Thursday, March 22, 2012

The night before I see the doctor for my annual checkup ...

So I ran across this article online, misleading as most such reports are. Read it carefully:
Seaweed toast can help you eat less: Study
By Mike Krumboltz | The Upshot – 2 hrs 52 mins ago

Enjoy a nice piece of seaweed toast in the morning? Today is your lucky day, weirdo! A new study has found that eating a slice of toast enriched with seaweed could help burn more calories than 30 minutes spent on the treadmill.

During tests conducted at Sheffield Hallam University near South Yorkshire, England, nearly 80% of overweight men who ate a scrambled egg on seaweed toast said they felt so full that they consumed, on average, 179 calories less each day than men who ate regular toast.

According to an article from The Telegraph, none of the men tested could tell the difference between the toasts. The men who ate the seaweed kind reported they felt more full due to a particular agent in the seaweed that acts as a "bulking agent." It gives the stomach a feeling of fullness.
I suppose you noticed that the author says, "A new study has found that eating a slice of toast enriched with seaweed could help burn more calories than 30 minutes spent on the treadmill." Now the study may indeed have found this, but that is not what the information cited says. All it says is that they consumed, on average, 179 calories less each day than men who ate regular toast. This is not at all the same as saying they ate the toast and then burned 179 calories, It just means they did not EAT 179 calories. The article implies the seaweed had an impact on the metabolic rate, whereas the citation only says that the seaweed had an indirect impact on the number of calories consumed, an impact caused by the feeling of fullness.

At any rate, I have eaten seaweed before -- having friends who follow a macrobiotic diet or an Asian one -- and I have to admit it probably made me consume fewer calories. I would not attribute that to the feeling of fullness, though. I think it just ruined my appetite.

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