What the New UK Law on Stating Calories on Menus Means for You
You might have seen in the news that larger establishments in the UK will now, by law, have to state the number of calories in a food on the menu. You might have seen calorie counts on menus if you’ve eaten out recently.
So you can imagine that a pot of boiled eggs and spinach might say 200 calories and a cookie might say 200 calories…
But here’s the thing – knowing the calorie content of a food tells us nothing about the quality of the food (boiled eggs are different from cookies even though they have the same calorie content) nor do the calories tell us anything about how the body will respond to that food.
If you eat the boiled eggs your gut will make lots of fullness hormones that go up to the brain giving the message – you’re full, you don’t need to eat anything more.
Fantastic, you’ve eaten something filling and can now move on with your day.
Whereas the cookie will lead to a large amount of sugar ending up in your blood and the hormone insulin (the fat-storage hormone) will push much of that sugar into fat storage.
The sugar will also target the reward centre in your brain – giving a pleasure hit or high that quickly disappears setting you up for cravings and seeking out more sugar.
Two foods with the same calorie content but one will keep you full and fat burning the other will put you into fat storage mode and trigger sweet cravings.
How liberating it is that the word calorie plays no part in our way of eating in LML-SatPro.
No counting, no apps, no food diaries.
Just eating real, delicious, filling food (no extra information on the menu required).