A recent studySee End Note 1 of people chewing food discovered that by listening to the crunching sound study participants ate slightly less volume than those who drowned out the crunch with ambient noises such as TV and radio.
I can hear it now. As if this is a useful study, the news is going to drone on for the next few months about the need to lower your radio or TV when eating your crunchy snacks and foods if you want to lose weight.
What foods are crunchy? Your steak is likely not going to be crunchy! If it is, better change restaurants. Your milkshake is not going to be crunchy; nor, yogurt, fish, cheese, eggs, all the stuff recommended on the American and Mediterranean diets.
What is crunchy, though, are cookies, potato chips, hard candies, stuff that does not deserve the label of “food”and should be labelled, “non foods”.
While this study provides very little useful information for optimising one’s health, it does demonstrate how researchers in the health field, and especially in the packaged foods industry, tend to focus on the tiniest of actions to con people into thinking they are taking healthful steps when making food choices. But crunch is one of the tools used by packaged-foods manufacturers to help further tie people to their products.
You can search this website for “Salt, Sugar, and Fat” to get a quick introduction to Michael Moss’ book that explains how you are being conned by a snack-food industry that uses salt, sugar, and fat, to make you addicted to foods and non-foods. CRUNCH is an important component of consumer enjoyment of snacks.
Addictions are built on temptation of just taking that first step. Repeated pleasures, done often enough, create bad habits that can turn into addictions. Eating salty, sugary, fatty, and CRUNCHY foods often enough can become an addiction. Some manufacturers of snacks rely upon that to boost their sales.
If this study proves it helpful to hear the crunch of our food to lose an insignificant amount of weight, then imagine how much weight people can lose by combining CRUNCHY FOODS with proven-effective-WEIGHT-LOSS FOODS.
A delicious carrot or apple or lettuce? Plenty of crunch.
If you are looking for just one more great reason to switch to a type of food that has been proven for hundreds of thousands of years to provide optimum health and maximum weight management, with very little effort on your part, switch to fresh, plant-based, whole-foods.
If you are looking to lose weight, look no further than veggies and fruits. That’s the skinny on the crunch factor!
END NOTES
- “The crunch effect: Food sound salience as a consumption monitoring cue” By Eldera, Mohrb. SCIENCE DIRECT, Food Quality and Preference. Volume 51, July 2016, Pp. 39–46.
