What’s the difference between a pet dog and a compulsive eater? The answer is, “Less than the compulsive eater might imagine.” Both are prone to eating past satiety – the dog because it is genetically hard-wired to chow down when food is present, the human being because he pays more attention to his cravings than his appestat.
With the holiday bingeing season just behind us and the New Year with its onerous resolutions still ahead, along comes help for the hapless fridge raider. It is called the HAPIfork, though the intended end-user will find little to smile about in the innovative $99 dieting tool. The HAPIfork, reportsMarketWatch, uses sensors to monitor movement from plate to mouth:
It tracks the number of forkfuls per meal and per minute, and it times the interval between each. The fork lights up and vibrates when the diner eats too fast — that is, if there are fewer than 10 seconds between forkfuls.
The smart fork, which looks like a cross between an ordinary fork and an electric toothbrush, is purported by a company spokesman to “greatly improve your digestion, and you’ll likely start losing weight.” The fork is slightly smaller than a conventional dinner fork, the thinking behind which is that the user will take smaller bites.
This, along with slowing the pace of eating, is one of the keys to weight loss, says registered dietitian Kari L. Kooi. She cites studies that have found that it takes about 20 minutes for the stomach to alert the brain it has eaten its fill.
Like training wheels for beginning bikers, the HAPIfork is envisioned as a stepping stone to healthier dietary habits. The expectation is that after a few months, the rapid eater will have become conditioned to eating at a more leisurely pace. At that point, he can pass the gadget on to the next compulsive eater (who also may have been the recipient of this year’s Christmas fruitcake).
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Loved the Seinfeld episode when Jerry asked if the Chinese had seen the fork (see also, have people with clutches heard of automatic transmissions), but this article could portend move towards chopsticks…just saying
Given Moochelle’s (or is it Moose chell…hard to say) mission about obesity, the manufacturer will probably get a few $100 million in gov’t money. But then we’ll only see it as “but wait…if you order now…”
The promoters will be sipping cocktails on some exotic beach with the green energy people, all laughing out loud.
FIFY.
Yes, but they will contain seaweed and like ingredients, so it’s only half a win.
thanks for the FIFY Howard…I tend to be pretty naive about such things.
HAPIfork: “Easy there, miner forty-niner! It’s not going anywhere. Dig slower. Sloooooweeeer. That’s it. Thaaaaats it.”
“How much did you pay for this anyway? Denny’s is cheaper. This is terrible. I don’t think that’s pepper. Anyway, I was talking to Siri, and . . . “