One social media influencer recently made the discovery that you can make a Pringle taste better if you eat it a certain way, reports the Mirror. Read More Related Articles Why do we still feel hungry after feasts like Thanksgiving or Christmas? Does overeating “stretch” your stomach, meaning you have more room for food the following day? Even thinking about it now is making me hungry. Perhaps counter-intuitively, ghrelin levels tend to be higher in lean individuals and lower in people with obesity. You might expect that a hormone that stimulates hunger would be more present in people who eat more – but this contradiction probably reflects how complicated our endocrine system is. I am pretty confident that I can predict how I am going to feel after a big meal: snoozy, sluggish and definitely full. But by lunchtime the next day I am sure I will find room for another roast. When you think about it, it is pretty weird that the day after an enormous meal we can eat exactly the same quantity again. Did we not learn our lesson the first time? Social media user A-A-Ron recently found out how to get the most out of each crunch, and shared his epiphany on TikTok. In a recent video on his cookinhungry account, he shared: Did you know there's a correct way to eat Pringles?"

This knowledge has implications for breaking bad eating habits, too. “When we are trying to help people to eat less, we focus on “unlearning” their learned eating desires. Here, we also try to make sure they learn that eating something nice once does not mean that you have to do it on the next days, too,” says van den Akker. This is important because other studies have shown that breaking a good eating habit once can be enough to relapse into a bad habit. When you grab a Pringle from the can, most people tend to chow down with the 'top' of the crisp facing upwards - but that reportedly isn't right.

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A-A-Ron went on to explain that if you "rub" a Pringle, you'll feel which side has most of the seasoning on it. This side should be facing down towards your tongue, so you get more of the flavour. The answer is, for most people, you don’t feel hungry in spite of the huge quantities of food you’ve recently consumed. You feel hungry precisely because of it. While Pringles are a well-known crisp, with the slogan 'Once you pop, you can't stop', it turns out many of us have been eating them incorrectly this whole time. It is true that your stomach changes in size when hungry or full. The stomach contracts as a meal is digested to help move food towards the intestines. It rumbles as air and food move around as food is pushed down, a phenomenon called borborygmus, which is often our first cue that we might be hungry because it is audible and physical. After rumbling, the stomach then expands again in preparation for eating – this is initiated by hormones.

Eating plays a big part in our lives at this time of year. But what happens if we indulge a little too much? Perhaps it is no surprise, then, how hungry we feel after a big meal with family and friends. We are still hungry the next day – or even later the same day – not because our stomach has stretched, but because we have grown accustomed to eating excessively on special occasions. If our brains see all the cues – the smells, the sights, the sounds – associated with a big meal the day after a feast like Christmas or Thanksgiving, then it will start getting us ready for round two. But it is not really true that eating stretches the stomach. The stomach is very elastic, so will return to its resting capacity (about 1-2 litres) after a big meal. In fact, most people’s stomachs are pretty similar in capacity – neither height nor weight have an effect. Even though your stomach has a hormonal system for telling your brain when it is empty, this is often augmented by the learned association between times of day and feeling hungry. So, even if you had a large lunch, you may well still feel hungry at dinner. If you repeatedly grab a piece of chocolate or crisps after dinner when you sit on the couch to watch TV, our body can start to associate sitting on the couch, TV and eating something nice, and as a result when you go to the couch you experience a craving,” says Karolien van den Akker, a researcher at Centerdata and formerly Maastricht University. “That can even occur when you are sated; when your energy stores are full.”

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What we might not be conscious of is the release of our hunger hormones: NPY and AgRP from the hypothalamus, and ghrelin from the stomach. Ghrelin is released when the stomach is empty and stimulates the production of NPY and AgRP in our brain. These two hormones are responsible for creating the feeling of hunger and overriding the hormones that give us the sense of being satisfied.