This mechanism in turn seems to be regulated by a flavor-calorie association. (Possibly as a famine-storage mechanism that tries to store more resources when dense food sources are available.) If you eat something with flavor X, which is followed by your metabolism detecting a large source of calories, flavor X will (a) seem more appealing and taste better, and (b) will raise your set point whenever you eat items with flavor X.
Same guy that suggested drinking sugared water dilute enough that it had no flavor?
And isn't there also some data in the reverse, that those drinking sugar free but artificially sweetened drinks gained weight?
Calories without flavor good, flavor without calories bad?
According to Stephan Guyenet's summaries for layman, this isn't totally unexpected behavior. Your brain regulates the amount of food you consume and bases its food-seeking behavior partially on how palatable the food you eat is. Pure sugar water, or pure oil which is the other recommended food in the Shangri-la diet, has very low palatability. This is because they offer only a single rewarding feature, while the foods that we typically think of as hyper-palatable contain multiple (a presentation he gave a couple years ago lists: calorie density, starch, sa...
Today's post, The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet was originally published on 10 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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