Do People Subconsciously Seek Nutrients? |
October 18th, 2010 |
| ideas, nutrition [html] |
I hear people talk about how cravings are signs that your body is
seeking something it needs. This ought to be testable. What if we
put people on a highly restricted diet that did not have enough of a
vital nutrient, say, potassium. The control group would be taking
potassium supplements so they would be eating almost the same stuff
but still getting the RDA. After people had had a while to become
accustomed to and deficient in that nutrient, we would give them some
choice over what they ate. The prediction would be that the chosen
potassium levels of the experimental group would be higher than those
of the control group.
If this worked, we could do something even cooler: use this to search for other possible needed substances. We have a pretty good handle on what people need to be eating, but we don't know totally. If you repeated this experiment with something like rice, beans, and nutritional supplements, then which foods people chose to eat after being slightly less limited in their choices might indicate that those foods had something we were not accounting for.
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