Study: Blended food prevented hunger for longer | Hacker News Reader

Study: Blended food prevented hunger for longer

theatlantic.com

76 pointsborisjabes62 comments

My own experience is that I can get the same satiety for the same duration with somewhat less food by taking smaller bites and spending more time chewing. This takes longer, of course, so my assumption was that the mechanism was simply that I would have eaten less by the time my blood sugar rose and turned off my hunger.

But I suppose it's also possible that I'm making the solids and liquids harder to gravitationally separate--essentially blending a smoothie with my teeth.

If so, just taking your time and enjoying the flavor of the food could be a more convenient and appetizing alternative to a chicken-broccoli smoothie.

Totally this. That's the problem I have with this trend for liquid food: you're eating food without chewing, and chewing is an essential part of the eating process as it gets saliva flowing, it exercises your jaw and sends signals to your digestive system to prepare.

And besides, texture is as much a part of food as taste and how it looks.

Any starches (complex sugars) in food are usually first broken down by saliva in the mouth while chewing. The enzyme amylase in saliva breaks starches into simpler sugars.

Drinking food likely reduces the amylase content of the bolus (dose of food entering stomach) and should consequently slow the digestion of starches and sugars in that food.

The pancreas secretes another form of amylase, so starches would eventually be digested anyway, just not as quickly. So your stomach would hold food longer and your pancreas would have to work a bit more.

Not a bad thing: I often eat only because "my stomach feels empty". Perhaps this would reduce that feeling.

"Amylase":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amylase

"Role of Amylase":

http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/role-amylase-8526.html

I remember reading somewhere that the signal from the stomach to the brain telling you are full takes 20 minutes so if you eat slower you eat less food in that period when you are full but don't know it yet

And interestingly, drinking is the opposite - consuming liquid kills thirst immediately, and it won't come back for ~20 minutes even if you still need hydration.

Both systems make sense, since you can hydrate in ~60 seconds but might need to stay hungry for ~10 minutes after you start eating. But they can both cause problems: hunger by prompting fast eaters to overeat, and thirst by letting dehydrating things like liquor satiate you.

This is exactly what I thought. The solution isn't to buy a blender, but to chew your food properly.

Along with the delayed reaction to feeling full, am sure I read somewhere that chewing longer triggers the brain into thinking you've eaten more as well.

I'm very guilty of not chewing very thoroughly, and it causes me all kinds of digestive ails... But when I chew more than three times my JAW starts to get sore. How can I fix this!

That sounds like a lack-of-exercise problem, which means just keep at it.

Maybe you should ask your doctor or dentist to evaluate you for TMJ?

Why does the article assume its healthier simply because it prevents hunger longer? Granted, people might eat less overall but that doesnt guarantee its healthier.

I think that's because two of the most important problems with food are quality and quantity that people eat. I'm general terms we eata lot of bad food, so if you have the same meal (so same quality) eating less (or only what your body needs and no more) that should be healthier.

I think I get your point though and eating well is a lot more that eating good food in adequate portions, and I agree, but for the general population over eating and junk food are the worst problems right now imho.

Is there even any evidence that eating less this way leads to smaller nutrient absorption by the body? This article does not seem to have any.

Relatively speaking, eating healthy is much easier than eating less. Anybody with enough will can eat healthy -it's quite sustainable. However, Over long periods of time, Eating fewer calories is a much larger challenge, that's why satiety research is of such enormous importance. For overweight people, There are many biological forces that force people to eat more than they need.

Khichdi (and other forms - Bisi Bele Bath, Sambar sadam etc.) is a recipe of rice, lentils and vegetables eaten by a lot of manual laborers (and babies) in India. Perhaps due to the same reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khichdi

And in poorer times, rice was eaten as Congee. With increasing wealth, this healthy food is now rarely served in homes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congee

I think the issue with these is that they're very carb-rich.

I've bought one of the Nutri-bullet type blenders and quite enjoy home-made smoothies; I eat far more fruit and veg than I'd have ordinarily.

do you cook the vegetables? or are they blended raw?

I like to blend raw spinach + raw kale + banana + apple + peanut/almond butter.

Delicious.

If you're new to green smoothies I'd suggest:

1 cup raw spinach + 1 green apple + 1 banana + 1 tbsp almond/coconut/peanut butter.

You won't even taste the spinach, I promise.

Usually raw. I sometimes steam kale and always blanch broccoli.

Lentils are high protein so it should be a good complete meal.

What's wrong with carbs anyways, hype now is that refined sugar are bad nowadays, which seems closer to the truth.

Carbs are just more complex sugars than what we usually refer to as dietary sugar. I think the real problem is refined carbs and refined sugars, at least in my own anecdotal experience.

I don't seem to experience the same effect from eating processed carbs like pasta vs rice or potatoes.

Agreed, processed bad. Guess that's why the comment on lentil and rice seemed odd to me, it's pretty great.

Rice is way better than processed carbs, no question. I was referring to the parent's point about these meals in India -- the sheer amount of rice in the typical serving size there is okay if one was really physically active (say a farm laborer), but it's completely inappropriate for desk workers these days.

Note: white rice is actually pretty processed as well. You'd be better off sticking to brown rice (less processed, more fiber, lower glycemic index).

I have reactive hypoglycaemia, and potatoes are literally one of the worst things I can eat. I didn't realise why until I looked it up - they have a glycemic index comparable to that of table sugar!

For pasta, the glycemic index varies depending on how you cook it; al dente is better than overcooked.

In unrelated news: chewing also increases satiety.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26188140

Putting together several ideas in this article, it should be possible to drink a small amount of calorifically dense liquid that's heavier than and doesn't mix well with water, and then a lot of water, to quickly kill off hunger.

Might be useful to stop binging before a meal out.

Not endorsing in anyway just had heard a similar concept before although it's based on different reasons...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet

it reads like another fad diet with a magical "newly discovered science" (with no studies) backing.

The safety is trivial, the cost is minuscule. The worst thing the critics say about it is that "it wasn't peer reviewed or done in a big study". Indeed, it wasn't - but asking for it in this case is simply cargo cult.

Most diets, whether tested in a large scale study or a small one, don't work equally well (if at all) on all participants - you'll notice that more often than not the only thing reported is the average weight loss, and that's usually because at least one participant didn't lose anything (or even gained).

The Shangri-La diet actually followed from experimental results in rats and people, which Roberts published, for free, on his own website[0], with all rationale, all the references you can ask for, and a description of his personal experience. This paper became very popular, but is too detailed for most people, that a publisher approached Roberts with a request to write a simplified version for lay people, and it is this book version that became an NYTimes best seller.

"No backing studies" in this case is knee jerk reaction -- when you can just try yourself at essentially zero cost and zero risk. Personally, it worked for me when I tried it; Roberts collected anecdotes from people on his website, urging anyone who tried to report starting and then their progress; IIRC, he assumed anyone who started and didn't report progress (there weren't many) as "didn't work", and after a year or so, it had ~80% success rate.

[0] http://media.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pd...

the point of wanting independent studies is that I have no reason to trust whatever this guy writes on his own website. Diets and nutrition are subjects with a huge amount of bullshit and scams, often perpetrated by people claiming phds or claiming on their website that "studies were conducted". Sure, the risk of trying it might be quite low, but it's reasonable to be skeptical of the claim that just eating olive oil between meals magically reduces your body's "set point" of weight. If I try this diet and it turns out that adding 400 calories of extra intake a day increases my weight (in line with the traditional understanding of metabolism) then the diet has proven counter-productive and thus there's a real cost involved, even if it's not one of being poisoned or suffering from malnutrition.

You have no reason to trust anyone. Michael Pollen and Gary Taubes (to name two writers) show how nutrition recommendations that are considered trustworthy cannot, in fact, be trusted and are often perverted by special interests or just wrong.

But if we use reputation is a proxy for trustworthiness (and we all do, for luck of time and resources to verify every since thing ourselves), then Seth Roberts has the credibility and reputation - he's prof emeritus of the Psych department at Berkeley (which is not nutrition, but his work did touch on similar issues with rats) , the paper about what inspired the diet contains dependable (by standard metrics) references, and while it is not an independent or double blind study, there are lot of independent testimonies of success and failure, and they seem to track the 80% success quite well. One of the problems with this diet is that there is no way to make money with it (except for writing a book ... which he agreed to do after giving away all the info for free), which means studies are unlikely to happen in a reasonable time frame.

The traditional understanding of metabolism-at-large, by the way, is incompatible with a lot of data; in the sense that while it reasonably describes a good percentage of the population a good percentage of the time, there are way too many repeatable counterexamples (some of which, especially the peer reviewed works of Robert Israel and Michel Cabanac, are referenced and elaborated on in the paper).

I don't know why you think I should trust the credibility of a psychology professor on the topic of nutrition - sure, his psychological study may have "touched on" dietary issues but that hardly makes him an expert.

As for your suggestion of relying on uncontrolled anecdotes - there are far too many variables to rely on people saying that a. they lost weight and b. it was due to the diet specifically.

Bear in mind, I'm not saying all this as a way to declare that the diet doesn't work. I'm just pointing out all the red flags for yet another false diet. There are more red flags than most fad diets I've seen. Especially the claim that you can still eat whatever you want at whatever portion and lose weight.

Seth Roberts wasn't a bullshit scammer. He was a self-deluder who produced a regular stream of blog posts about how he'd discovered links between standing and sleep, viewing faces and mood, and other monthly improvements in his health, until he dropped dead of a heart attack at age 60.

    > is that I have no reason to trust
    > whatever this guy writes on his own
    > website

What you can easily confirm is that:

a) It's simple and easy to acquire olive oil

b) The timeline on which 400kcal of olive oil consumed before a large meal causes health issues can be measured in decades

it's like you didn't even bother to read the whole comment.

"Does blending fruits and vegetables ruin some of the fibrous benefit?"

“Blending won’t have a significant negative impact on fiber,” Spiller reassured me. “Fiber is what’s responsible for the viscosity of a smoothie and its impact on the bacteria of the large bowel. Mashing fiber up into small pieces should only enhance its availability for the bacteria."

People have told me, here at Hacker News, that blending fruit into a smoothie separates the sugars out and makes it like drinking coca-cola. It's nice to see that ridiculous notion quashed.

Fiber has two effects: it slows the rate of digestion, and it provides energy for gut bacteria that can metabolize it. The objection to blending is that it loses the first benefit, but this quote talks only about the second.

>blending fruit into a smoothie separates the sugars out

One would have to perform an experiment to find out. Did the HN commenters point to any?

Likewise,does this guy have experimental evidence?

Try it both ways and measure your insulin response at 5 minute intervals.

Juicing your fruit, which is when you extract the juice and throw away the fibrous bits, DOES make it basically coca-cola. But blending your fruit, which is just mashing the juice and the fibrous bits together, is essentially the same as eating a whole fruit.

This question comes up a lot. I really don't think there's ever been a study to confirm that the fiber stays intact after blending. Everyone is kind of citing everyone else but no one has ever tested it.

Don't the nutritional benefits from fiber happen on a microscopic level? Genuinely asking--my blender is too dull to split molecules.

Well, to add a counterweight to his assertions, the NHS advice directly contradicts Spiller, they say only 1 smoothie OR juice counts towards your 5 a day. And they assert that it does release the sugars.

And they've actually reduced this figure, they used to say you could drink up to 2 of your five a day as a smoothie (mention of it in this article[2] for example).

[1]http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/FAQs.aspx#juices

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/ma...

If you read the NHS FAQ page though it seems bunk.

This because fruit juice and smoothies don't contain the fibre found in whole fruits and vegetables.

Fruit juices don't contain the fiber, but smoothies do. Its almost like they don't get the difference between a smoothie and fruit juice.

The sugars found naturally in whole fruit are less likely to cause tooth decay because the sugar is contained within the structure of the fruit.

That also seems like BS to me. I'm flossing more apple out of my teeth after eating an apple than after drinking a smoothie (where the fruit is going more straight down). I think they think you are swallowing whole fruit and not chewing it first.

Well, you need to be clear on terms.

JUICING fruit DOES "separate the sugars out and make it like drinking coca-cola"

BLENDING the fruit (in a smoothie) DOES NOT.

So it depends on if you're ordering/making "juice" or a "smoothie".

anyone ever seen a guide to dairy free blended food recipes?

You can use palm or coconut fat as a butter replacement and blended soaked nuts as a cream replacement. It might not taste the same, but it's edible at least.

A good one which I personally started out with as a base is a large handful or two of spinach leaves and a ripe banana blended with some water. From there on you can make a pretty creamy and healthy smoothie, just add almonds, dates, berries, etc. to create variants.

Just use the search term "blended" and "vegan" and you'll find a ton

Can't you blend anything you want? If it's too thick just add water.

Anyone who has had a smoothie has experienced this before.

I've experienced the opposite before.. after having a smoothie with probably 5 bananas in it, I was hungry a couple of hours afterwards. Probably due to the sugar content.

I don't think this makes banana smoothies healthy either. Just things like congee, or like... blending steak and veggies into a drinking cup, or something.

Bananas and smoothied are very good for you. But it partly depends what you're doing. They're great for inclusion liver glucose levels to fuel a workout

As far as fruit goes bananas are the least healthy. They don't have a lot in the way of vitamins, and some people have a larger insulin response to bananas than cookies.

YMMV.

Although not really a smoothie, I find that I can easily eat twice as many potatoes if they're mashed than if they're simply boiled. So I'm not entirely convinced.

I can't remember one time in my life that I've slammed down the smoothie glass and gone "boy am I satiated and satisfied!"

You don't have to work as hard to break it down?

My uneducated guess would be for this reason.

Or maybe since it's broken down more, the body is able to extract more energy?

RTFA, it has to do with how the food separates in the stomach.

are you re-wording what I said?

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