Food & life · 2018
Do a smoothie and its fresh-fruit equivalent differ in how much less people eat at the next meal?
This experiment found no clear difference. In healthy adults, a smoothie and its fresh-fruit equivalent, matched for energy and similar in volume, did not differ detectably in how much people reduced their next-meal energy intake compared with water. Meals were served either 2 minutes or 2 hours later; this does not establish that the foods have identical effects.
Details
Researchers compared water, blackcurrant squash, milk, a fruit smoothie and the fresh-fruit equivalent of the smoothie before a test meal. Each option except water provided 569 kJ, and volumes were similar. The meal followed after 2 minutes for 23 participants or 2 hours for 24 participants.
People felt fuller when an option seemed more like food, and fullness also varied with how quickly it was consumed. But that feeling did not translate into a detectable difference among the energy-containing options in how much less energy people ate at the next meal relative to water. The reduction offset 82% of the energy consumed beforehand at the 2-minute interval, versus 12% at the 2-hour interval.
The central finding is that feeling fuller and eating less at the next meal were not interchangeable outcomes here. The experiment examined short-term meal intake in healthy adults, not when hunger returned or whether smoothies and fresh fruit have the same long-term effects on eating or weight.
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