The theory that explains how we always have room for dessert

Have you filled your ears with the meal and yet, somehow, you find yourself finishing it with a slice of cake eaten until the last crumb? No, this is not a "separate stomach for dessert" as you like to explain, nor is it about your gluttony

The theory that explains how we always have room for dessert

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"Thank you, I was filled. But I would love to hear what the dessert has, that I have a separate stomach." Identify the sentence? How many times have you said it? Let us gamble quite a bit. Don't worry, not only do you find yourself feeling that you can't eat anymore, but you can definitely be pissed off. Now it seems that behind this feeling is not gluttony - it's simply a mechanism built into us from birth, and it even has a scientific term - sensory-specific satiety. What it means? The more we eat, the less we like it, which gives us the impression that we are full. In fact, we are only saturated with the specific taste, texture or taste of the same thing we ate.

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"The decline in pleasure you derive from food is specifically related to the same foods you eat, or similar foods," she told dailymail Barbara Rawls, a professor of nutritional science at Penn State University in the United States, who has been researching the field for 40 years. Other food will still be appealing. And that's why you always have room for dessert. "

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Professor Rawls has shown that not only does food become less delicious as the meal progresses, it also looks, smells and feels less appealing and it encourages us to try something different. Its theory is that the specific sensory crust has evolved to keep us healthy - limiting one's appetite for one's food encourages moving to another's food, increasing the chances of getting all the nutrients we need. This mechanism creates many disadvantages for those who are trying to diet. In one study, Professor Rawls showed that people ate 60 percent more calories when eating a four-course meal than one meal where all the dishes were the same.

According to Professor Rawls, this phenomenon may make it more difficult for us to resist the abundance of foods available in our world during this period, thus contributing to the obesity epidemic.

This dessert now? It is an evolutionary need at all. Chocolate sauce gif all vanilla ice cream (Photo: Giphy)

Chocolate sauce dripped on a vanilla ice cream ball (Photo: Giphy)

Evidence of this inherent mechanism has already been found in a study in the 1920s when a Chicago pediatrician allowed milk-fed babies to eat whatever they wanted from a wide variety of foods. In front of the cots, trays were placed with small dishes of various foods, and a nurse waited for the baby to point to a particular tool and then fed it. The results showed that some babies were fasting on one food for a short period of time, but as time went on they all ate a well balanced and varied diet. This led researchers to conclude that they were probably guided by "some kind of innate automatic mechanism." The specific sensory satiety appears to be the same mechanism.

The Macaroni & Cheese Experiment

The phenomenon of losing interest in one food and moving to another was well observed in a recent experiment by Vox News, based on past research by Professor Rawls: Volunteers received a large plate of macaroni with cheese and were asked to eat until they felt full. They were then given a "dessert" - another macaroni with cheese. Next, they were asked to rate from one to ten the amount of interest they had in the meal, and measured the amount they ate. The result: Their average level of interest in macaroni started at 6.2 out of ten, and after their first dose it dropped to 1.3. On average, they managed to eat only one ounce (28.35 grams) of pasta for "dessert," and when they finished eating their interest in cheese macaroons was only 0.2 out of ten.

The experiment was repeated again on another day, but this time the dessert offered to volunteers was ice cream instead of pasta. Throughout the macaroni meal, they were also asked about their interest in ice cream, and it remained high. At the dessert stage, they ate three times more of the ice cream than what they ate from the “dessert” pasta in the previous experiment.

This is what it looks like when the brain reward system works hard. Woman eating dessert (Photo: ShutterStock)

Woman eating dessert (Photo: ShutterStock)

Specific sensual satisfaction not only explains why it is so difficult to refuse dessert, but also clarifies why it is so easy to eat too many meals that include a wide variety of foods, such as bbq, buffet, or what we call meats (recognize that after the "salad" stage in the restaurant Aren't you hungry for the main course anymore?). The biology underlying this mechanism is unclear, but the answer - as in many things - may be in the brain. Experiments conducted by the University of Oxford have shown that cells in the brain's reward system, which produce feelings of pleasure, respond less to food while being eaten. However, when moving to sample other foods, the cells become responsive again.

Bottom line, we almost always have room for dessert and it's a shame to deny it and torment because of it; That's how we were created and it's stronger than us. If you are trying to keep the weight off - just choose a smaller dessert that contains fewer calories, like fruit salad or frozen yogurt.