Milkshake Study: Do Food Labels Affect Hunger?
April 15, 2014Alia Crum, a clinical psychologist, conducted a milkshake study to see how information on nutrition labels affects the body's physiological processing of nutrients consumed. For the study, Crum mixed up a large batch of vanilla milkshakes and poured the mixture into bottles with very different nutrition labels.
One group of bottles were labeled as Sensishake – advertised as having zero percent fat, zero added sugar and only 104 calories. The second group of bottles were labeled as Indulgence - containing enough sugar and fat to account for 620 calories. The truth - each serving of the vanilla milkshake contained 300 calories.
Participants in the study had their ghrelin levels tested before and after consuming the shakes. Ghrelin is known as the hunger hormone and scientist have long thought that ghrelin levels fluctuated in response to nutrients that the ghrelin met in the stomach. However, the results of Crum's study indicated a different possibility.
"If you believed you were drinking the indulgent shake," she says, "your body responded as if you had consumed much more."
"The ghrelin levels dropped about three times more when people were consuming the indulgent shake (or thought they were consuming the indulgent shake)," she says, compared to the people who drank the sensible shake (or thought that's what they were drinking).
Proof that our brains are in more control than our stomachs?
Crum believes more research needs to be conducted but that the results do help to dispel the typical "calories in, calories" metabolic theory.
Source: Spiegel, A. (2014, April 14). Mind Over Milkshake: How Your Thoughts Fool Your Stomach. Retrieved from Shots Health News from NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/14/299179468/mind-over-milkshake-how-your-thoughts-fool-your-stomach
