View this email in your browser

By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #102: The influence of food variety on satiety

Find all previously published newsletter facts here
Find a list of thought-provoking books related to food, nutrition, health, and other topics here

This week's "food for thought" excerpt comes from The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat (2018), by Stephen J. Guyenet.

“‘Eat a varied diet’ is a maxim that lies at the foundation of our modern approach to health. If we eat a large variety of different foods, we’re likely to meet our overall nutritional needs. While this principle is sound, it also has a dark side. Food variety has a powerful influence on our calorie intake, and the more variety we encounter at a meal, the more we eat. . . . Several independent researchers using various methods have confirmed that we tend to eat more total food – and gain weight – when we’re presented with a large variety of foods. This goes a long way toward explaining what researchers calls the buffet effect. We tend to overeat spectacularly at buffets, despite the fact that the food isn’t always the crème de la crème. At a buffet, we don’t have the opportunity to habituate to any particular food, because every few bites, we’re eating something new. The brain’s satiety system eventually throws the emergency brake, but not before we’ve eaten far too much.

"Sensory-specific satiety also helps explain why we’re happy to eat dessert even after a large meal. We’re not longer hungry for a savory food at all, yet when the dessert menu appears, we suddenly grow a ‘second stomach.’ We’re satiated of savory foods, but we aren’t satiated of sweets. A novel sensory stimulus with an extremely high reward value makes it easy to pack away an additional 200 calories of dessert. So it makes sense that the converse is also true. . . When food reward and variety decrease, so does food intake.”