Is Soup The Best-Kept Diet Secret Of All?
Consider two simple scenarios you could be facing at lunchtime: when you have a solid food and water, you could eat those separately or you could premix them into a soup and drink the whole thing together. Which of the two techniques do you think will keep you full longer hence preventing you from snacking often and gaining weight? If you said “The soup!” then it just shows you have read the title of this blog post!
But seriously, BBC News Magazine reports that eating the same food and water combined together as a soup will help keep you full much longer than if you ate them separately. The secret lies in the way food passes from the stomach to the intestines:
After you eat a meal, the pyloric sphincter valve at the bottom of your stomach holds food back so that the digestive juices can get to work. Water, however, passes straight through the sphincter to your intestines, so drinking water does not contribute to “filling you up”.
When you eat the same meal as a soup, the whole mixture remains in the stomach, because the water and food are blended together. The scientists’ scans confirm that the stomach stays fuller for longer, staving off those hunger pangs. [BBC]
Ghrelin and the suppression of hunger:
Ghelin is a hormone released by the stomach walls when the stomach is empty. This hormone triggers a response in the brains hypothalamus region that causes us to “feel hungry” and we start to look for food. But when the stomach walls are stretched as a result of eating food, ghrelin production is stopped and we “feel full”. So one easy way to keep the feeling of fullness for longer periods of time is to eat foods that stay in eh stomach longer.
But as you saw eating food and drinking water separately causes the water to leave the stomach first and the food left behind is not there long enough to keep you satisfied. Soups on the other hand stay in the stomach in their entirety and are only slowly removed causing you to avoid the dreaded 3:00 p.m. snack craving.
What has been your own experience with soups? Have you ever felt full for a longer period of time when you drank soup for lunch? Do comment your thoughts on this study and head on to BBC to read the entore article also.
[Via Lew Rockwell]
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I really love soup it makes me fuller without eating too much meat or fat. So i would prefer eating soup is great way to eat when you are on a diet and of course daily exercise..