Dr. Sarah Berry
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566 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Dec
Dr. Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And yet when you've got something like a whole grain or a nut, typically that would be absorbed lower down the gastrointestinal tract where you've got more of these fullness signals. So giving you that greater feeling of fullness.
Absolutely. We now know that eating rate is important. There's some fantastic work that's being done by a professor, Kieran Ford, who's dedicated many years into researching this and looking at how changing the structure and texture of the food can modulate your eating rate and how also your eating rate can modulate how you metabolize the food and how many calories you go on to eat.
And so it's a great example. You know, I talked about all of these different pieces of the puzzle. That's one of those pieces.
So when we talk about how you eat, changing your eating rate, so how quickly you have your breakfast, your lunch or dinner or any of these snacks, will also, without you consciously thinking about it, change how many calories you eat, might change how quickly you metabolize the food as well.
So the research that's been done by Karen Ford shows that on average, if you change the speed in which you eat your food by about 20%, you reduce your calorie intake by about 15%. And that's due to where you're releasing your hunger hormones, how many fullness hormones you're releasing, etc. So it's a really simple strategy.
And we see this play out as well, even in our own evidence, when we look in our ZOE predict studies at fast eaters versus slow eaters, we see that once we adjust for lots of other confounders, there's a difference of 120 calories between what fast eaters have over a day versus slow eaters with the fast eaters eating more calories compared to slow eaters.
And there's even been clinical trials where they get groups of individuals and say, OK, slow down the rate at which you eat your food over the next, you know, three, four, five weeks. They have another group, they say, just eat at your normal rate.
Those people who are intentionally slowing down the rate at which they eat their food lose more weight than those people who continue to eat at their normal rate.
Yeah, and also the food that is available to many of us is the kind of food that can be eaten really quickly. So there's some great research that's been conducted that shows that heavily processed, soft textured type food can be eaten 50% more quickly than the unprocessed, harder textured equivalent. So the kind of food that we're eating now is quite different. So you're eating it really quickly.
You're overeating because your hunger signals haven't got there, but it's that rate at which you're eating.
So we can use an example from a study that was actually conducted in 1977. And this was published in The Lancet. It was one of the first nutrition studies published in The Lancet. And it's one of the first studies published. to show the importance of the food matrix. And it kind of got buried for many years. And it's a study by the scientist called Haber where he fed individuals whole apples.
He fed individuals the equivalent amount of carbohydrate from apple puree. It was exactly the same, i.e. same nutrients, same fiber, same everything else in it. All that's different is the apples are hard, the puree is soft.
And what he found was that those people who were given the puree, even though they were given exactly the same amount of calories, ate that puree, or rather drank that puree, three to four times more quickly than when they had the apples, the equivalent amount of calories. So they were eating the same amount of calories, but three to four times more quickly.
They felt less full. So when they measured their fullness and they monitored that for quite a few hours. So going up to quite a few hours, those that were having the apples continued to feel full for longer. Those that were having the puree didn't feel full as long. And what also happened, interestingly, is those that were having the puree had what we call a blood sugar dip.
So about two to four hours after having a high carbohydrate meal, we know that some people have a dip in their circulating blood sugar. And we know from our own story predict research that actually this can really increase your hunger levels. And so we know from our research, if you are a dipper, I'm a dipper, hence I get hungry quite often.
So in about two hours, I'm going to be eating one of these. If you're a dipper, you know, your blood glucose is going below your baseline levels. And so you get hungry, you go on to eat 180 calories on average more at your next meal because of that. And so, I mean, this research from 1977, I think is fascinating. It's that first research really demonstrating the importance of food matrix.
And then since then, I've now, over the last 10 years, done lots of studies with nuts, with oats, for example, that demonstrate you can have two foods that have identical backpack labeling, identical nutrients, identical calorie value, if you were to look at the backpack labeling, but can have entirely different impacts in terms of how much energy you absorb, how you metabolize that food, how it impacts your hunger, how it impacts downstream health effects.
So we've done work on walnuts, but particularly on almonds. So we've done lots of work with almonds, using it as a kind of proof in principle of the importance of the food matrix. Now, you just took a bite of that and I could hear the crunch. The reason I could hear the crunch is because in almonds, like most nuts, like many plant-based products, there is a very...
rigid cell wall okay so that almond that you've you're holding there has thousands and thousands and thousands of cells these cells are tiny they're about 50 microns okay you can't see them with the human eye i can show you a micrograph um but there's thousands in there now each of those cells is smaller than a grain of sand
And each of those cells is encapsulated, cell walls is encapsulating the fat. So we know that in most of these nuts, it's about 50%, they're about 50% fat. Hence people say, oh my gosh, I can't eat nuts. They're high fat, they're high calorie. Now in all of those nuts, the fat's encapsulated in this rigid cell wall. When you bit that, you fractured some of those cell walls.
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