Dieting's best kept secret? (Will you pay me to reveal it, all you Acai enthusiasts who have regrettably been scammed?) Here it is, for free: soup. And that's official.

If you eat your healthy chicken and veggies lunch washed down with a glass of water to help fill you up, you'll feel hungry a couple of hours later. Take those same ingredients and whizz them into a soup - and you will carry on feeling full!

What the scientists say: Apparently (and this is confirmed by MRI exams of many stomachs), once you've finished a meal of solids, the pyloric sphincter at the base of your stomach keeps the solids in so the digestive juices can make their own meal of them. But the water goes straight through to your intenstines. So it does nothing for that full-up feel.

But if you blend that water and those solids into a thick soup, the water stays in the stomach because it's become part of the food. So you feel fuller longer and the stomach takes longer to empty than it does with solid-food-plus-water.

There's a hormone called ghrelin. When your stomach's empty, ghrelins rush to the blood stream to knock on your brain and tell you you're famished. When your stomach is full, those ghrelins go to sleep. So you don't feel you must find food at all costs!

Which soup works best? Plain ol' vegetable. It has fewer calories than chicken or fish soup and blends more uniformally, so coats the stomach better.

Isn't that better than sending off for the Acai Diet and getting scammed?

Posted on Wednesday 27th May 2009 in Blog

1 Comment

1. moi

   How about Depression Soup from the 30s--25% tomato ketchup plus hot water.
   
   It built the Hoover Dam.