Sensory Specific Satiety / Flavor Satiety (Nutrition For Health and Hypertrophy Part 24)

Continued from Part 23 where we talked about the satiety levels of various foods.

Satiety is not just about individual foods, but also about your overall diet that you eat every day.

If I feed you chocolate and ice cream after every meal, you will end up massively overeating your calories and get fat (this is the reality of most people who eat extra sugar after their meals – I strongly recommend replacing it with diet soda if you must have something sweet, because diet soda has no calories).

On the other hand, if I feed you nothing but chocolate (and of the same type, texture, and flavor), you will in just a few short days get bored and SICK AND TIRED of it, and will eat less of it, and could even get to the point where you eat so little that you start losing a lot of weight.

The point is, there is more to satiety than the food itself. FOOD/FLAVOR VARIETY is a factor.

Habituation

Habituation is an ancient nervous system learning mechanism where the more you are exposed to a certain type of stimulus, the less you respond to it.

It’s so ancient that it is widespread across animals with a nervous system, including the ones that branched off from our evolutionary path a long time ago, like insects and jellyfish.

When a stimulus is new, it triggers a stronger response because the stimulus could be important.

When you are exposed to a certain stimulus repeatedly (especially in a short period of time), and there are no consequences for that stimulus, the nervous system responds to it less and less.

This is why people who work in places that have constant background music playing (lots of shops for example) learn to tune it out and don’t even notice that music is playing.

Essentially, this is the nervous system learning to focus on what is novel, which is more likely to be important than something that it’s being exposed to repeatedly without consequence.

Sensory Specific Satiety

Research shows that food satiety involves habituation to the sensory properties of that food. It is based on the type of stimulus you’re sending to your brain.

To put it in another way, when you are satiated (feel full), it’s in part because the neurons responsible for responding to (the reward value of) the sensory properties of that food (sweet flavor stimulus, salty flavor stimulus, fatty content stimulus, umami flavor stimulus, etc.) are not responding to it as much. They have habituated.

Note: Sensory properties also include things like smell, texture, temperature, etc. I simplified it only to flavor because it’s usually the strongest factor.

So if you’ve had a nice meal, which is usually savory (salty flavor stimulus, spicy flavor stimulus, and often fat content stimulus), you can be so full that you couldn’t eat another bite of that meal.

But what happens when desserts and ice cream come around?

Because the sensory profile is different (dessert and ice cream are sweet flavor stimulus), you can suddenly eat a lot more despite being so full that you can’t eat another bite of the savory meal.

I’ve seen guys eat 500-1000 extra calories after their meals after claiming to be full. It’s not a “second stomach” as guys often joke around, but a second sensory/flavor profile.

Food Variety Leads to Overeating (Buffet Effect)

You ever go to a buffet and then track your calories afterwards?

It could be a wedding buffet, or a paid buffet restaurant, or just lots of different foods at a party.

You will have noticed that you ate far more calories than you normally do (even when the food is not particularly great).

The reason is because buffets have so many different types of foods that you get to exhaust almost every flavor profile before you just cannot eat anymore.

You’ll have a savory dish, then a spicy dish, then a sweet dish, etc. and rack up hundreds and hundreds of extra calories before you are full (and then sometimes you can still eat some more… we simply did not evolve to not overeat highly palatable foods in rich variety).

The long story short is that if you do not want to become overweight, you should limit the amount of food variety you are exposed to in each meal.

(We’re talking about highly palatable calorie dense foods here. If you add a bowl of vegetables or something highly satiating like that – see satiety levels of various foods, you will usually increase food satiety even though you’ve increased food variety.)

Eat one or two things till you are full, and skip the dessert.

If you are one of those people who’ve built a habit out of eating sugary food after meals (and it is a nasty habit that will make you crave sugar after every meal), use diet sodas to satisfy those cravings.

Diet soda gives you the same sweet taste without the calories.

Either that or take the Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program to fix the habit for good. Breaking this sugar habit alone can help you lose a ton of fat because it cuts off a lot of extra calories.

That’s all for this piece.

In the next few parts of this series, I’ll talk about set and settling points.

Your man,

Harsh Strongman