Longer meals cause you to eat less snack waffles!

Today at the Real Fitness Nerd, we're doing one of my favorite activities: poking holes in scientific studies and the way they're covered in the media. You fancy journalists and scientists may think you're soooooo cool with your little "degrees" and "IQs" and "knowledge." Whatever, Dr. Clever. I got your knowledge right here.

Case in point, this article in the New York Times regarding a study out of the Netherlands asking whether longer meals will cause you to snack less.

Two and a half hours after the beginning of the meal, when the diners were offered an array of traditional Dutch tea treats like apple cake, chocolate-covered marshmallows, peanuts, chips and waffles, they ate almost as much as they did two and a half hours after a meal that they had consumed in 30 minutes.

“We didn’t see a big difference in their energy intake afterward,” Dr. Lemmens said. In fact, the slow diners ate only 10 percent fewer snack calories than when they had consumed their meal quickly, a difference that wasn’t statistically significant.

Let's pounce on the scientists first, shall we? In these two paragraphs alone, I find so many problems. First and foremost, Dr. Lemmens should spell her name "Dr. Lemons" because that would be funnier. Second, "10 percent fewer snack calories" is HUGE. Do the math.

Let's take something from that list as a snacking example. Maybe waffles. I don't know anyone who snacks on waffles, but I'm already offending the Dutch enough in this post, so I'll run with waffles. According to Nutritiondata.com, your standard waffle is about 100 calories. We won't even bother with whatever the Dutch put in waffles - pickled herring or whatever - we'll just have a straight waffle snack. Now, let's say you only waffle snack on weekdays - weekends are waffle-free - and that you have that waffle after you snarf down a 30-minute speed meal. Over the course of a year, that's 260,000 snack waffle calories.

Now, let's say you switch to a longer, more leisurely lunch and therefore cut your waffle intake by 10%, or 90 calories a day. That adds up to 234,000 annual snack waffle calories - a 26,000 calorie difference. Considering a pound of fat equates to about 3,500 calories, that's seven and a half pounds on potential annual waffle weight gain.

(To answer your next question, I believe I wrote "waffle" 13 times.)

I know my example is completely silly (except the pickled herring part. They really eat pickled herring), but it proves the point that even if drawing out your meal decreases your intake of junk food, er, I mean Dutch tea treats, minimally, it's worth considering as an option.

Now it's time to bash the left-wing, commie, Nazi, fascist, liberal, monarchical, intellectual, freedom-hating, east coast journalist who wrote this. The lead states: "Does one leave you more satisfied — and less likely to snack afterward — than the other?" The study isn't about being satisfied, it's about our lame drive to eat junk even when we are satisfied. As Dr. Lemons points out towards the end of the article.

When participants ate the drawn-out meal, their satiety hormones (glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, and peptide tyrosine-tyrosine, or PYY, believed to communicate satiety to the brain and curb the appetite) increased more gradually than after the nonstaggered meal, when they spiked more rapidly. Just before the snacking period, diners who had eaten a drawn-out meal rated their satiety higher and their hunger lower, and their levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases with hunger and is believed to stimulate appetite, were lower.

Yet these differences in hormone levels did not significantly affect how much participants ate of the sweet and salty tea snacks, Dr. Lemmens said, suggesting the availability of tempting foods overrides the body’s internal messages about when to stop eating.

I don't think I'm splitting hairs here. It's important that New York Times readers understand satiety and the drive to eat are two different things. Just because your brain wants junk, it doesn't mean your body needs it. I'd like to see the same study done with carrot sticks and apple slices. That would prove something about satiety. I think the Times would totally leap on that one, given they could recycle the lead from this article.

photo: www.jenlouie.com