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Google Glass Could Be the Virtual Dieting Pill of the Future
MrSeb writes "In a year or two, augmented reality (AR) headsets such as Google Glass may double up as a virtual dieting pill. New research from the University of Tokyo shows that a very simple AR trick can reduce the amount that you eat by 10% — and yes, the same trick, used in the inverse, can be used to increase food consumption by 15%, too. The AR trick is very simple: By donning the glasses, the University of Tokyo's special software 'seamlessly' scales up the size of your food. You pick up an Oreo cookie, and then the software automatically scales it up to 1.5 times its natural size. Using a deformation algorithm, the person's hand is manipulated so that the giant Oreo appears (somewhat) natural. In testing, this simple trick was enough to reduce the amount of food eaten by 10%. The inverse is also true: shrinking the Oreo down to two-thirds its natural size increased food consumption by 15%. This new research dovetails neatly with an area of nutritional science that has received a lot of attention in the United States of Obesity recently: That the size of the serving/plate/cup/receptacle directly affects your intake. The fact is, there's a lot more to dieting than simply reducing your calorific intake and exercising regularly. Your state of mind as you sit down to eat, and your perception of what you're eating, are just as important — which is exciting news, because both of those factors can be hacked."
Where Google would be peddling pills that increase size.
As a wearer of bifocals, I've seen the effects of objects being magnified and its dimensions being distorted form reality. But, I've also seen that the brain learns to compensate for this within a day or two and everything returns to normal.
I suspect that if one was to experience this distortion only when eating that it might take a while longer for the brain to compensate. But, compensate it will.
If you want to lose weight, eat less! You fat bastard!
Actually, that's more or less true - a number of studies have found that blue (color of food, color of room, etc.) suppresses appetite. Some molds are blue, so it's plausible that there's an evolutionary advantage to being disgusted by blue food.
What do you mean? Copper ore? Tin ore? Iron ore?
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I think the real question is, do we take visual indicators of food intake based on experience, or is it hard wired? If the former, this trick will only work for a while until your brain finally realizes "hey, I'm not getting as much food as I used to, maybe I should adjust portion sizes up", and now all of a sudden you are used to eating portions that "look" much bigger, and the gain from such trickery is lost.
Not to mention what might happen when you stop using the glasses - all of a sudden all the food appears much smaller, and you think you can eat more of it.
I don't know about others, but I always decide what I'm going to eat beforehand. Then I always finish what's on my plate. Maybe a couple of times a year if I'm feeling ill or something, I will take a break and finish my food later.
The last couple of nights I've had 14" stuffed crust plain pizza with extra meat toppings that I added myself. I'm 6'1" and 168lbs (185cm, 76kg). I get regular light to moderate exercise, and eat whatever I want. The key being that I don't want to eat sugary snacks and drinks. I actually find it hard to keep my weight on unless I eat a lot - whereas when I was eating donuts and drinking fizzy pop type drinks every day, I was slowly gaining weight.
which is totally what she said
What you mean "we"? Free will is wishful thinking. There is only the laws of physics. The laws of physics are either deterministic or probabilistic(statistically deterministic). There's no room for anything to be "free", it would violate f=ma.
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Google Glass has a display in the top right corner of your view - the majority of your vision is unobstructed. Look at the photos of the product being worn (not the "one day" concept reel) and think about where in your view-space the screen will exist.
Something like the Oculus Rift + head mounted cameras? Sure. Google Glass in it's current form? No chance.
Don't confuse philosophy with physics. The latter in particular has moved somewhat beyond Newton.
One important factor to consider is that how much you eat in a single sitting is just your brain's estimate of how much food you need at the moment to maintain your metabolism. ...and, since foods vary in calorie density, it's often wrong.
It makes up for this the next day. If it consumed more energy then it thought, you'll be less hungry. If it consumed less, you'll be more hungry.
So that this might work for a single meal isn't much of a surprise. I'd expect it to fail for any long-term use, however.
To lose weight, one would do much better to simply stop eating Oreos. See Sugar: The Bitter Truth for more information. After simply cutting sugar from my diet, but otherwise eating as much as I wanted to, I lost 75 pounds over 6 months. The only difficult part is the first two weeks, over which it becomes painfully obvious that sugar is addictive since, no matter how much you eat, you're still hungry until you eat something with sugar in it. Once you break that addiction, however, losing weight isn't hard at all. So just stock up on jalapeno poppers and other tasty sugar-free foods and over-consume them for the first two weeks so that you aren't tempted to consume any sugar. Once the addiction is broken, your brain will start regulating your appetite in response to your leptin levels exactly the way nature intended, and you'll just naturally no longer want to overeat.
Is this only a temporary effect, though? I could imagine that your mind creates an association between the size of the food you see and the amount of fullness you feel, but if you start changing your visual perception, I could imagine that this visual/feeling-of-fullness connection could be changed. If true, then you'd reduce your consumption for a short period of time (maybe weeks or months), but then your perception would change, you'd begin eating normally (despite the larger appearance of food), and if you stop using the glasses, maybe you'd continue eating larger portions until your mind re-adjusted itself in the reverse direction.
(A slightly bizarre effect would be that you'd become dependent on the glasses to maintain your weight. If you stop using the glasses, you'd go through a short-phase of gaining weight again.)
Does the constant advertising of overly large portions of food also train us to think that such portion sizes are normal? And if we eat a healthy size instead, do we feel like we're not having enough?
The real question here is, how long will it be before the brain adapts to this trickery? Not like we eat less of "large" food like popcorns, we just eat a bucket full of them.
Glass doesn't have the ability to change the appearance of things in your field of vision. It deliberately places its screen above and to the right of your normal area of vision so as not to obscure your visual field. For this to work with Glass, you'd have to carefully only look at what you're eating in the Glass screen... and it would probably take a lot of practice to learn to navigate the cookie to your mouth while watching it in the Glass screen. Might be easier if you looked at it in the screen and then closed your eyes before trying to eat.
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If you're eating 14" stuffed crust pizzas with added meat toppings, you are eating serious amounts of crap food. You're just lucky enough that your metabolism is capable of handling it.
Not exactly correct. There's a significant difference in base metabolic rate between different individuals. For a given individual your rate slows as you age, but there can be big differences between individuals of the same age. Men and women are different too, men can eat more.
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Starches break down to glucose. sugar (sucrose) breaks down to fructose and glucose. Glucose can be used by most of the cells in the body. Fructose is mainly processed by the liver (a few other things can use it). Again calories are not all the same.
It is easier to get a fatty liver from consuming sucrose or fructose (or alcohol for that matter), than from consuming starch (which is still harmful in excess). http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Heart_Letter/2011/September/abundance-of-fructose-not-good-for-the-liver-heart
You are more likely to get gout too: http://www.bmj.com/content/336/7639/309
If you don't have an active lifestyle consuming lots of starch is likely bad for you, but consuming lots of sugar or fructose is a lot worse.
For a similar serving, spaghetti has about the same glycemic index as apples, for double the carbs, and pasta is low fructose. So if it weren't for the other nutrients eating al-dente spaghetti (GI goes up if you over-boil ;) ) would be healthier than apples- especially since you only need to eat half the amount for the same calories. And if you can get similar nutrients from other sources (berries) you can skip the apples. Apples aren't that nutritious a food. Even potatoes are more nutritious. If you want a lower glycemic index for your potato - consume them cold ( https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/25731/1/Kinnear_Tara_S_201011_MAST_thesis.pdf ). Then you end up with more resistant starch (however that may make you fart more ;) ). Or switch to yam/sweet potatoes.
For reference: http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Glycemic_index_and_glycemic_load_for_100_foods.htm