Have you ever wondered about the effect that mental work has on our figure, on the amount of calories we consume, and on what we feel like eating? Scientist from Laval University, Canada, decided to do a special experiment just to establish the effect that mental work has on appetite and consumed calories. The results were quite worth the effort.
Mental Work and Calorie: Experiment
During the experiment the scientists recorded the amount of food consumed by students as they did three different types of activities: resting while sitting, reading, and working with computer-based memory and attention tests.
Calorie Experiment Results
Once the participants were ready with their “activity” which had lasted for the period of 45 minutes they were offered to have a snack at the cafeteria. It turned out that the “reading” students consumed 203, while and the tested ones – 253 extra calories than those who were resting. Interesting enough, the amount of energy used by the readers and the tested students increased only by some mere 3 calories.
Glucose Is the Key to Consuming Extra Calories
The scientists believe that this is due to the fact that the brain uses only glucose, so that when we work mentally this substance gets used up much faster. In fact, the organism can get extra glucose from its own storage, but prefers not to take such risk and simply to get the needed sugars from food, especially if it is available. The worst point is that once you are done with the mental work the extra calories get stored in your body and unfortunately not in our brain, the scientists note.
