NUTRITIONAL ASPECTS OF APPETITE CONTROL: FAT

May 8th, 2009

A preference for fatty foods may have developed during hunter-gatherer times because high-fat foods were both scarce and probably beneficial for survival.10 this legacy now counts against us in a world of greater availability of fatty foods with desirable textural qualities like thickness and smoothness.

Does a high-fat meal reduce appetite? Professor Blundell and his colleagues at Leeds university have studied the effects of dietary fat on feeding patterns in humans. They have shown that the most important determinant of the amount of energy consumed in a meal was the macronutrient content of the meal and not the prior level of hunger. For comparison, subjects were required to eat a high-fat dinner one day and then a high-carbohydrate dinner on another day. Surprisingly, the high-energy, high-fat meal did not suppress eating later in the day, nor did it have a significant effect on energy consumed the following day when compared to the lower energy high-carbohydrate meal.

This means that periodic exposure to high-fat meals will lead to over-consumption of energy which is never compensated for later. Fat can also leave a type of ‘fat hangover’ which causes a person to feel full or bloated, but still with an appetite to eat more. It is useful to learn to recognise this ‘hangover’ and to realise that it can be avoided (by reducing the fat content of meals). In a practical sense, it is always easy to slip some more fatty food (e.g. Chocolate dessert) in at the end of a meal, but this is much less likely to happen with carbohydrate.