Philip J. Goscienski, M.D.
December 2005
"Eat something. It'll make you feel better." Mom had the right intentions but the wrong solution. That kind of advice has led millions of us to relieve stress or boredom by eating, and ignoring the way nature intended for us to manage our appetite.
Your appestat is a control mechanism that has been fine-tuned for hundreds of generations. That's why it can keep your weight stable within a pound or two from the end of your adolescent years into old age - if you let it. It's a structure deep in the oldest part of the human brain that regulates food intake. Stimuli such as the sight or the aroma of food, or even thinking about it, act to increase our desire to eat. Mental problems such as depression can decrease the appetite and stress can increase it. The flood of appetite-related research and the recent epidemic of obesity have raised the stakes for finding a safe chemical that will regulate appetite downward.
As soon as you take the first few bites of dinner your appetite control mechanism swings into action and starts to send appetite-suppressing signals to the brain. By the time the stomach is filled, which should take about 20 minutes, hunger is usually gone. If that were not enough, nutrients that have been absorbed from that meal into the bloodstream also let the brain know that it's OK to stop eating.
Early humans ate mostly fruits, roots and vegetables. These all contained plenty of fiber and not much carbohydrate. What a contrast to the plump, juicy fruits and vegetables that modern farmers offer to us! Three or four apples from your local supermarket probably have less fiber than one of the Stone Age varieties did, and it's fiber that contributes to a feeling of fullness.
Modern hunter-gatherers, with no access to "civilized" food, take in about 150 grams of fiber a day, just like Stone Agers did. Americans average about 10 grams a day but many of us don't even get that much.
Our distant Stone Age ancestors never drank fruit juice and they certainly never tasted fruit drinks. Fruit drinks, which may not contain any fruit at all, are very recent arrivals and are important contributors to the fattening of our population. The calories that they contain don't seem to register with our appetite-control mechanism that took nature millions of years to develop. When we drink liquid foods they don't trigger the control mechanism, so we take in more calories than our bodies need. Worse still, these nutritional disasters come in supersized containers. It's easy to down a few hundred calories that the brain doesn't notice but that end up as body fat.
Almost all processed foods frustrate our appetite mechanism, too. Foods that are made from fat, sugar and refined flour are so packed with calories in a small volume that we can eat a lot of them within that 20-minute window. For instance, how many donuts can you eat in 20 minutes?
Let your appetite work for you, not against you. For the next 30 days, try more fiber (fruits, vegetables and whole grain bread and cereal) and no fruit juice, fruit drinks or sodas. Let me know how it works.
Philip J. Goscienski, M.D. is the author of Health Secrets of the Stone Age, Better Life Publishers 2005. Contact him at drphil@stoneagedoc.com.