Originally published August 28 2005
Eating habits are related to your surroundings, Cornell researchers find
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Eating behaviors, such as portion size, are related to the environment you are in, Cornell researchers recently found.
When a group of 12 normal-weight men and women, average age 31, agreed to overeat by 35 percent for two weeks, they gained an average of 5 pounds, half of it body fat.
"The study suggests that eating behavior does not normally respond to internal cues, such as physiological mechanisms involved in the regulation of body weight, but to external cues," said David Levitsky, professor of nutritional sciences and of psychology at Cornell.
The results add to the growing evidence that environmental cues, especially portion size, appear to be a major determinant of how much we eat, he said.
This finding runs counter to the current view that food intake is largely determined by biological mechanisms.
Despite not eating less or exercising more after gaining weight, the participants still lost about half of their weight gain in the three weeks after the overeating phase because their metabolic rate spontaneously increased.
"The spontaneous increase in metabolic rate that we found in the subjects after overeating was remarkably consistent with a comparable overfeeding study in animals, as well as with other studies with humans and overeating."
He plans to conduct a study in the fall to examine how much additional energy is expended when carrying around extra weight.
It is well known, he said, that obese people have higher energy expenditures than nonobese people, and his study is an example of weight being regulated passively without any control of food intake.
A number of his previous studies found that the amount animals and people eat is strongly determined by portion size, and that eating between meals, or eating a very large or very small (or no) previous meal does not influence how much is eaten at the next meal.
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