Tasty Food Won’t Necessarily Make You Fat
It sounds too good to be true (and probably is), but scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center have concluded that eating good tasting food won’t lead to weight gain – at least if you’re a mouse. The researchers knew from multiple investigations that lab mice are attracted to human foods such as chocolate chip cookies and potato chips. They will eat as much of these high calorie snacks as they can get, and they also quickly gain weight as a result. To test what was driving this behavior, investigators gave lab mice a choice of the animals’ usual chow or the same chow sweetened with non-calorie sucralose or moistened with calorie-free mineral oil. Not surprisingly, they found that the mice preferred the sweet or oily stuff to plain chow. They then fed separate groups of mice sweetened chow, chow with mineral oil or plain chow for six weeks. At the end of that period, none of the mice gained excess weight. Why not? “Good taste determines what we choose to eat, but not how much we eat over the long-term,” said senior study author Michael Tordoff, PhD.
Source:
Michael G. Tordoff et al, “Does eating good-tasting food influence body weight?” Physiology & Behavior, December 15, 2016; DOI: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2016.12.013
Also in this week’s bulletin:
