Death By Salad: Two Reasons ‘Healthy’ Food May Make You Fat
Death By Salad: Two Reasons ‘Healthy’ Food May Make You Fat
Subconscious satiation.
In an effort to lose weight, you pass on the steak sizzler at your favorite family restaurant and settle, instead, for a healthy salad. But you might be in for a dietingdouble whammy. First off, the salad probably has more calories than you realize. For example, Applebee’s Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad packs a whopping 800 calories(link is external) (a full 170 calories more than a Whopper). When you order that salad thinking you’re cutting calories, you’re wrong.
As if underestimating calories wasn’t bad enough, there’s a second problem with that salad: Your body is about to play a sinister trick on you. As you engorge on all 800 calories of the salad, your brain, convinced the salad is healthy, convinces your stomach that it is not full. When people believe food is healthy, they experience that food as being less filling.
Not convinced? Consider this: A team of researchers(link is external) gave college students a cookie to eat, telling half of them the cookie was “healthy” with “high levels of proteins, fibers, and vitamins” and telling the other half it was “unhealthy” with “high levels of sugars, fats, and carbohydrates.” Immediately after eating the cookie, and 45 minutes later, the researchers asked people how hungry they were. They found that people who ate what they thought was a “healthy cookie” were hungrier:
In another study, they let students eat as much popcorn as they liked while telling some of them that it was healthy popcorn, others that it was nourishing, and others that it was unhealthy. When convinced that the popcorn was healthy, people ate more of it:
That’s right: People ate more than twice as much “healthy” popcorn as unhealthy.
I used to think my stomach knew when I was full. I trusted my body to tell me when I needed to eat. Now I realize that the hungry feeling I experience after I eat a healthy meal–it’s not my physiology kicking in to tell me I’m in caloric deficit, it’s my subconscious overriding this physiology. My belief that healthy food won’t satiate me causes me to feel unsatiated.
When it comes to food consumption, the most important organ is our brain.
Previously published in Forbes.
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