Beet burger and our vision when we are hungry

Warm Lentil Salad

Food Diary (March 03, 2012)

Breakfast: Rolled oats with raisins, coconut, sunflower seeds and flax seeds

Lunch: Sandwiches

Dinner: Warm Lentil Salad with steamed veges

Baking/sweets: Various bits and pieces, in moderation!

Warm Lentil Salad is a really simple and delicious salad. It’s a French creation going by the name of salade tiède aux lentilles. The recipe is available here.

Today's Favourite Photo

Source: Camemberu

Char Grilled Beet Burger with Truffle Fries – that’s right, beet not beef.

Today’s Favourite Blog

Source: Science Daily

A new study finds that hungry people see food-related words more clearly than people who've just eaten.

The experiment was done in an interesting way. 42 students with a normal body mass index were recruited. On the day of the test, each student was told to arrive at the lab at noon after three or four hours of not eating. Then they were told there was a delay. Some were told to come back in 10 minutes; others were given an hour to get lunch first. So half the students were hungry when they did the experiment and the other half had just eaten.

For the experiment, the participant looked at a computer screen. One by one, 80 words flashed on the screen for about 1/300th of a second each, at a size that was just at the threshold of what that person could consciously perceive. A quarter of the words were food-related. After each word, the person was asked how bright the word was and asked to choose which of two words they'd seen -- a food-related word like gateau (cake) or a neutral word like bateau (boat).

Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying food-related words.

Psychologists have known for decades that what's going on inside our head affects our senses. For example, poorer children think coins are larger than they are, and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter.