Why Do You Grey Hungry Again After Eating Chinese

Dear Cecil:

I've heard it oft said and experienced it myself on various continents (including Asia): you enjoy a terrific Chinese, or Thai, or Malay dinner, only to feel hungry again a brusk while later. Is this our imagination playing a trick on us appreciators of Chinese cuisine? Or is it a western analogue to the fact that many Asians don't tolerate milk?

Erwin Kuhn, Frg

Illustration past Slug Signorino

Cecil replies:

We had a helluva time with this one, Erwin. The problem wasn't but coming up with an answer. Information technology was figuring out the question, which nosotros've gotten in different forms over the years.

Possibilities:

1. Why, later on eating Chinese food, practise yous presently feel hungry once again?

2. Practise you, in fact, after eating Chinese food, soon feel hungry over again?

iii. People used to say that subsequently eating Chinese food i soon feels hungry again. At present they don't. What changed?

All we were able to establish initially was that, long ago (at to the lowest degree), people did in fact say the Saying, as I'll refer to it, and that this wasn't some mass hallucination. My assistant Una constitute the post-obit fragment from a dramatic piece published in the literary magazine Golden Volume in 1934:

julie (in a flat tone): Yes, only the trouble with that Chinese food is, no matter how much you consume y'all experience hungry an hour later. Have you e'er noticed that?

ham (the Orientalist): Information technology's the rice.

The easily satisfied will say, "Then there you accept information technology — information technology'due south the rice," and movement on. Those of subtler aptitude will ask more closely. This Julie — why is she speaking in a apartment tone? Has she been drugged? Has Ham, the glib Orientalist, put something in her lo mein? I take no idea, and if we waste whatever more time on such flighty inquiries nosotros'll soon run out of column. However, having eaten considerable quantities of the impugned starch without after experiencing premature hungriness, I feel confident in proverb: it's not simply the rice.

What, then, is it? I'm working on that. Some preliminary observations:

• I don't personally feel hungry presently after eating Chinese food, nor exercise I hear the Saying much these days. I therefore incline to the view that while the Maxim may have been truthful years ago, it's not true now.
• Dissimilar foods are digested at different rates. One measure out of digestion speed is the glycemic index (GI), which measures how rapidly and how high your blood sugar levels rising after eating. This has led some to wonder if there'southward a connection between GI and subjective feelings of satiety, or fullness, after a meal. Answer: no. The GI correlates with satiety for some foods only not others, and correlation varies depending on how the food was candy and the fat and protein levels of the meal overall.
• Taking a different tack, other researchers (Holt et al, 1995) take developed a satiety index, or SI. Testing satiety typically involves eating a specified calorie corporeality of various foods and rating how you feel over the adjacent 2 hours on a scale from "extremely hungry" to "extremely full." The ratings are and so converted to a numerical score by comparison them to ratings for white bread, whose SI score is stock-still at 100. From this we learn that two major components of Chinese cuisine — white rice and white pasta noodles — take much lower SI values (138 and 119 respectively) than the starch that was once a mainstay of American food (I won't call it cuisine), namely the potato. The apprehensive tuber has an SI of 323, by far the highest of any food tested.

Here we glimpse an caption. I can't speak to German dining trends, but prior to 1980 or then, potatoes in various forms (mostly mashed, but too baked, fried, scalloped, au gratin, and then on) were a standard characteristic of the American dinner menu. Since then, in my casual observation, they've go less prevalent, and potato stats bear this out.

Then when people said the Saying 50 years ago, they may simply take been comparing Chinese nutrient to the meat-and-potatoes fare to which they were accustomed. In other words, it's not that Chinese food left you feeling hungry later an hour, but that the standard American diet left yous feeling exceptionally full. As American cooking became less white potato-dependent, the difference in satiety potential betwixt Chinese and U.S. food probable diminished.

Other factors may besides take been at work. For example, eating a salad before the main course — common in Western-fashion restaurants but less and then at Chinese places — increases a diner'due south feeling of fullness, whereas high-fatty soups, like the old-school egg driblet and hot-and-sour varieties, have only minimal impact on satiety. Another element in the decline of the Proverb may be the increased popularity of spicy Hunan and Szechuan cuisine compared to the banal Cantonese that one time dominated Chinese menus — the capsaicin in hot peppers is known to reduce hunger.

We oasis't withal tested whatever of the above — after their recent take a chance with alcoholic cupcakes, Una and Fierra are on a diet. For now, nonetheless, I don't blame the rice; I blame the spuds.

Cecil Adams

Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com.

etheridgeapprokill.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.straightdope.com/21344047/why-do-you-soon-feel-hungry-again-after-eating-chinese-food-or-do-you

Share this post