our stomach becomes empty quickly, and the food in the stomach goes to the small intestine, due to which some people lose their appetite.
Even if future research reveals the secret that coffee really suppresses our appetite, the maximum result will be that we will eat 100 or 200 calories less throughout the day, which is not a big deal.
In addition to certain food components, experts have also studied macronutrients and their effects on our appetite. For example, it is generally said that if we eat fiber or fiber food, our weight increases less. But Gary Frost says that this happens only when we continue to eat a lot of fiber continuously.
"It is said that we should eat 30 grams of fiber daily, but in the UK, most people eat 15 hot fiber. Even if you increase the amount of fibrous ingredients in your diet to 30 grams daily, it can still have temporary effects on your appetite, but this effect will disappear after some time. ‘
Research has also shown that eating high amounts of protein also reduces appetite, but this has been revealed in very small-scale experiments.
Many experiments have also tried to find out what the macronutrients that you think your stomach is full after eating, but no clear results have been seen. "The results suggest that proteins are more likely to satisfy you, but they're not that clear and usually have very little effect, and it's difficult to compare different types of macronutrients," said Yann Cornell, a marketing professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada. ‘
Martin Kohlmeier, a professor at the University of North Carolina, says, "Instead of looking at specific types of food to reduce our hunger, we should make sure that we are drinking enough water or not because water stops our appetite for a while." ‘
Research has also shown that people who drink two glasses of water before eating eat less.
But Gary Frost says, "Any changes in our appetite on a physical level will be small and lasting because it does not physically realize that there will be any food that will force us to eat less." ‘
"It's only recently that in Western society, we've started overeating," he says. Throughout human evolution, we lived with very little food, and this food was available in installments. Our body is such that it is attracted to food. ‘
"If there's a food ingredient that suppresses hunger, you have to avoid it altogether to survive." ‘
According to Kohlmeyer, another reason for this is that no food item can suppress our appetite for long, because our body is naturally made so that it tries to maintain its weight.
"We have a system in our body that protects our weight. From an evolutionary point of view, the greatest threat to humanity was starvation, not only because starvation can kill you, but also because hunger weakens the body and makes you more prone to infectious diseases. ‘
Kohlmeyer adds, "The system of the body that monitors how much food we eat is one of the most complex systems within our body. ‘
"If you consider your body to be a large machine, in which a lot of things (different food) can be inserted from the outside, it means that in addition to food, this machine also needs plenty of water, macronutrients, and micronutrients. ‘
Thus, there are many of these nutrients or ingredients, whose amount, if reduced in the body, makes us feel hungry.
"Our food is actually a whole system that we have to maintain continuously. How can a person know what my body needs at this time and in what food will I get this? The hunger systems in our body are very complex in nature. ‘
"The best way to deal with hunger is to eat a balanced diet so that our body encourages us to eat more to make up for the lack of something special," Kohlmeyer said.
The problem here is how our psychology affects our appetite. This is a topic that has been the focus of experts for decades. A research article published in 1987 said that seeing and smelling food sends a message to our body that it is ready to digest this food.
According to the article, if we expect that this food will end our hunger, then it has a huge effect on our appetite.
Professor Yann Cornell says that our beliefs, our expectations of food, and our (old) memories are the things that have a great impact on our site. This means that if we think we've already eaten a lot, we'll eat less of the food in front of us, and if we think we haven't eaten anything (too late), we'll eat more.
A study has also seen that if it is written on our food packet that it will fill your stomach, then we will eat that food in small quantities and if it is written on it that it is a 'light' food, then we will eat that food more.
Your weekly purchases may contain food that doesn't make you hungry for long, but there's probably only one way to deal with our body's evolutionary process and that's to use a balanced diet that contains the ingredients and water your body needs.
You can neither deceive nature nor tolerate hunger for long, but what you can do is not try to accumulate too many calories in your body to make up for the lack of special ingredients.