The Omnibus Satiety Metric: Predicting Satiety in Humans Through Brain, Blood, and Subjective Data

Designing food and drink that maximizes satiety has long been an ambition of industry and public health. For obvious reasons, foods that fill faster and for longer are desirable to consumers for controlling their weight, and to public health programs that are designed to prevent obesity. Current methods for measuring satiety have weak predictive value, commonly fail to replicate, and are yet to be validated with respect to energy consumption in everyday life. The investigators propose to overcome this deficiency by developing the Omnibus Satiety Metric (OmniSaM). OmniSaM is proposed as a multi-modal metric that targets the full spectrum of processes underlying the satiety cascade, composing brain, blood, mind and behavior of consumers. As a proof-of-concept, subjects (normal BMI) will undergo a preload ad libitum paradigm, with a 2-parameter factorial design comparing milk based products differing in levels of caloric load and protein-to-carbohydrate ratio. The investigators will acquire 1. high-resolution neuroimaging data, whilst 2. simultaneously recording appetitive hormones, 3. blood metabolite composition, 4. subjective sensory indices of appetite and 4. behavioral metrics of consumption.