Hunger is always a kind of emptiness - an absence of nourishment - but what it will take to replenish it is far from obvious.

We tend to automatically associate hearty meat dishes with men and lighter salads and sweets with women, and these stereotypes are replicated in cultures as different as France and Japan.

Once the pattern of not being hungry in the morning is set, it modifies the way you eat for life.

Prolonged chronic malnutrition affects children for the rest of their lives because it affects both brain development and growth.

If food is a fuel, we should feel that the tank is emptiest when the longest time has elapsed since it was filled - usually in the morning.

Hunger - this mechanism that we suppose to be so basic - turns out to be one of the more intricate bodily impulses.

One of the reasons hunger is so hard to pin down is that it is a negative concept, an absence.

Hara hachi bu is a Confucian principle, popular in Japan since medieval times, that you should eat until you are only eight-tenths full. This principle has since been given backing by nutrition scientists who note that when we eat there is a time delay between the body receiving the food and the brain registering that we are full. When the urge comes to have a second helping, it’s worth waiting twenty minutes, and the feeling may pass.

Soup leaves us full because we believe it will.