Nutrition information changes how you eat
New research from Uppsala University shows that information about how many calories your food contains affects how much you eat. The results have now been published in the online scientific journal Obesity.
Researcher Pleunie Hogenkamp has together with her colleagues at the Department of Neuroscience at Uppsala University seen that both a person’s awareness and the body’s reactions affect food intake. A small label with nutrition information can affect how much of the food product you will eat.
The researchers invited female students to breakfast on four occasions and served a predetermined amount of sweetened yoghurt which was either rich or low on calories. At two of the occasions, both variants of the yoghurt were labelled with correct information about energy content. At the other two occasions the yoghurts were incorrectly labelled, i.e. the low calorie yoghurt was claimed to be rich in calories and vice versa.
Both before and after the breakfasts, hunger levels were determined and hormone levels were measured, including ghrelin, the so called hunger hormone. That the food was labelled with a high calorie content did not affect feelings of hunger in the participants and the researchers could not see any effect on their hormonal responses.
However, the researchers noticed that the incorrect calorie information affected how much the participants wanted to continue eating. When they were served bread, grapes and muffins 30 minutes later, those who had eaten low calorie yoghurt, thinking it was high calorie yoghurt, did not want as much.
“I think this result helps us control our food intake in a satisfactory way by simply making us calculate beforehand how many calories we will eat and thereby limiting our food intake”, says Pleunie Hogenkamp.
The results show that labelling can affect later food intake. The incorrect calorie information affected the next food intake for those who had eaten the low calorie yoghurt, but no effect could be observed for those who had eaten the high calorie yoghurt.
These results suggest that both cognitive and physiological information affect human food intake. When the actual calorie content was high enough to create a feeling of fullness the cognitive factors, the calorie information, made no difference. But when the participants felt moderate levels of hunger, the calorie information affected food intake.
The participants’ assumption of a high calorie content in the yoghurt may have resulted in increased brain activity in the areas involved in suppression of hunger and food intake.
P.S. Hogenkamp, J. Cedernaes, C.D. Chapman, H. Vogel, O.C. Hjorth, S.
Zarei, L.S. Lundberg, S.J. Brooks, S.L. Dickson, C. Benedict, H.B. Schiöth, Calorie anticipation alters food intake after low-caloric but not high-caloric preloads, doi: 10.1002/oby.20293
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.20293/pdf
Linda Koffmar