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On this episode of The Daily Dot we're chatting about snacking and what the research says about snacking and hunger. Snacking advocates like to talk about snacking, helping manage your appetite, but is this really based in evidence? It's dollop time! Hey, hey, my name's Kate.
I'm a registered nutritionist, and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start. And so, I'm changing the conversation. You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health. Every weekday will dollop an episode into your feed covering everything from busting nutrition myths, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics, and habits for a healthy life.
My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free, and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy, everyday advice. Let's do this. Welcome back to The Daily Dot Talk House, everyone.
We are deep into a week-long series on snacking, where we have looked at what the evidence says about snacking and your health, snacking and body weight, and today, snacking and hunger. Before we get snacking to the episode, I do want to just discuss this idea of managing your appetite and what that means. So, for those of you who've been listening to the show for a little while, you will know that my practice has changed a little bit over the years and that I used to do weight loss and talk about weight loss. I was a weight loss expert and help people with weight loss.
Now I do what's called weight-neutral nutrition and I've changed a little bit. So, my idea of managing your appetite has changed somewhat because of the context in which I practice. And certainly from a weight loss perspective, managing your appetite is all about how do we help the client not feel so hungry all the time so that they can stick to the structured eating pattern so that they can remain in an energy deficit, which is the only evidence-based way to lose weight. And even then, not all bodies respond metabolically to an energy deficit in the way that we want them to.
But that would be what appetite management is about, you know, eating in a way that helps you feel satisfied on a lower amount of energy. Now that I do health-first nutrition where the goal is long-term health and not a smaller body and we treat weight as a side effect, it's not that it's not important, but we're just going, if we were to eat in a way that was healthy, that met your body's energy needs and your nutrient needs and that you were enjoying and feeling good, what is your weight, then that's the right weight for you. So, that's how I sort of tackle weight now. And for me, in this context, appetite management is how is the way that I'm choosing to eat either snacking or maymills, et cetera, making my body feel?
Do I feel adequately energized? Do I feel like I've got enough energy to do what I need to do? Can I concentrate? Can I make decisions?
Can I exercise? Am I feeling good? Or am I under eating and I've actually got this low-level underlying hunger and I just feel irritable and lethargic and I want to get up and go to the pantry every hour and I just can't stop. Like I'm just feeling unsatisfied.
And so, certainly from that perspective, appetite management is about, all right, how can we eat in a way that's fueling and nourishing our bodies well long-term and we're feeling good in our bodies. So, let's look at what the research says. So, essentially, the first point is, reduction in perceived hunger and appetite at a subsequent meal with increased meal frequency has been shown in most studies, however, not in all studies. And this is very interesting.
I've frequently talked to clients over the years when I used to work with them about the benefits of snacking to manage your appetite. And I would say things like eating a snack between lunch and dinner will mean that you're less hungry at dinner and less likely to overeat. So, the evidence suggests that the first part of the recommendation, like less hungry at dinner, might be the case, but not all studies actually support this. So, my experience with clients tells me that this is true for a chunk of clients.
There are a chunk of them who planning a snack between lunch and dinner means they're less hungry at dinner and they're able to make more rational decisions about what they want to eat for dinner and they feel good about those choices. Whereas, for other people, it makes no difference to them. It's not true. And so, a good nutritionist and health practitioner, in my opinion, uses both the evidence and their professional experience to refine and hone their professional judgment with working with individuals, which is something I try to do all the time.
So, when I read this evidence, I was like, this is really interesting. Okay, cool. It sort of half backs up what I would like to teach people, but it also explains what I see when I am working with clients. So, my next question was then, well, if regular eating might make you feel less hungry, does it actually make you eat less at your next meal?
And that was the thing I wanted to investigate further. And this is what I found. Overall, the evidence suggests a weak reduction in perceived hunger with snacking or increased meal frequency. And there is insufficient evidence that snacking reduced energy intake at subsequent eating occasions.
So, there you go. Again, when we think about all the variables that go into food choice, hunger, appetite, we can see it's obviously very difficult to measure all these elements in a scientific experiment to draw some conclusions. So, for me, saying things like, well, eating a snack in between lunch and dinner will make you eat less at dinner. That's not evidence-based.
It might make you eat less at dinner. And we can logically draw conclusions from thinking about the way that our body uses energy and other things that we know the body, but we do need to be careful about the statements that we make. And I just found this really interesting. So, there you go.
Anyway, the next thing I found, though, is hunger is not linear or logical. And studies show that the feeling of hunger changes as the body adapts to its current eating pattern. For example, in Ramadan studies, so the Muslim religion practice Ramadan, which is long periods of fasting throughout the day, in the Ramadan studies, perceived hunger in the women changed by the end of the fasting period. So, the way that they perceived hunger was different at the end of the fasting period than it was at the beginning.
Boom! Like, you just can't put logical and linear thinking on this aspect of humanity because it's not. And I just think to myself, God, I love my job. Do you mean?
Well, so that's a lot. The other thing that I learned was that hunger is a learned response and is associated with environmental stimuli. You can condition yourself to feel hunger with particular cues in the absence of true hunger. Therefore, it's possible that the intake of food during specific times of the day is not solely related to an energy deficit or an internal appetite signal, but can be actually just a conditioned response.
This means that consumption of food often occurs when we're not in a physiologically hungry state. Oh, my gosh. Have you ever felt compelled to eat, but you're not truly hungry? I absolutely have.
And do you feel compelled to snack on something like while you're doing another activity, like watching TV? Or do you want to drink Coca-Cola when you eat takeaway pizza? Do you want to sit down on the couch and want chocolate after you've put your toddler to bed? Do you pick at food while you're cooking dinner or cleaning up?
Right. These are all examples of environmental conditioning, which can potentially explain like genuinely feeling hungry or a drive to eat in the absence of true hunger. And I just, it just fascinates me so much. What an incredible area of human behavior just blows my mind every time.
All right. So the next thing that I learned is that the onset of physiological hunger is a subtle reduction in blood glucose levels, which then access the key mediator for turning on all the different other mechanisms within the body and the hormones and everything to initiate true hunger. So our team at ALA Health are really passionate about helping you tune in and listen to your body so that you can learn what these messages feel like and understand them more acutely. It's something that we are really good at when we're toddlers and babies and we are trained to not listen to it as part of many aspects of our culture.
But this skill has huge ongoing benefit for feeling good in your own skin, feeling confident with food choices and helping you feel in command of your appetite. So there is a physiological cue for true hunger. But get this and I'm going to finish today's episode with this bombshell. In an environment with no cues, no time, so there's no clocks, no visual cues, no kitchen or ads on TV, no activity cues, like you're not doing anything, there's no routine.
The time interval between intake of food and the subsequent decline in blood glucose levels and thus the feelings of hunger depends on the energy density and macronutrient composition of food and then the rate of energy expenditure, so how active are you? Now I know this was a mouthful, so let's break it down. So if you were in a room with no windows for 24 hours, your hunger would be solely dictated by your drop in blood sugar levels, not by the clock or seeing something yummy and your colleague offering your biscuit, right? The time between you eating something and your blood sugar levels dropping again and then triggering hunger feelings is dependent on the amount and types of food and its nutrient composition, so fats, proteins, carbs that you ate at the meal or snack before.
And then it's dependent on how much energy your body is using at the time, like are you running on the spot or on a treadmill in your room without windows and clocks? What a whole thing, it is actually unethical to put people in rooms without windows and conduct experiments like this over a long period of time, so they've just done really short studies and things like that, but isn't that fascinating, right? So we have this physiological element of hunger and then that is affected by the types of food we eat and how much energy, and of course if we remove all the cues, our body feels like we eat based on the food we eat and how much energy we're expending, right, when it's next needs that next lot of fuel, but we don't live in a white room with no windows. Does it have to be white?
I don't know, a blank room with no windows. We live in the world with cues and we have this whole psychological element. So my anecdotal reflection is, if I eat a handful of barbeque shapes, which arguably is the best flavor of shapes, I'm probably genuinely hungry about one to two hours later, and there wasn't really that much energy in that little fun bag of shapes, right? And they were mostly refined carbohydrates.
But if I go out for breakfast and I have a coffee and a big breakfast, so eggs, bacon, sausage, mushroom, tomatoes, toast, hash brown, I'm usually not hungry for at least five to six hours after a meal like that. And I also frequently feel more hungry on days that I exercise compared to days when I don't. So some food to thought, but join me for tomorrow where we're going to keep talking about snacks and we're going to get into practical things. What should we snack on?
We'll catch you then. The Daily Doll Podcast is proudly brought to you by Ayla Health. Build food confidence and learn how to choose foods that are right for you and your body. Download the app today and build habits that last.
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