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Food choices at 'all-you-can-eat' buffet linked to chances of weight gain
During a new study, the University of Kansas researchers analysed people's choices when confronted with an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Kansas: During a new study, the University of Kansas researchers analysed people's choices when confronted with an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The study published in the journal Appetite found out that the food people choose to heap on their plates might predict their chances of having higher weight gain or obesity.
The researchers focused on foods defined as "hyper-palatable," dividing this category into carbohydrate and sodium (CSOD) foods or fat and sodium (FSOD) foods, and compared them with high-energy dense and ultra-processed foods.
"Hyper palatable foods have combinations of ingredients that can enhance a food's palatability and make a food's rewarding properties artificially strong," said lead author Tera Fazzino, assistant professor of psychology at KU and assistant director of the Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research and Treatment at the KU Life Span Institute. "Common examples would be various chocolates, hot dogs, pretzels or brownies -- foods that can be difficult to stop eating."
In the study, younger adults without obesity ate a meal at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The research team measured their body composition before the meal and followed up a year later. The study tracked associations between proportions of buffet items chosen by participants -- high-energy-density foods, ultra-processed foods and hyper-palatable foods -- and participants' weight change and per cent body fat change one year later.
"We were able to look at their behavioural tendency to consume certain types of foods," Fazzino said. "Is that associated with greater energy intake relative to their physiological energy needs, and is it longitudinally associated with weight and per cent body fat gain?"
Fazzino's co-authors were James Dorling, John Apolzan and Corby Martin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Louisiana State University System. They shared the dataset that was analyzed for this study and collaborated on the article.(ANI)