Slimming Glasses Trick Brain Into Thinking We’ve Eaten More Than We Have

If you’re looking for a modern, effortless way to diet and you don’t mind how you appear to the public, then the new Meta Cookie+ glasses from Tokyo University, Japan, might be just the thing for you.

The dieting glasses come equipped with a screen that displays an image of our food at an extra 50% magnification to trick us into thinking we’ve eaten more than we have.

If this all sounds like a glorified version of a magnifying glass then you’re just not appreciating the full power of the device – it also sprays out small bursts of smell towards the wearer’s nose as they tuck into an otherwise rather bland looking food, meaning that our brain identifies the food as tasting more delicate and more appetizing than it is.

All of this amounts to something quite remarkable – the research team said that trials with the glasses resulted in 9.3% less food being eaten.

A first?

Surprisingly, this actually isn’t the first time that slimming glasses have been produced. Previously, a Japanese company created a pretty sleek looking pair of aviators with blue-tinted lenses, a color believed to suppress appetite in the brain and control sensations of hunger.

When will we see them?

Whether we’ll see them at all is unknown right now, but I’m not sure that I can imagine them finding their way into society just yet.

As a concept, it’s not a bad idea – I can certainly see people buying into it in theory. Still, until developers can come up with something which looks a little bit more subtle and sophisticated, we’re not going to see people walking around in the street wearing them.

The problem is that we’d need to be wearing the glasses all the time – if we only put them on once we’d grabbed a bite to eat, then we’d already know what it looked/smelled like usually. I can’t see any technology tricking our brains into disbelieving something we saw just seconds before.

Even then, tricking our brains is only half of it – you might be able to pull the wool over my eyes, but I’m sure my empty stomach will figure the ruse out soon enough. If you’re trying to quit smoking, then you don’t just stick a nicotine patch on – you have to want to do it. Similarly, losing weight takes a little more mental strength than holding a pair of glasses on, so I don’t think those who write diet books have got much to worry about just yet.