Researchers found that study participants ended up eating more calories when provided with three different yogurt flavours than just one, even if that one is the chosen favourite. So, variation can trump sensation. They don’t call it the spice of life for nothing.

It appears to be something we’re born with. Studies on newly weaned infants dating back nearly a century show that babies naturally choose a variety of foods even over their preferred food. This tendency seems to be driven by a phenomenon known as sensory-specific satiety.

Researchers found that, “within two minutes after eating the test meal, the pleasantness of the taste, smell, texture, and appearance of the eaten food decreased significantly more than for the uneaten foods.” Think about how the first bite of chocolate tastes better than the last bite. Our body tires of the same sensations and seeks out novelty by rekindling our appetite every time we’re presented with new foods. This helps explain the “dessert effect,” where we can be stuffed to the gills but gain a second wind when dessert arrives. What was adaptive for our ancient ancestors to maintain nutritional adequacy may be maladaptive in the age of obesity.

When study participants ate a “varied four-course meal,” they consumed 60 per cent more calories than those given the same food for each course. It’s not only that we get bored; our body has a different physiological reaction.

Researchers gave people a squirt of lemon juice, and their salivary glands responded with a squirt of saliva. But when they were given lemon juice ten times in a row, they salivated less and less each time. When they got the same amount of lime juice, though, their salivation jumped right back up. We’re hard-wired to respond differently to new foods.

Whether foods are on the same plate, are at the same meal, or are even eaten on subsequent days, the greater the variety, the more we tend to eat. When kids had the same mac and cheese dinner five days in a row, they ended up eating hundreds fewer calories by the fifth day, compared to kids who got a variety of different meals.

Even just switching the shape of food can lead to overeating. When kids had a second bowl of mac and cheese, they ate significantly more when the noodles were changed from elbow macaroni to spirals. People allegedly eat up to 77 per cent more M&Ms if they’re presented with ten different colours instead of seven, even though all the colours taste the same. “Thus, it is clear that the greater the differences between foods, the greater the enhancement of intake,” the greater the effect. Alternating between sweet and savoury foods can have a particularly appetite-stimulating effect. Do you see how, in this way, adding a diet soda, for instance, to a fast-food meal can lead to overconsumption?

The staggering array of modern food choices may be one of the factors conspiring to undermine our appetite control. There are now tens of thousands of different foods being sold.

The so-called supermarket diet is one of the most successful ways to make rats fat. Researchers tried high-calorie food pellets, but the rats just ate less to compensate. So, they “therefore used a more extreme diet…[and] fed rats an assortment of palatable foods purchased at a nearby supermarket,” including such fare as cookies, candy, bacon, and cheese, and the animals ballooned. The human equivalent to maximize experimental weight gain has been dubbed the cafeteria diet.

It’s kind of the opposite of the original food dispensing device I’ve talked about before. Instead of all-you-can-eat bland liquid, researchers offered free all-you-can-eat access to elaborate vending machines stocked with 40 trays with a dizzying array of foods, like pastries and French fries. Participants found it impossible to maintain energy balance, consistently consuming more than 120 per cent of their calorie requirements.

Our understanding of sensory-specific satiety can be used to help people gain weight, but how can we use it to our advantage? For example, would limiting the variety of unhealthy snacks help people lose weight? Two randomized controlled trials made the attempt and failed to show significantly more weight loss in the reduced variety diet, but they also failed to get people to make much of a dent in their diets. Just cutting down on one or two snack types seems insufficient to make much of a difference.  A more drastic change may be needed.

Reprinted with permission from www.nutritionfacts.org

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In ancient Greece, the art of medicine was divided into three parts: cures through diet, cures through drugs, and cures through surgery. Garlic, Hippocrates wrote, was one such medicinal food.

Those who eat more than a clove of garlic a day do seem to have better artery function than those who eat less than that, but you don’t know if it’s cause-and-effect until you put it to the test.

In a recent study, heart disease patients were randomized to receive either garlic powder or placebo tablets two times a day for three months. Those lucky enough to be in the garlic group got a significant boost in their artery function—a 50 per cent increase in function from taking only 800 mg of garlic powder a day. That’s just a quarter teaspoon of garlic powder.

Garlic powder can improve the function of our arteries, but what about the structure of our arteries? Dozens of studies on garlic all compiled together show that garlic can reduce cholesterol levels in the blood by more than 16 points. So, might garlic powder actually be able to slow the progression of atherosclerosis? Researchers studied a garlic powder tablet versus a placebo for three months. The placebo group got worse, which is what tends to happen. Eat the same artery-clogging diet, and your arteries continue to clog. However, the progression of the disease appeared to slow and even stall in the garlic group.

Of course, it would be nice to see the thickening of the artery wall reverse, but, for that, one might have to add more plants than just garlic to one’s diet. Still, though, that same quarter teaspoon of a simple spice available everywhere may be considered as an adjunct treatment for atherosclerosis, the number one killer of both men and women around much of the world.

What about garlic for high blood pressure? A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials: “demonstrated that garlic has a statistically significant and clinically meaningful effect” on both systolic and diastolic blood pressures, reducing the top number by nearly seven and the bottom number by about five (Journal of Phytomedicine 2015). That may not sound like a lot but reducing diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by five points can reduce the risk of stroke by about a third and heart disease by 25 per cent. 

This article has been edited for length and reproduced with permission by Michael Greger M.D. FACLM – www.nutritionfacts.org

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But chew on this: This simple weight loss rule doesn’t add up.

The 3,500-calorie rule can be traced back to a paper in 1958 that noted that since fatty tissue on the human body is 87 per cent fat, a pound of body fat would have about 395 grams of pure fat. Multiply that by nine calories per gram of fat, which gives you the “3,500 calories per pound” approximation. The fatal flaw that leads to dramatically exaggerated weight-loss predictions is that the 3,500 rule fails to take into account the fact that changes in the calories-in side of the energy-balance equation automatically lead to changes in calories out—for example, the slowing of the metabolic rate that accompanies weight loss, known as metabolic adaptation. That’s one of the reasons weight loss plateaus.

If you decrease your intake by 500 calories daily, you will lose one pound per week.

Imagine a 30-year-old sedentary woman of average height who weighs 150 pounds. According to the 3,500-calorie rule, if she cuts 500 calories out of her daily diet, she’d lose a pound a week, or 52 pounds a year. In three years, then, she would vanish.She’d go from 150 pounds to negative six. Obviously, that doesn’t happen. What would happen is that in the first year, instead of losing 52 pounds she’d likely only lose 32 pounds, and then, after a total of three years, stabilize at about 100 pounds. This is because it takes fewer calories to function at a lower weight.

Part of it is simple mechanics, in the same way a Hummer requires more fuel than a compact car. Think how much more effort it would take to just get out of a chair, walk across the room, or climb a few stairs carrying a 50-pound backpack. Even when you’re lying at rest sound asleep, there’s simply less of your body to maintain as we lose weight. Every pound of fat tissue lost may mean one less mile of blood vessels your body has to pump blood through every minute. So, basic upkeep and movement takes fewer calories. Essentially, as you lose weight by eating less, you end up needing less. That’s what the 3,500-calorie rule doesn’t take into account.

Or imagine it the other way. A two-hundred-pound-man starts eating 500 more calories a day. According to the 3,500-calorie rule, in 10 years he’d weigh more than 700 pounds. That doesn’t happen, because the heavier he is, the more calories he burns just existing. It takes about two doughnuts worth of extra energy just to live at 250 pounds, and so that’s where he’d plateau out if he kept it up. So, weight gain or weight loss, given a certain calorie excess or deficit, is a curve that flattens out over time, rather than a straight line up or down.

Nevertheless, the 3,500-calorie rule continues to crop up, even in obesity journals. Public health researchers used it to calculate how many pounds children might lose every year if, for example, fast food kids’ meals swapped in apple slices instead of French fries. They figured two meals a week could add up to about four pounds a year. The actual difference, National Restaurant Association-funded researchers were no doubt delighted to point out, would probably add less than half a pound—10 times less than the 3,500-calorie rule would predict. The original article was subsequently retracted.

To learn about the new rules on calculating what’s exactly in a pound, Click Here.
Excerpt republished with permission from Friday Favorites: The 3,500 Calorie per Pound Rule Is Wrong; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

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It’s the same with flax seeds and the anticancer lignan compounds. Flax may average a hundred times more lignans than other foods. And mushrooms aren’t even plants at all; they belong to an entirely different biological classification, and may contain nutrients (like ergothioneine) not made anywhere in the plant kingdom.

It seems like every time I come home from the medical library buzzing with some exciting new data, my family rolls their eyes, sighs, and asks, “What can’t we eat now?” Or they’ll say, “Wait a second. Why does everything seem to have parsley in it all of a sudden, or something?” They’re very tolerant.

As the list of foods I tried to fit into my daily diet grew, I made a checklist and had it up on a little dry-erase board on the fridge, and we’d make a game out of ticking off the boxes. This evolved into my Daily Dozen: the checklist of all the things I try to fit into my daily routine.

This may all sound like a lot of boxes to check, but it’s easy to knock off a bunch at a time. One simple peanut butter-banana sandwich, and you just checked off four boxes. Or, imagine sitting down to a big salad: two cups of spinach, a handful of arugula, a handful of walnuts, a half-cup of chickpeas, a half-cup of red bell pepper, and a small tomato. You just knocked out seven boxes in one dish. Sprinkle on your flax, add a handful of goji berries, and enjoy it with a glass of water and fruit for dessert, and you just wiped out nearly half your daily check boxes in a single meal! And then, if you just eat it on your treadmill—just kidding!

Whenever I was sitting down to a meal, I would ask myself: Could I add greens to this? Could I add beans to this? (I always have an open can of beans in the fridge.) Can I sprinkle on some flax or pumpkin seeds, or maybe some dried fruit? The checklist just got me into the habit of thinking, How can I make this meal even healthier?

I also found the checklist helped with grocery shopping. Although I always keep bags of frozen berries and greens in the freezer, if I’m at the store and want to buy fresh produce for the week, it helps me figure out how much kale or blueberries I need.

The checklist also helps me picture what a meal might look like. Looking over the checklist, you’ll see that there are three servings each of beans, fruits, and whole grains, and about twice as many vegetables in total than any other component. So, glancing at my plate, I can imagine one quarter of it filled with grains, one quarter with legumes, and a half a plate filled with vegetables, along with maybe a side salad and fruit for dessert. I happen to like one-bowl meals where everything’s mixed together, but the checklist still helps me to visualize. Instead of a big bowl of spaghetti with some veggies and lentils on top, I think of a big bowl of vegetables with some pasta and lentils mixed in. Instead of a big plate of quinoa with some stir-fried vegetables on top, I picture a meal that’s mostly vegetables—and oh, look! There’s some quinoa and beans in there too.

But, there’s no need to be obsessive about the Daily Dozen. You know, on hectic travel days, when I’ve burned through my snacks and get stuck in some airport food court, sometimes I’m lucky if I even hit a quarter of my goals. If you eat poorly one day, just try to eat better the next.

My hope is that the checklist will just serve as a helpful reminder to try to eat a variety of some of the healthiest foods every day.

1 | BEANS

3 SERVINGS
By beans, I mean legumes, which also includes split peas, chickpeas, and lentils. You know, while eating a bowl of pea soup or dipping carrots into hummus may not seem like eating beans, it certainly counts. We should try to get three servings a day. A serving is defined as a quarter-cup of hummus or bean dip, a half-cup of cooked beans, split peas, lentils, tofu, or tempeh, or a full cup of fresh peas or sprouted lentils. Though peanuts are technically legumes, nutritionally, I’ve grouped them in the Nuts category, just as I would shunt green beans, snap peas, and string beans into the Other Vegetables category.

2 | CRUCIFEROUS VEGETABLES

1 SERVING
Common cruciferous vegetables include broccoli, cabbage, collards, and kale. I recommend at least one serving a day (typically a half-cup) and at least two additional servings of greens a day—cruciferous or otherwise.

3 | WHOLE GRAINS

3 SERVINGS
A serving of whole grains can be considered a half-cup of hot cereal, such as oatmeal, cooked whole grains, or so-called
“pseudograins,” like amaranth, buckwheat, and quinoa, or a half-cup of cooked pasta or corn kernels, a cup of ready-to-eat (cold) cereal, one tortilla or slice of bread, half
a bagel or English muffin, or three cups
of air-popped popcorn.

4 | BERRIES

1 SERVING
A serving of berries is a half-cup fresh or frozen, or a quarter-cup of dried. While, biologically speaking, avocados, bananas, and even watermelons are technically berries, I’m using the colloquial term for any small edible fruit—which is why I include kumquats and grapes and raisins, as well as fruits that are typically thought of as berries, but actually technically aren’t, such as blackberries, cherries, mulberries, raspberries, and strawberries.

5 | GREENS

2 SERVINGS
Serving sizes for other greens and vegetables are a cup for raw leafy vegetables, a half-cup for other raw or cooked non-leafy vegetables, and a quarter-cup for dried mushrooms.

6 | FLAX SEEDS

1 SERVING
Everyone should try to incorporate one tablespoon of ground flax seeds into their daily diet, in addition to a serving of nuts or other seeds.

7 | NUTS

1 SERVING
A quarter-cup of nuts is considered a serving, or two tablespoons of nut or seed butters, including peanut butter. (Chestnuts and coconuts, though, don’t nutritionally count as nuts.)

8 | OTHER FRUIT

3 SERVINGS
For other fruits, a serving is a medium-sized fruit, a cup of cut-up fruit, or a quarter-cup of dried fruit. Again, I’m using the colloquial, rather than the botanical, definition. So, I place tomatoes in the Other Vegetables group.

9 | OTHER VEGETABLES

2 SERVINGS

10 | SPICES

1 SERVING
I also recommend one-quarter teaspoon a day of the spice turmeric, along with any other
(salt-free) herbs and spices you may enjoy.

11 | BEVERAGES

5 SERVINGS
The serving size in the beverage category is one glass (12 ounces), and the recommended five glasses a day is in addition to the water you get naturally from the foods in your diet. I explain my rationale in my video How Many Glasses of Water Should We Drink a Day?

12 | EXERCISE

1 SERVING
Finally, I advise one daily “serving” of exercise, which can be split up over the day.
I recommend ninety minutes of moderate-
intensity activity each day, such as brisk
(four miles per hour) walking, or forty minutes of vigorous activity (such as jogging or active sports) each day. 

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Food and Nutrition

This article is a summary of Dr. Greger’s video presentation at nutritionfacts.org.

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Energy density is the ratio of calories-per-weight of a food or beverage. Water, for example, provides a significant amount of weight without adding calories. Fiber, too. Thus, foods high in water and fiber are generally lower in energy density.

On the other hand, because dietary fat provides the greatest amount of calories per ounce, foods high in fat are generally high in energy density. Bacon is a an example of a high energy-density food while fruits and vegetables are low energy-density foods.

Researchers have been able to cut people’s caloric intake nearly in half, from 3,000 calories a day down to 1,570 without cutting portions, just by substituting less calorie-dense foods, which means lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans, compared to a high energy-density meal with lots of meat and sugar.

A study in Hawaii where people followed a traditional Hawaiian diet with all the plant foods they could eat, lost an average of 17 pounds in just 21 days, resulting in better cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugars and blood pressure. Caloric intake dropped 40 per cent, but not by eating less food; in fact, they ate more food. But because plants tend to be so calorically dilute, one can stuff oneself without getting the same kind of weight gain.

Choosing low energy-density foods allows people to eat satisfying portions while limiting calories. And since lower energy dense diets tend to be of healthier foods, you improve the quality of your diet.

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This article is a summary of Dr. Greger’s video presentation at www.nutritionfacts.org.