Can Menus With Low-Calorie Sections Make Us Fat?

You know those "light and healthy" sections more and more restaurants are putting on their menus? They could be sabotaging your weight-loss efforts: a new study shows that when restaurants create special low-calorie sections on their menus, people tend to automatically rule out those options.

The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, shows that when menus have a separate section specifically for low-calorie options, people are less likely to pick dishes from that section.
"Because most restaurant menus are quite complex -- offering numerous dishes composed of multiple ingredients -- diners try to simplify their decision. People have come to expect low-calorie food to taste bad or not fill them up," study researchers Jeffrey R. Parker, of Georgia State University, and Donald R. Lehmann, of Columbia University, said in a statement. "We propose that by calorie organizing a menu, restaurants make it easier for people to use the general 'low-calorie' label to dismiss all low-calorie options early in the decision process."

The study
The study included four experiments, all of which involved having study participants view menus and then indicate which dish from the menu they would choose, as well as estimate or recall how many calories were in that dish.
For one of the experiments, researchers had 272 people with an average age of 31 look at a menu for Timmy's Diner (a restaurant none of the participants had ever visited before) and choose a dish and beverage. However, not all the participants' menus were the same.

There were three formats for menus: one of them was a traditional menu that just listed all the items, the second was the same as the first one except there was calorie information labeled by each item, and the third was organized by calorie content and included a separate section specifically for dishes under 700 calories. There were two versions of each of these three menus, with one version having the price positively correlated with calories and the other version having the price negatively correlated with calories. (When price is positively correlated with calories, that means people pay less for low-calorie items, and so in theory would be more likely to pick low-calorie items; the opposite goes for when price is negatively correlated with calories.)

The study participants were randomly assigned to have one of these six menus. Researchers found that people given the menus where the calories were listed next to each item (but where low-calorie dishes were not split up into their own category) tended to choose lower-calorie options, compared with those given the traditional menus.

However, people who were given the menus where the low-calorie dishes were in their own separate category chose dishes that were about 11% higher in calories, compared with the dishes chosen by people whose menus only listed the calories by each item.

Bottom line
"Thus, additionally organizing the calorie-posted menus by caloric content largely (though not completely) erased the positive impact of calorie posting," the researchers wrote in the study.
They also noted that the impact of posting calories by each dish in choosing lower-calorie foods was even greater for the menus where the price was positive correlated with calories, "suggesting that price, unsurprisingly, plays a role in consumers' choices."
However, researchers did not find that the calorie-price correlation seemed to affect food choices at all when the participants were given the menus where the low-calorie foods were spun out into their own category. "This supports our contention that consumers use menu categories as a screening criterion," the researchers wrote in the study. "Since many participants likely screened out the under-700-calories options in the consideration set formation process, they would be unlikely to notice the calorie-price correlation, resulting in this factor playing little to no role in their choices."

What do you think about the findings? Do you usually skim right over the "low-calorie" or "diet" sections of menus, since you don't expect the food to be as good? 
My opinion? Don't get freaked out or intimidated by these special labels or menus. Healthy food can be super filling and tasty—so just pick the most appetizing thing you see and stop overthinking it!  

Sources: http://www.eurekalert.org/, http://www.sciencedaily.com/, http://www.womenshealthmag.com/, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

How Food Texture Affects Your Calorie Intake

Creamy butter or ice cream versus a crunchy granola bar: a new study suggests that the texture of foods influences people’s dieting choices.

“We studied the link between how a food feels in your mouth and the amount we eat, the types of food we choose, and how many calories we think we are consuming,” wrote study authors Dipayan Biswas and Courtney Szocs, both from the University of South Florida, and others.

The study

In one experiment, participants were asked to sample foods that had soft, smooth, hard or rough textures and then estimate their calorie amounts.

In another test, volunteers were asked to watch and rate a number of television ads, thinking that was the test. But they were also given cups with bite-sized brownies as a “thank you” for their time. Half of the participants were also asked about the amount of calories in the brownies.

Some of the participants received softer-textured brownies while the other half got crunchier brownies. People who had been asked about the calories in the brownies which forced them to focus on caloric intake — ate more of the crunchy brownies than soft. On the other hand, those whose minds weren’t focused on calories tended to eat more of the soft brownies, the investigators found.

The researchers believe this is due to "oral haptics–calorie estimation," which is the relationship between how much you chew a food and how you perceive the calories. The more you chew, the fewer calories you believe a food has.

Bottom line

As a general rule most people would agree that raw veggies, i.e. a hard food, are low in calories. But maybe the reason you find it difficult to put down your fork (or spoon) down when eating mashed potatoes or ice cream isn’t only the taste that does it, but also the texture.

Interesting, but not all soft foods are high in calories. For example, oatmeal and yogurt are excellent meal choices. Similarly, not all hard foods are low in calories—pretzels, rock candy, and licorice all come to mind for me. As a general rule, though, people eat slower when consuming hard foods, which could lead to less consumption and fewer calories by default.

Really, this area of research needs to be further explored. As the study authors conclude, "Understanding how the texture of food can influence calorie perceptions, food choice, and consumption amount can help nudge consumers towards making healthier choices."

The 'sixth sense' really exists and it is for calories

The brain can "feel" the calories in the food regardless of the mechanisms of taste, there’s evidence from a study conducted on mice by a team of biologists of Duke University Medical Center.

The researchers, who describe their study in an article published in the journal Neuron, have found that the brain's reward system is activated by a sort of "sixth sense". As Ivan de Araujo and his colleagues explain, in the experiment were used genetically modified mice so that the cell receptor that detects the sweet taste lacked an essential protein, making the mice "blind" with respect to the sweet sensation.
Then researchers subjected these modified rats and a group of normal mice to tests where they were given sugar solutions and non-caloric sweeteners. In these tests the mice numb to sweet taste still preferred the sugary, caloric solution; it turned out that all mice brain reward circuits and the levels of dopamine are activated by caloric intake, regardless of the ability to feel the taste.

De Araujo concludes the study has shown that the reward system, which previously had been associated with the detection of a reward value by compounds pleasing to the palate, responds indeed to the caloric value of the sugar when there are no signals from taste receptors. So these brain circuits do not encode only the impact related to the pleasantness of foods, but can perform functions not yet identified which include detection of gastrointestinal and metabolic signals.
The discovery, researchers say, has important implications for understanding the pathogenesis of obesity.

Scheme of the contribution of the insular cortex in food-related processes.
Especially the anterior and mid-dorsal part of the insular cortex respond to
(A) high-caloric food cues and show
(B) increased activation in obese subjects and
(C) in a hungry condition after stimulation with food items.
(D) Lean subjects showed higher resting state connectivity pattern in the salience network, including the insular cortex.
(E) Also patients suffering from an eating disorder show enhanced activation in this region.
(F) Obese subjects’ regulation ability during an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) based neurofeedback paradigm is higher compared to lean subjects.
Source: Frontiers in human neuroscience - PubMed