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Japanese Company Makes Low-Calorie Noodles Out of Wood
AmiMoJo writes: Omikenshi Co, an Osaka based cloth manufacturer best known for rayon, a fibre made from tree pulp, is expanding into the health food business. Using a similar process, Omikenshi is turning the indigestible cellulose into a pulp that's mixed with konjac, a yam-like plant grown in Japan. The resulting fibre-rich flour, which the company calls "cell-eat," contains no gluten, no fat and almost no carbohydrate. It has just 60 calories a kilogram, compared with 3,680 for wheat.
Not the point. The point is to reduce the energy density of the food while, hopefully, retaining most of its other characteristics.
Your body does not instantly know when you've ingested enough calories to be satiated. If your food is highly energy dense, it is easy to overshoot. If you have to actually eat for 15-30 minutes to get enough calories for your meal, the odds are far better that you'll feel full after consuming the appropriate amount of calories rather than the double-whammy-megablast that is that second quarter-pounder with cheese.
If your food is highly energy dense, it is easy to overshoot.
It doesn't matter if you "overshoot", as it just means there will be a longer time until you get hungry. The human body is way more precise in long-term energy intake regulation than any bean-counting diet can ever be. Just have a look at groups of people who diet mostly on energy-dense food, like those on ketogenic diets or ethnic groups eating mostly fatty fish and whale meat etc. - those sure don't have an obesity epidemic because of that.
Combine artificial food with an artificial avoidance of motion, and you are much more likely to become obese.
These artificial noodles are as useless to fight obesity as are artificial sweeteners and "fat-substitutes" in dairy products.
A food "calorie" is a kilocalorie, you miron.
I agree with you in spirit, but disagree in terms of basic caloric intake.
Once we have the ability to create tasty foods with effectively no caloric value, it doesn't matter how much our bodies tell us to eat. We can only hold so much worthless food at a time. If we can literally gorge ourselves on near-zero calorie foods, we will have solved obesity, simple as that.
I do have to wonder how our bodies will rebel against this latest way to eat-without-eating, but strictly in terms of energy-budgets, this seems like a win/win.