Page 16 - Nutrinsight-4

NutrInsight • Satiety: from appetite sciences to food application
MECHANISMS oF ACTIoN oF PoLyPHENoLS: 3 BENEFITS oF SATIETy To THE CoNSuMER
NEWLy EMERgINg EVIDENCE
Pr Marion Hetherington, Professor of Biopsychology, Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, UK
Consumers want products which promote fullness, satisfaction and satiety. Food companies have responded to consumer interest by developing products with satiety claims. Diet containing foods which have enhanced satiety features could provide benefits for appetite and weight management.
Since a variety of foods with enhanced-satiety claims are now proposed to consumers, a crucial question has to be addressed: What are the potential benefits of enhanced satiety and appetite control to the consumer? The objectives of the present chapter will be, first, to describe satiety claims and consumers’ understanding of them, and then to examine experimental evidence of enhanced satiety effects and the potential benefits to the consumer. These elements were addressed in a recent publication reporting the work of an ILSI Expert group [Hetherington et al., 2013].
3.1 Satiety claims and consumer understanding
Satiety claims on marketed products
Numerous foods have been developed in order to optimise the satiety effects following ingestion. Such foods include dairy products (yoghurt, milkshakes of various types), cereals, ready-to-eat meals, as well as snack foods (chocolate bars), among other categories. Various claims appear on the packaging of these foods. These claims promise a reduction in hunger or an increase in the duration of fullness following ingestion. While some are fairly simple (“fuller longer”), others suggest complex bio-physiological mechanisms (“re-programs appetite to reduce hunger and cravings”). Regardless of their particular wording, it is important to assess the consumer’s understanding of “satiety claims”.
Consumer understanding of satiety and “satiety claims”
A number of recent scientific publications have addressed the issue of the consumer’s understanding of satiety itself and of “satiety claims”. A qualitative study of British consumers through the use of focus groups [Murray & Vickers, 2009] revealed that consumers describe hunger and fullness as having both physical and psychological components, which are experienced as either typical or extreme. They describe the state of fullness following a meal as:
• “a feeling of food in the stomach”, • “stomach stretch”,
• “satisfaction”,
• “lack of desire to eat”.
These notions clearly focus on gastric signals at the end of a meal but they also reflect the experienced absence of the desire to consume foods that extends for some duration following meals. While these dimensions are among the important features of the “Satiety Cascade” elaborated by scientists over the last 20 years, consumers do not typically use the term “satiety” to describe the between-meal inhibition of eating.
16