Unsatisfying ‘healthy’ milkshakes
In a now well-known experiment published 15 years ago, a group of scientists found that what we believe we are eating can affect how our body responds.
A team led by Alia Crum, a psychologist at Stanford University in the US, demonstrated that if participants believed they were eating a decadent high-calorie milkshake, their body’s hormonal response differed depending on what they believed they were consuming – not how many calories they actually consumed.
Participants were given the exact same milkshake but were either told it was healthy and only 140 calories or that it was a 620-calorie “indulgent” shake. In reality, it was only 380 calories.
When participants believed they were drinking the “indulgent” shake, they experienced a significantly sharper drop in the hunger hormone ghrelin, which stimulates appetite and tends to rise when we are hungry and drop when we’re full. But when they were told they were drinking a healthy shake, there was less of a drop in ghrelin.
READ MORE ON THE NEXT PAGE..
