I've been trying to cut down on snacking, eat more slowly, and generally limit my caloric intake — normally, I eat like a vacuum, cleaning my plate in 30 seconds flat — and I've been really keenly watching my appetite based on how fast I eat and what I eat. I think that the secret is to get to a point where you're just not hungry. This report from Digestive Disease Week is therefore pretty interesting: it turns out that eating a fatty soup before a meal can reduce your appetite.
For the study, investigators recruited 12 lean and 12 obese healthy subjects and invited each group to the lab for two sessions (eating both fatty soup and protein soup with the same number of calories and volume). Each session consisted of a 30-minute baseline of soup consumption, a 20-minute post-soup period, an "all you can eat" pizza meal, and a 60-minute post-meal period. Electrogastrogram (a test recording the electrical activity of the stomach, EGG) and electrocardiogram (a similar test recording electrical activity of the heart, ECG) were recorded during each session. Food intake was assessed by the caloric count of the consumed pizza. Several symptoms, including satiety, appetite and nausea, were rated at different times of the study. In a second study, subjects were given the soup appetizer and then taken to an "all-you-can-eat" pizza buffet together in a social setting.
When compared with the protein soup, the fatty soup significantly reduced the amount of caloric intake with the following meal in both lean (962.0 vs. 1,188.5 calories) and obese (1,331.9 vs. 1,544.6 calories) subjects. A similar reduction in caloric intake was noted in lean subjects eating in the social setting (1,555 vs. 1,825 calories), except that significantly more food was consumed in social sessions compared with the lab setting.
