The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat

by Stephan Guyenet

Five years after the machine-feeding studies, Michel Cabanac, a physiology researcher at Laval University in Canada, published another study that supported and expanded upon these findings. Cabanac’s team had a group of volunteers eat an unrestricted bland liquid diet for three weeks, which caused them to spontaneously eat fewer calories and lose just under seven pounds. Then the researchers had a second group of volunteers lose the same amount of weight over the same period of time by deliberately restricting the portion size of their normal diet. Cabanac found that the portion control group developed the expected hunger response to weight loss—but the bland diet group didn’t. He reported that the bland diet volunteers “reduced their intake voluntarily and were always in good spirits,” while the portion control group “had to continually fight off their hunger and would spend the night dreaming of food.” On the bland diet, the starvation response never kicked in. Cabanac concluded that diet palatability influences the set point of the lipostat in humans.