Reinhard wrote:
"Why don't snacks diminish our appetite beyond an immediate few minutes? I suspect that our bodies simply don't really register them because they make no sense"
Gastric Emptying
I had a look for ideas around the net about the way the stomach clears itself. The medical phrase seems to be 'Gastric Emptying.' Mmmm....
Anyway; I found
this, which describes the way our bodies process food over time.
Have a look at the first graph on the page;
there's a blue line showing what happens when you eat a meal -- there's a little time before you start clearing it out, then you get rid of the food in a roughly linear way. I wondered if you only get that if you've eaten a big meal; maybe, if you only eat a snack, you immediately begin digesting - the graph goes up but immediately descends. Maybe something special happens for Big Food...
Big Food and Fattynol
And now I have a half-baked theory...
What if that half-an-hour marked something the body does only with big meals? Some kind of 'i have eaten well' signal -- maybe a burst of neurotransmitters that latch on to your hunger glands and says 'whoa, there, big fella!' I'm gonna call this theorised neurotransmitter
Fattynol.
Next time you come to eat, you eat based on how much Fattynol is sloshing around. Low Fattynol == lots of food.
If you snack, you don't get properly full. That means you never get a Fattynol release. Because your Fattynol levels are low when you next eat, you eat loads -- even though you've eaten the extra calories.
Et voila! A perfect explaination. There's no actual evidence for it, but it
is scientific fact.
The Snack That Would Be Lunch.
A few more thoughts.
We seem to have two types of eating event;
1) small eating events, or snacking
2) big eating events, or meals
if Meal-Snack Independence is true, then there must be a threshold, between snack and blow-out meal. The Snack That Would Be Lunch.
That threshold is just enough to count as a meal. Anything over that, and maybe you're eating too much. Below that, and it counts as snacking. The one-plate-that-doesn't-look-stupid rule seems to be a guideline for finding that threshold.
Note how, in this model, it's much worse to eat a slightly too small meal, that doesn't satisfy and makes you feel hungry for hours, than it is to eat a slightly-too-big meal that stops you snacking or feeling hungry as the day wanders on.