Lose Weight by Cutting Food into Smaller… Bites?!
July 30, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Lose Weight by Cutting Food into Smaller… Bites?!
Want to lose weight? Try cutting up food into smaller pieces.
Devina Wadhera and her Arizona State University colleagues found that in both college students and lab rats, cut-up food could be beneficial to weight loss.
College Students
“Cutting up energy-dense foods into smaller pieces may be beneficial to dieters who wish to make their meal more satiating while also maintaining portion control,” Wadhera said.
For the college students study, Wadhera’s team took 301 female and male students and split them into two groups. One group was given a whole bagel smothered with cream cheese, while another group was given the same bagel — covered with the same amount of cream cheese — but cut into four pieces.
What they found was that the group that was offered the whole bagel ate more of it than those who received the cut-up bagel.
But that’s not all. Another difference between the two groups happened 20 minutes later. Twenty minutes after having the bagel, both groups were offered a free meal. Here again, those who had eaten the cut-up bagel, ate less of the free meal than the whole bagel group counterparts.
“Perhaps cutting up foods into multiple, bite-sized pieces may perceptually look like more and therefore elicit greater satiation than a single-piece food portion,” Wadhera and colleagues suggest.
Lab Rats
The Arizona State University researchers also tried this experiment on lab rats. The rats were trained to run through a maze, and offered a reward for quickly getting through the maze.
Like the college students, the lab rats were split into two groups. One group of 20 rats were given a single chunk of food as a reward for successfully making it through the maze. The other group of 20 rats, were offered the same amount of food in terms of weight, but the reward was 30 smaller pieces of food.
After the rats completed 12 trips through the maze, the researchers noted a clear result. Rats worked harder for the same quantity of food in smaller pieces.
These findings were presented at the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior conference, but haven’t been reviewed by peers or presented in a medical journal. As such, the results of this study should be interpreted as preliminary.
Doctor Headquarters (DrHQ.com) Editorial Staff Copyright 2012 – All rights reserved
