We all know the adage that Chinese food will leave you feeling hungry an hour later. Although it may seem like something people just say, there’s actually truth to it. But in order to understand the reason, you must first understand preservatives.
A preservative is a substance that retards food spoilage and extends shelf life — in other words, it keeps it from going bad. Pick up any food item and read the ingredients; you will undoubtedly find many words you can’t understand, including disodium EDTA, hydrolyzed soy protein, tripolyphosphate, and (probably the only one you will recognize) monosodium glutamate (MSG).
While all of these complicated words sound like the verbal dribbling of a mad scientist captured by a court stenographer, they are just the names of different preservatives. And the one thing they all have in common is they kill off bacteria or inhibit it from eating the food.
Most of us have grown up believing that bacteria are our enemy, with our moms, Lysol and soap TV commercials, and the family doctor all convinced that bacteria must be killed before it kills first. Plus, we can make food last longer on the shelf (and even taste better, as in the case of MSG) with the addition of preservatives. But what does that have to do with that MSG-laden take-out container that leaves you hungry an hour later? For that, we take a quick field trip inside your intestines.
Your body gets its energy from food, which is broken up in your mouth (where it’s mixed with saliva to lubricate it) before taking a ride down to your stomach, where it’s sterilized and broken down further by stomach acid. Simple compounds like sugar get absorbed into your blood stream directly through your stomach lining, but other, more complicated elements head further into the digestive track.
The conversion of certain vitamins and nutrients actually take place in your intestines. And the things that do the actual converting are bacteria! Yes, those horrible little creatures we’re so busy trying to wipe out from the face of the Earth are not only inside you, but they’re trying to help you.
The point I’m trying to make here is that preservatives kill bacteria or keep bacteria from being able to break down food. When you eat preservatives, the bacteria living in your gut can’t break the food down into nutrients, causing you to absorb mostly sugar and fat while letting the good stuff pass you by.
Your body knows this even if you don’t. So you eat that bowl of noodles or a fast food burger, and although you know you just ate, your body knows it’s not really going to get many nutrients from the preservative-soaked meal. So an hour later it says, “Hey, buddy! This junk you just fed me was just for show. I’m hungry again. I need real food!” And hence, you find yourself craving more a short time later.
So why have people picked Chinese food as the common butt of this colloquial statement and not fast food or subs?
The answer is fat. That bowl of Chinese noodles has less fat than a sack of burgers from McDonalds or Burger King, and will sit in your stomach for a lot less time. But it’s not just Chinese food. Subway subs can also be relatively low in fat and pass through to the intestines faster, triggering the “Feed me real food” phenomena much sooner.
Now that you know why some foods make you feel hungry after you eat them, you may want to avoid them or just have them less often. A healthy low-preservative or preservative-free meal will not only make you feel full longer, but also fill you up with actual nutrition.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2012.