HAIL TO THE JUNK FOOD!

Researchers invited people who were not on diets to snack on as many cheese puffs as they wanted over the course of four afternoons. One group munched on dense Cheetos, while others munched on the puffier, more aerated ones.


Although the group snacking on the more aerated puffs ate more by volume, they ended up consuming 21 percent fewer calories on average.

There are 160 calories per ounce in even the puffy version of Cheetos, and no responsible doctor would recommend them as a regular part of a healthy diet. But there is something to learn from the puffy factor.

You can trick your senses into believing you’ve eaten more food by pumping up the volume. By choosing snacks that contain more air, you’re going to get more food by volume and fewer calories.

Cereals are another biggie. Eating puffier, irregularly-shaped cereals are a better bet than dense, tightly-packed cereals like muesli or granola. If you’re pouring the inappropriate amount on the basis of how full the bowl is, you’re going to get easily three times as many calories with the granola-type food.

Separate research at Cornell University found that people who ate Chex Mix from large bowls consumed 56 percent more than those who munched from the smaller bowls. Why?

The remaining question is why, exactly, people snacking on less dense foods consume fewer calories. There are two possible answers, said Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study.

“One is that the stomach is filled more by the volume, and so it’s giving more of a signal to the body to say ‘that’s enough,’” Rozin said. The other possibility is that you’re actually imagining that you’ve eaten more, since each piece is larger, he said.