Sugar and Satiation

Posted on December 3, 2007 in Sugar and Fat

Here’s a conundrum if you diet: exercising self-control can break down your resistance. In other words, if you force yourself not to eat that chocolate, you’ll waste the energy and, in a matter of moments, find yourself eating it anyways.

A group of people were put through what is called a Stroop test and then subjected to blood-glucose level tests:

Participants in this task are shown color words that are printed in different-colored ink (like the word red printed in blue font), and are told to name the color of the ink, not the word. Baumeister found that when participants perform multiple self-control tasks like the Stroop test in a row, they do worse over time.

Researchers discovered that taking the Stroop test ate up blood and muscle glucose. Furthermore:

They found that the group performing the self-control task suffered depletion in glucose afterward. Furthermore, in another experiment, two groups performed the Stroop task two times each, drinking one of two sweetened beverages in between. The control group drank lemonade with Splenda, a sugar-free sweetener; the test group got lemonade sweetened with real sugar. The sugar group performed better than the Splenda group on their second Stroop test, presumably because their blood sugar had been replenished.

Exercise is said to help. But maybe you need to eat that one chocolate so you aren’t gorging yourself in a few minutes time?

The worry that I have is will this become an excuse for me to eat when I shouldn’t? “Oh, I feel that I want that chocolate and I know I shouldn’t, but if I resist, I’ll eat it and more anyways, so why not eat the whole bag now?”

You get the picture.

---

In other news, if you want your child to like fruits and vegetables, eat lots of them while you are breast-feeding.< /p>