off-topic - vegetables make you thin

Seriously.

They do.

Vegetables make you thin.

I'm starting to see fruits and vegetables (and legumes) the way people used to see diet pills back when it was legal for housewives to take amphetamines to lose weight: eat your vegetables, fruits, and beans, and you can eat anything else you want and still stay thin.

The reason you can eat anything else you want and still stay thin is that you don't want to eat as much as you do when you're not eating beaucoup fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Fruits, vegetables, and legumes are natural appetite suppressants.^*

Here's more evidence:

[R]esearchers from Penn State gave 20 men and 21 women casseroles made with varying amounts of purée — a strategy popularized by the cookbook author Jessica Seinfeld, who has encouraged parents to sneak vegetables into foods like spaghetti.

But in the Penn State study, the goal wasn’t to trick people into eating vegetables. Adding the purée bulked up the dish and resulted in fewer calories per serving. (You can see two of the recipes developed by the researchers here.)

In a macaroni and cheese recipe from the researchers, for instance, the cheese sauce is made with skim milk, reduced-fat cheese and one cup each of puréed cauliflower and puréed summer squash.

The diners were fed the casseroles during different visits. They ate pretty much the same amount of food during each visit and reported no differences in flavor or enjoyment. But when they were served the casseroles made with puréed vegetables, they ate 200 to 350 fewer calories a meal.

“We’ve been able to change recipes a lot, even baked goods, and we’ve been doing it for preschool kids and adults,” said Barbara Rolls, director of Penn State’s laboratory for the study of human ingestive behavior. “We had a huge effect on energy intake. We’re adding cups of veggies to recipes and people don’t even notice.”

Other research by Dr. Rolls, author of the popular diet series Volumetrics has shown that eating soup or salads before a meal can also curb the appetite and result in eating fewer calories over all.

But the stealth-vegetable approach allows diners to eat the same amount of favorite foods without ingesting as many calories.

[snip]

“We offered a Tex-Mex casserole, and we could get away with adding the vegetables much more easily,” she said. “Once you put in those spicy flavors, they mask other changes in calorie density and vegetable content. The people were totally unaware we were adding lots and lots of veggies.”

While the best option is to purée vegetables and add them to home-cooked meals, Dr. Rolls said she hoped the food industry would respond by offering more convenient canned and frozen vegetable purées and more foods bulked up with vegetables
Adding Food and Subtracting Calories
by Tara Parker-Pope
May 2, 2011, 5:03 pm

my rules:
animal fat makes you eat more
plant foods make you eat less



The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals
by Missy Chase Lapine

^* I'm not sure plant foods are natural appetite suppressants; it's a 'working hypothesis.' I'm 99% certain palmitic acid makes you eat more.