While the ability to manifest nutrients from a cheeseburger sounds like fiction, it’s a strand of psychology that’s shaping the future of nutrition. WH chews over the science
With the exception of hangover-free cocktails, there are few health-optimising scenarios quite as appealing as the ability to count a Big Mac as one of your five-aday. And while negronis that nourish are still a way off, researchers are exploring a strand of science that could change the way you look at the Golden Arches forever.
A growing body of research is exploring the interaction between your feelings about foodsandthephysiologicalresponse you have to eating them, such as the hormones you produce or the symptoms in your digestive tract. Dubbed the ‘expectation effect’ by David Robson in his 2022 bestseller of the same name, it refers to the way in which your thoughts about something have the power to change your physical response to it. And while the expectation (or placebo) effect is well known in terms of illness, it’s the role it could play in wellness – specifically nutrition – that has scientists salivating.
The secret to a nutrientpacked burger and fries? It’s all in your mind...
Plate expectations
If you’re as sceptical about this news as you are about the authenticity of a Love Is Blind union, bear with us while we tell you about a study from the good people of Yale University. In it, they gave the same 380-calorie milkshake to two groups of people. Decorating the label of group one’s milkshake was ‘620 calories’, along with the message ‘Indulgence: decadence you deserve’; group two’s milkshake declared itself a ‘Sensi-Shake, for guilt-free satisfaction’ that contained just 140 calories. When researchers compared participants’ levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin before and after consuming the shake, they found that group one had a bigger reduction in ghrelin after drinking it than group two. Meaning? They were less hungry and burned more calories by simply believing that the meal would fill them up.
Adding further weight to the idea that your attitude towards a food is more significant than its nutritional value is research from The American Journal Of Clinical Nutrition. Study participants who believed a drink would turn to solid as it was digested had slower gastric emptying rates, meaning the contents moved more slowly through the gut, and felt fuller for longer. As a result, they ate 400 fewer calories over the course of the day than those who believed it was an ordinary drink. ‘In hindsight, it seems foolish to have ignored the intellectual, emotional and cultural elements of what we eat, while focusing exclusively on the raw nutritional content of food,’ notes Robson in The Expectation Effect. So what exact
