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Editorial
Dr France Bellisle
Faculty of Medicine, Laval University, Quebec.
Centre de Recherche en Nutrition Humaine d’Ile de France, Université Paris, Bobigny, France
The 20th International Congress of Nutrition held by the International Union of Nutrition Societies in Granada in September 2013 hosted a symposium devoted to satiety, its importance in human nutrition and energy balance, and the recent developments in the understanding of its mechanisms of action. The symposium was organized by Mondele-z International and included presentations by five of the major experts in the field. This booklet will provide a summary of the five symposium presentations.
In an opening talk, Professor John Blundell, Chair of the PsychoBiology Department at the University of Leeds and world leading expert of the scientific investigation of satiety, presented satiety as a major determinant of appetite control. He defined the concept (the inhibition of intake that follows the ingestion of foods and drinks) and presented the central notion of the “Satiety Cascade” illustrating both the behavioural manifestations of satiety and the underlying peripheral and brain mechanisms allowing the inhibition of eating following a meal. Chapter 1 presents the highlights of Pr. Blundell’s talk.
Pr. Blundell insisted on the importance of rigorous assessment of satiety both in terms of effects on actual intake and in terms of experienced sensations. The next presentation in the Symposium was by Dr. Sophie Vinoy who presented a novel approach to the assessment of satiety by combining the use of validated Visual Analogue Scales with training techniques developed in sensory analysis. This novel method was developed conjointly by the Nutrition Research and Consumer Science Departments of Mondele-z International. Chapter 2 describes successive steps in training panels of “satiety experts”, and then using their fine discriminations to screen and rank foods varying in their nutrient composition. This approach can help the development of foods with optimal satiety power and guide the selection of food prototypes in large scale clinical trials.
Pr. Marion Hetherington of the University of Leeds then addressed the benefits of satiety to consumers. In Chapter 3, Pr. Hetherington reviews various satiety claims that are associated with many types of foods and the consumer’s understanding of such claims. The risk that consumers might equate enhanced satiety claims with slimming claims is not supported by recent evidence. There are numerous reports of short-term satiety effects inhibiting or reducing intake and appetite sensations, but it is presently unclear how satiety effects can affect longer-term appetite and body weight control.
1 The regulation of appetite is a vital component of general health – both physical and psychological.
About the value
of controlling appetite
There are some indications however that foods with high satiety power (due to their protein or fibre contents for example) might help with hunger management and maintenance of weight loss.
The study of satiety has recently taken unexpected directions.
The presentation by Pr. Nathalie Delzenne of the Université
Catholique de Louvain illustrated one of those rapidly growing fields:
the role of gut microbiota in satiety. Chapter 4 covers some of the
exciting literature published in the last decade showing how the presence of certain bacteria in the gut can enhance satiety and even affect changes in body weight. Probiotics, whose concentrations in the gut are affected by the diet, have been shown to decrease food intake in animal models of obesity, maybe via their action on the endogenous release of gut hormones controlling appetite. The relevance of prebiotics in human obesity has been confirmed by recent intervention studies opening new avenues for the understanding of the complex regulation of appetite.
Another scientific field that has experienced a very rapid expansion in recent years is the exploration of brain activity associated with eating and appetite, due to the spectacular development of modern neuroimaging and particularly of Functional Magnetic Resonance. Pr. Hans-Rudolf Berthoud of the Neurobiology of Nutrition Laboratory at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center covered this exciting new field in his presentation (Chapter 5). He showed examples of brain activity associated with making optimal decisions, a field known as “neuro-economics”. He illustrated the interactions between the brain and the periphery of the organism both in terms of “bottom- up” control of cognitive and emotional functions by nutrients, and in terms of “top-down” control of appetitive behaviour by cognition and emotion.
The five talks presented at the Symposium brilliantly illustrate the scientific activity in the complex and important field of satiety research. The attendants at the Granada Symposium were offered a broad perspective on this field and contributed to a very active session with numerous comments and questions. We hope that the readers of this booklet will share this excitement.
10 TH European Nutrition Conference
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