Posted on 05/27/2009 2:11:33 AM PDT by Schnucki
In the battle to lose weight, hunger is the dieter's worst enemy. But research has revealed a simple aid to taming the appetite: soup. It's dieting's best kept secret says one science writer.
Imagine a typical lunchtime meal - say, chicken and vegetables with a glass of water.
If you eat the food and drink the water, you will feel full for a couple of hours before hunger kicks in. But if you blend the food with the water - to make soup - you will stay hunger-free for much longer, and less likely to snack through the afternoon.
How can blending the food into soup make such a difference? The answer lies in the stomach. Scientists have used ultrasound and MRI scans of people's stomachs to investigate what happens after eating solid-food-plus-water meals compared with the same food made into soup.
After you eat a meal, the pyloric sphincter valve at the bottom of your stomach holds food back so that the digestive juices can get to work.
Water, however, passes straight through the sphincter to your intestines, so drinking water does not contribute to "filling you up".
When you eat the same meal as a soup, the whole mixture remains in the stomach, because the water and food are blended together. The scientists' scans confirm that the stomach stays fuller for longer, staving off those hunger pangs.
The key to this low-tech weapon against hunger is a hormone called ghrelin. It is one of the major players in the body's appetite system.
Discovered as recently as 1999, ghrelin is released by specialised cells in the stomach wall.
'Cupcake circuit'
These cells produce a constant stream of ghrelin whenever the stomach is empty. The ghrelin travels via the blood stream to the brain's appetite centre, an organ called the
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
15 bean soup with a piece of ham, or the generic 16 bean soup, will feed a crowd.
One of my favorite meals is 15 bean soup, homemade bread chuncks with butter, and fruit or salad on the side. I could eat it for days (and have). If beans give you gas, take beano or gas-x. They don’t seem to bother me.
I know that it's hard to find a low-sodium soup. So I just ate the regular soup. But I cut out a lot of other things (potato chips, salted nuts, etc.) and still lowered my blood pressure from about 155 to 120 in three months. Diet pop is another high sodium consumable. I used to drink six to ten cans a day. Cutting down on those things will help cut high blood pressure even with occasionally eating high-sodium soups.
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My pyloric sphincter would have to be my body's smartest sphincter in order to determine whether the water and food arrived there together or in separate swallows?
Agree with 16 (or 15) bean soup in the package, made in the crockpot. Along with the original bean package, soak overnight any additional beans you want to add (try adding 1/2 cup of lentils AND 1/2 cup of black beans). After soaking overnight, discard the soak water, and place sorted beans in the crockpot. DO NOT USE the high salt-added, ham flavoring package that comes in the bean package, but DO add the following for a WONDERFUL flavor:
One pound COOKED ground beef (or 1/2 pound COOKED ground white meat turkey AND 1/2 pound COOKED ground beef);
One can chopped tomatoes and green chilies;
One (or TWO!) chopped onions;
One (or TWO!) cloves minced garlic
Add water to cover everything in crockpot, and cook 8-10 hours till beans are SOFT. If beans are not yet soft, add more water if needed and continue cooking. It sounds complicated, but it’s not, and is very forgiving if you add too much or too little of ANYTHING!
ENJOY!!
Sorry, but NOT buying the premise of this article. A glass of water, drunk by itself, will certainly "pass through". But a glass of water, taken as sips while eating, should act precisely the same as soup. By the time it leaves the mouth, it is already pretty much "soup", as far as its intermixture with food..
L0L!
I love the stuff!
yupper.
Being a bachelor, my dinners consist of cereal, English muffins, and sometimes rice when I attempt to cook something.
My cooking is limited to the toaster oven and microwave and scumming meals off my neighbors once in a while when they feel sorry for me.
My mom couldn't cook worth a damn. Best she made was breaded chicken breast, rice or instant potatoes, and some canned green beans.
And you can have roast beef sandwiches for the next two days!
I wish I had the time for stuff like that. But I don’t usually get home from work till 8:15 or 8:30.
And when Sunday afternoon comes around, I’m beet from all the house cleaning, yard work, wood cutting/splitting ... that all I want to do is relax and go to bed.
Maybe I need a wife. /sarc
Hehe...yes, Seinfeld...this from someone who has never even seen a Seinfeld episode (I don’t watch television, haven’t for about 10 years)
But I have seen clips of this episode, and it does look funny!
See, now you've made me feel sorry for you.
Yes, soup can definitely help you lose weight, especially cabbage soup.
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