Salty foods increase our calorie intake, study shows

What do chips, fries, and fast-food burgers all have in common?

Aside from being delicious and relatively inexpensive, these foods are all exceptionally rich sources of both salt and fat.

Many people consume the two dietary components too much and this may contribute to today’s obesity epidemic and all the health complications that go with it.

But researchers currently know very little about whether dietary fat and salt work synergistically to affect how many calories an individual consumes, and if so whether this effect is the same in everyone.

To help understand more about how salt and fat may affect food and calorie consumption, a research team conducted a controlled dietary intervention study.

In the study, food intake and sensitivity to fatty foods was determined in 48 relatively healthy adults provided with various types of experimental lunches.

This study is published in The Journal of Nutrition.

Each participant was studied on 4 separate occasions, during which time they were provided with either a low-fat/low-salt, low-fat/high-salt, high-fat/low-salt, or high- fat/high-salt pasta-based lunch after consuming a standardized breakfast.

High-fat lunches provided approximately twice as many calories as the low-fat options, whereas the high-salt lunches had more than 8 times the salt as the low-salt versions.

Protein content was similar across experimental lunches.

Subjects were advised to consume as much of each lunch as they wanted, and questionnaires were administered before and after the meals to assess factors such as hunger, fullness, and thirst.

Sensitivity to the taste of fat was also assessed in each subject to help determine if this characteristic modified the effects of fat and salt intake.

Subjects consumed ~11% more food and calories when they were provided with the high-salt (compared to low-salt) lunches, and as expected ~60% more calories when consuming the high-fat (compared to the low-fat) lunches.

Individuals who were the most sensitive to the taste of fat consumed less when they were offered the high- fat/low-salt meals, but not when they were provided with the high-fat/high-salt version.

The authors concluded “salt promotes passive overconsumption of energy in adults, and may override fat-mediated satiation in individuals who are sensitive to the taste of fat.”