Want to cut the amount of salt your family shakes on their food? Stick clear tape over half the holes in the salt shaker. Who knows? It might just work. It certainly did for one study where they found that people shook the salt shaker for a certain time regardless of how much was coming out. When they taped over half the holes, the study subjects unknowingly ended up eating half the amount of salt.

This ’stealth’ method of reducing salt is exactly what many nutritionally responsible food manufacturers

Last week I attended an interesting talk by Dr Sally Poppitt on appetite regulation. She works at the Nutrition Unit in Mt Eden, Auckland – a ten-bed live-in unit where she studies what and how much people eat. “For some of our studies we ask people to eat a test meal and then six to eight hours later eat an ‘ad lib’ lunch. That means they eat as much as they like, of whatever they like, from the free buffet – and we calculate what they have eaten,” she explained. “During those 6-8 hours we ask them to rate how hungry or full they feel”. Just as I was imagining the queue of volunteers attracted by the prospect of a free feed, she mentioned the blood tests. A plastic tube stuck into your arm so the researchers can take blood every hour would certainly stop me from volunteering!

I learned that it’s harder to regulate how many kilojoules you are consuming with liquids compared with solids. This explains why slurping on calorie laden thick-shakes, juices and fizzy drinks are so fattening – you don’t really cut back on the solid food to compensate. There is a similar effect from eating fatty foods – it confuses appetite regulation. Dr Poppitt described one of their studies where they gave overweight women a low fat meal (25% fat) and asked them to eat until they were full. A week later the women came back to the unit to eat exactly the same foods but this time, unknown to the women, the meal was high fat (50%fat). Dr Poppitt commented, “It’s really easy to pack fat into foods without noticing any difference”. On the low fat meal the women felt full and stopped eating at 3000kJ less than when they ate the high fat meal!

I unintentionally did a similar experiment this weekend. On Friday we ate out at our local Italian restaurant. The service is friendly and the food is delicious – just like being in an Italian kitchen with Mama cooking while the four of us enjoyed pizza, veal marsala, veal involtini, chicken parmigiana and a bottle of chianti. I chose the veal marsala which came with perfectly cooked vegetables. It was pretty low in fat and not a huge meal but I was full.

Two nights later came the second part of the experiment. Some of our family had booked us into the restaurant equivalent of the high fat all-you-can-eat buffet. Creamy soups, deep fried vegetables, garlic butter soaked bread, cheese laden pasta, chips, salads with rich creamy dressings and the desserts – rice pudding made with cream, whipped cream slapped onto commercial pavlova and stuffed into commercial brandy snaps, chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, buttery biscuits and slices. My son gleefully filled his dessert bowl with jelly beans, topped with serve-yourself-ice-cream, caramel sauce, chocolate sauce and sprinkles on top – twice!

It’s not really the place a dietitian gets excited about but we didn’t go for the food, we went to spend time with our family – and that was great. But I had to eat and, just as in Dr Poppitt’s study, after two or three visits to the buffet, despite fussily searching for the healthiest food, I’m sure I had eaten way more kilojoules than the veal marsala meal. Actually, I think it was the pavlova and brandy snaps that did it! Have you ever been in that situation where you don’t really like a food but you just keep on eating it? It’s the fat or sugar that does it, I’m sure!

So it’s back to proper food this week – rolled oats, organic sour dough grain bread, home-made hummus, salmon and rice, stir fried beef and vegetables, and apples and mandarins for dessert. My son will thank me one day!

Related:

Veal marsala recipe

Not healthy at all, but a New Zealand favourite, so here it is: Pavlova recipe

… continued from yesterday’s post

4. Eat Breakfast

Eating breakfast is one of the most important habits to develop. Even if it is just a banana and a glass of milk, teach your children that some food in their stomach kick-starts the body for the day making it easier to control weight and giving them energy for work, study and play.

5. Listen to your tummy

“If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding.” Children are born with the ability to stop eating when they are full. But we sometimes unintentionally over-ride this natural regulating mechanism when we make them finish their meal. I do encourage kids to take a few extra bites of the nutritious bits of the meal if they have left too much. If they insist they are full, I let them off – but they don’t get dessert.

Teach older children to listen to their tummy and ask themselves both quantity and quality questions: “Is my tummy full? Will I feel sick if I eat those extra biscuits? Is this what my body really needs right now?” You are training children to be aware of the many cues around them enticing them to eat, even if they are not hungry. Just because they are at the movies or passing the food hall at the shopping centre, do they really need to eat? If an advertisment shows a gorgeous model eating chocolate biscuits or a famous sportsman eating fast food, ask them if they think eating that food will really help them look like that model or be as fast as that sportsman. Do they eat that stuff in real life? What else do they do to look or perform like that? Will eating a certain food or drink give them the same lifestyle and friends as on the advert? If the answer is yes, are they the type of friends they really want?

6. Sit at the table to eat

There’s a time to play, a time to work, a time to rest and a time to eat. All too often the ‘time to eat’ is all the time! We balance dinner on our lap in front of TV, we stuff in a sandwich while continuing to work, and we grab snacks on the run. Train your children to focus on food when it’s meal time and then forget it until the next meal time. This means eating regular meals, sitting at the table – with no distractions. It not only reduces snacking, grazing and the risk of choking as you run around with food in your mouth, it also teaches social skills such as table manners, how to use a knife and fork, how to talk over a meal and patience to wait while others finish.

7. Eat Slowly

I spend my professional life telling people to slow down and enjoy their food, then find myself at home telling the kids to “hurry up and eat!” As much as we would love our children to finish their meal in minutes rather than hours, it won’t be too many years before we will be nagging those same kids to slow down and chew their food ‘properly’ rather than inhaling it. This is a good time to remind them that it takes about 20 minutes for the message to get from their stomach to their brain that they are full. So eating slowly is great for weight control. It also gives them time to chat – preferably without their mouth full!

8. Enjoy Cooking

Children are more likely to become discerning, adventurous eaters if they know how to cook. OK, we all know of overweight chefs but at the very least your future son or daughter-in-law will thank you! Give children their own apron – it’s half the fun of cooking – and let them help you in the kitchen. Buy a kids cook-book for inspiration and as they become more confident let them cook dinner once a week.

9. No routine visits to fast food outlets

As a child I used to think the kids who had fish and chips every Friday night were so lucky. As an adult I am glad this wasn’t part of my childhood training. If kids are trained to associate fast food with good feelings – as a reward for winning Saturday morning sport or as a fun family outing – what are the chances they will go to the sushi bar as adults?

10. Be a role model

Actions speak louder than words. What we teach should be what we do. Like any elite athlete, put the effort into training your children now and you are sure to reap the rewards later.

Hey guys! How’s the state of your machinery? You know – your car, your lawn mower, your computer – your body? Which one do you service the most? It’s illegal to drive a car in New Zealand without an annual warrant of fitness. But there’s no law requiring a body warrant of fitness – perhaps there should be. Whether it’s your car or your body, if it crashes, you’ll likely hurt more than just yourself.

We all know machines seize up when they’re not used for ages. Your body is no different. In fact your body is worse – nuts and bolts don’t shrink from lack of use but muscles do – and fast! Same for our brain! Our body is designed with the largest muscles in the legs, not the butt. Does that give you a clue as to what we are meant to be doing most of the day?

Yeah, yeah. I know this applies to girls as well. But you blokes are notorious for ignoring your body until something serious happens – like sudden death (which is one of the first symptoms of heart disease)! And us girls don’t want faulty machines in our lives (I was thinking this as I vaccuumed today). We want our men to be mean machines – or at least healthy and happy.

Yesterday I finished teaching a 10-week nutrition course. At the graduation one of the guys spoke about his life. As a kid he was poor but active and healthy. Then he got a job – and money. Where did it go? Burgers, pies, chips. Then he bought a car. No more walking to get takeaways – he could drive. One day he was playing basketball and found he could hardly jump to reach the goal. He was shocked. He went home, looked in the mirror and … where did THAT GUT come from? He finished by saying, “You choose the food you eat, you choose your lifestyle – good or bad.”

It reminds me of some other words of wisdom: “I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live…”

So take that body for a service, move those muscles, swallow the right fuel and remember – you’ve only got one body – no trade-ins possible! Us girls love you – and we want you around for a long time.