that kind of intimate tete-a-tete with the nutritional label,

trying to discern are you good or are you bad.

But here's the thing you probably haven't considered.

"Labels are not just labels. They evoke a set of beliefs."

That's Alia Crum. (Psychologist at Columbia University)

See Crum has spent years studying the "placebo effect,"

and she figured that food labels might work the same way and so to test her idea,

Crum created a huge batch of milkshakes,

and then labeled it in two very different ways.

Then, as people drank the milkshakes,

she had nurses monitor their levels of this hormone called "ghrelin."

People in the medical field call it the "hunger hormone."

Physically, when you have not eaten anything,

ghrelin levels in the stomach rise which signals to the brain that "it is time now to seek out food."

(food seeking)

But after that rise, say you have a big meal,

ghrelin levels are gonna drop a lot, and when that does, it signals to the mind:

"You've had enough here, you know, and I'm gonna start revving up the metabolisms, we can burn the calories that we had just ingested."

But Crum discovered that those who believed they were drinking the "indulgent shake", responded as if their bodies had eaten three times more.

So what people believed about their milkshake came true.

If they thought it was fattening, they felt they've eaten more, and their digestion was affected.

Their ghrelin levels dropped three times more.

So to summarize, you may be able to change your metabolism with your mind.

So in theory, if you wanna lose weight, you can try eating healthy food with an indulgent mindset.

You feel fuller and your metabolism would increase.

And if diet products actually wanted to help you lose weight, they advertises "fattening" not "fat-free."

We have this very simple metabolic science: calories in calories out,

and I don'... I think that we haven't given enough credits to the role of our beliefs in determining our physiology, our reality.