Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Digestion index needed?

NewScientist informs us that our food labels are way out of date. They don't take into account energy required for digestion:

...digestion - from chewing food to moving it through the gut and chemically breaking it down along the way - takes a different amount of energy for different foods.

...in 2003, a team led by Kyoko Oka at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, investigated the effect of food texture on weight gain. They fed one group of rats their usual hard food pellets, while a second group received a softer version. Both pellets had exactly the same calorie content and flavour. The only difference was that softer ones were easier to chew. After 22 weeks, the rats on the soft food diet were obese and had more abdominal fat.
(Journal of Dental Research, vol 82, p 491)

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