4 ms·

The Science of Satiety per Calorie

58 points by rzk 1y ago

belviewreview 1y ago
I liked the ideas at the link. About 15 years ago I came up with something similar, though not as sophisticated. I needed to lose a lot of weight. However I didn't want to follow a standard calorie-counting diet because I had been reading that many studies find they don't work over the long term, at least for most people, and besides I have no will-power when it comes to food. So I came up with the idea of eating all I want, but just make it mostly food that is filling but reasonably low in calories. So this is what I did, and I lost 50 lb, and have kept it off ever since. I call it the low will-power diet. I don't know that it would would work for everyone, but I bet it would work with a lot of people who find standard calorie-counting diets don't. Also, it seems to me the Mediterranean diet is a version of this.
lopis 1y ago
I haven't tried the tool they advertise, but I imagine that people trying to bulk up might benefit from a diet of low satiety per calorie that maximizes protein intake. This would also be useful for people struggling with appetite due to illness. Not everyone worried about their diet is trying to lose weight. I wonder if they provide that?
- lukas099 1y ago
  Why maximize protein intake? Protein benefits cap out at a certain level that is far below maximal, especially when "bulking".
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
  Egg whites give you insane amount of proteins per very low amount of calories. Discovered this recently and I like egg white way more than chicken breast. My lunch salad is 150g of chicken thigh, 200g of egg white, 1 whole egg, 2 tomatoes, 1 romaine heart and 50g of cottage cheese (unfortunately I cannot eat greek yogurt). For topping I add some low calories pickled cucumber and 0 calories mustard. Very filling even at 400 calories (very low). With 2 meals like that I get close to my protein goal per day.
zwieback 1y ago
As a former Swabian I'm a bit hurt that those beautiful Brezeln get such a low score
maerF0x0 1y ago
It's odd to me that they do not aim to calculate a different sort of hedonic factor -- essentially how much pleasure you get from the food. And arrangement matters because I do not get the same satisfaction from chicken breast, flour, mozzarella, and tomatoes eaten individually than when made into a pizza.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Yes, and they've explicitly thrown out actually quantitative, objective factors ("carbs and glycemic index") for one that is purely subjective (and horseshit, to boot).
gspencley 1y ago
After decades of struggling with weight, I no longer believe in the calorie religion. That's not to say that calories are useless or don't matter at all. I just think that calories matters a hell of a lot less than people are led to believe and that the idea of calories in vs calories burned is an oversimplification so extreme that it is useless, and can actually lead people to making bad diet decisions. I have put myself on extremely restrictive diets where I was consuming 1,000 -> 1300 calories per day. After a few weeks of initial weight loss, the rate of loss completely plateaued and maintained for long enough that if what we have been told about calories were true, my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics. The human body is insanely complicated, and from what I've read in research, hormones seem to be the single biggest contributor to body composition and weight management. And for what it's worth, my thyroid is perfectly healthy. I'm not talking about people who have medical conditions impacting their hormones. Rather, consider that our bodies are basically chemical factories and when we ingest something, our digestive process is a process of chemical reactions. The particular chemicals and nutrients that we are deriving from foods can trigger or suppress certain hormones. When it comes to energy allocation, insulin is the most significant. When your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released in order to direct your cells to absorb that blood sugar. When that becomes saturated, your fat cells are going to begin absorbing. One of the reasons that a lot of people find success on extremely low-carbohydrate diets is that carbs tend to spike insulin. But there are other hormones that can impact weight as well, such as cortisol (stress hormone), ghrelin (hunger response hormone) etc. I'm convinced that the reason my ultra-restrictive diets saw plateaus despite sticking with them has to do with what I was eating and less to do with how much I was eating. I'm not an advocate for any particular diet. I have friends who have switched their lifestyle to a mostly ketogenic diet to great results. I've known other people who eat vegan and do well. I've done those same diets and not seen the same results. What ended up working for me (and only me) was largely eliminating plant-based foods. Given the fact that when I step outside, I am allergic to pretty much every plant that lives ... I wonder if there's some kind of mild dietary allergic reaction at play in my body when I eat certain plants. When I eat pretty much just meat, the weight starts to melt off, I gain muscle mass (makes sense - I'm consuming more protein) and I feel better. My wife can't eat the same diet, though. Gives her heartburn. For her, she seems to look and feel better on a more "Mediterranean diet." I'm not a fan of fad diets, I'm not an advocate of them. I think it's obviously about long term lifestyle choices. I just think that calories has become a sort of religious belief. I don't think we have ANY data that suggests "You can live on an all cheesecake diet and, as long as you restrict your calories, your body composition will be healthy baseline." And we would need that to be true in order for the calories in vs calories out hypothesis to hold. But research actually suggests the opposite: not all calories are created equal. I even recall a study that was shared on Hacker News a while back where they served two study groups the same daily calorie intake but they were different food types and they were able to observe differences in body fat accumulation in the different groups. I wish I could remember what to search for to dig that up.
lopsidedmarble 1y ago
Failing the smell test. This feels more like someone trying to sell you something than help you find satiating foods. There really is only one study in the field of satiety: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_Index_of_common_foods https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_... Which to the articles credit, it links in reference '3', but then fails to use the data within. The journal article cites potatoes as having a Satiety Index % of 323+-51. The next highest is Ling Fish with 225+-30, yet TFA omits mentioning potatoes and chooses rather to harp on about protein protein protein which is very faddy diet advice across all major social media platforms at the moment.
- Ifkaluva 1y ago
  Also none of their satiety scale illustrations show the humble white potato.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Focusing on reducing carbs and maximizing protein doesn't really seem faddish anymore. You don't have to go full Keto, but the carbs do spike your glucose and prevent your body from canabalizing fat for weight loss. At least reducing your carb portions is really effective. It took my clinical dietician 4 meetings to get that into my head at least.
  - lopsidedmarble 1y ago
    The effectiveness or viability of protein maxxxing in diet is tangential to the stated goal of TFA: satiety. My point was more to say the 'protein all the things' angle of TFA has more to do with the popularity of this diet advice right now than anything informed by satiety research.
    - cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
    - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
sys32768 1y ago
Potatoes are king of satiety. I dice up two giant baked potatoes for lunch daily and mix with a lean protein and some toppings like sliced jalapenos and sometimes Greek yogurt. At 3 PM, I drink a Premier protein shake but don't eat again until 7AM the next day, yet I am still full by bedtime. Breakfast is a larger protein shake with fruit or almond butter + almond milk. Easiest diet ever, and I feel great and hardly crave bread or sugar now.
- anon291 1y ago
  While I commend you for your effort, protein shakes are ultimately basically ultra processed food. They have their uses, but if this is the standard diet for humans in 2025, then something is wrong with how people are eating.
  - titanomachy 1y ago
    I mix whey, full-fat yogurt, and frozen fruit in a blender. I think it's a decently healthy breakfast, even if blending is technically a type of "processing". Unless you mean the packaged protein shakes, in which case I agree, and also incidentally they are kind of gross.

58 points by rzk 1y ago

I liked the ideas at the link. About 15 years ago I came up with something similar, though not as sophisticated. I needed to lose a lot of weight. However I didn't want to follow a standard calorie-counting diet because I had been reading that many studies find they don't work over the long term, at least for most people, and besides I have no will-power when it comes to food. So I came up with the idea of eating all I want, but just make it mostly food that is filling but reasonably low in calories. So this is what I did, and I lost 50 lb, and have kept it off ever since. I call it the low will-power diet. I don't know that it would would work for everyone, but I bet it would work with a lot of people who find standard calorie-counting diets don't. Also, it seems to me the Mediterranean diet is a version of this.

lopis 1y ago

I haven't tried the tool they advertise, but I imagine that people trying to bulk up might benefit from a diet of low satiety per calorie that maximizes protein intake. This would also be useful for people struggling with appetite due to illness. Not everyone worried about their diet is trying to lose weight. I wonder if they provide that?

lukas099 1y ago
Why maximize protein intake? Protein benefits cap out at a certain level that is far below maximal, especially when "bulking".
Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
Egg whites give you insane amount of proteins per very low amount of calories. Discovered this recently and I like egg white way more than chicken breast. My lunch salad is 150g of chicken thigh, 200g of egg white, 1 whole egg, 2 tomatoes, 1 romaine heart and 50g of cottage cheese (unfortunately I cannot eat greek yogurt). For topping I add some low calories pickled cucumber and 0 calories mustard. Very filling even at 400 calories (very low). With 2 meals like that I get close to my protein goal per day.

zwieback 1y ago

As a former Swabian I'm a bit hurt that those beautiful Brezeln get such a low score

maerF0x0 1y ago

It's odd to me that they do not aim to calculate a different sort of hedonic factor -- essentially how much pleasure you get from the food. And arrangement matters because I do not get the same satisfaction from chicken breast, flour, mozzarella, and tomatoes eaten individually than when made into a pizza.

IAmBroom 1y ago
Yes, and they've explicitly thrown out actually quantitative, objective factors ("carbs and glycemic index") for one that is purely subjective (and horseshit, to boot).

gspencley 1y ago

After decades of struggling with weight, I no longer believe in the calorie religion. That's not to say that calories are useless or don't matter at all. I just think that calories matters a hell of a lot less than people are led to believe and that the idea of calories in vs calories burned is an oversimplification so extreme that it is useless, and can actually lead people to making bad diet decisions. I have put myself on extremely restrictive diets where I was consuming 1,000 -> 1300 calories per day. After a few weeks of initial weight loss, the rate of loss completely plateaued and maintained for long enough that if what we have been told about calories were true, my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics. The human body is insanely complicated, and from what I've read in research, hormones seem to be the single biggest contributor to body composition and weight management. And for what it's worth, my thyroid is perfectly healthy. I'm not talking about people who have medical conditions impacting their hormones. Rather, consider that our bodies are basically chemical factories and when we ingest something, our digestive process is a process of chemical reactions. The particular chemicals and nutrients that we are deriving from foods can trigger or suppress certain hormones. When it comes to energy allocation, insulin is the most significant. When your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released in order to direct your cells to absorb that blood sugar. When that becomes saturated, your fat cells are going to begin absorbing. One of the reasons that a lot of people find success on extremely low-carbohydrate diets is that carbs tend to spike insulin. But there are other hormones that can impact weight as well, such as cortisol (stress hormone), ghrelin (hunger response hormone) etc. I'm convinced that the reason my ultra-restrictive diets saw plateaus despite sticking with them has to do with what I was eating and less to do with how much I was eating. I'm not an advocate for any particular diet. I have friends who have switched their lifestyle to a mostly ketogenic diet to great results. I've known other people who eat vegan and do well. I've done those same diets and not seen the same results. What ended up working for me (and only me) was largely eliminating plant-based foods. Given the fact that when I step outside, I am allergic to pretty much every plant that lives ... I wonder if there's some kind of mild dietary allergic reaction at play in my body when I eat certain plants. When I eat pretty much just meat, the weight starts to melt off, I gain muscle mass (makes sense - I'm consuming more protein) and I feel better. My wife can't eat the same diet, though. Gives her heartburn. For her, she seems to look and feel better on a more "Mediterranean diet." I'm not a fan of fad diets, I'm not an advocate of them. I think it's obviously about long term lifestyle choices. I just think that calories has become a sort of religious belief. I don't think we have ANY data that suggests "You can live on an all cheesecake diet and, as long as you restrict your calories, your body composition will be healthy baseline." And we would need that to be true in order for the calories in vs calories out hypothesis to hold. But research actually suggests the opposite: not all calories are created equal. I even recall a study that was shared on Hacker News a while back where they served two study groups the same daily calorie intake but they were different food types and they were able to observe differences in body fat accumulation in the different groups. I wish I could remember what to search for to dig that up.

lopsidedmarble 1y ago

Failing the smell test. This feels more like someone trying to sell you something than help you find satiating foods. There really is only one study in the field of satiety: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_Index_of_common_foods https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_... Which to the articles credit, it links in reference '3', but then fails to use the data within. The journal article cites potatoes as having a Satiety Index % of 323+-51. The next highest is Ling Fish with 225+-30, yet TFA omits mentioning potatoes and chooses rather to harp on about protein protein protein which is very faddy diet advice across all major social media platforms at the moment.

Ifkaluva 1y ago
Also none of their satiety scale illustrations show the humble white potato.
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Focusing on reducing carbs and maximizing protein doesn't really seem faddish anymore. You don't have to go full Keto, but the carbs do spike your glucose and prevent your body from canabalizing fat for weight loss. At least reducing your carb portions is really effective. It took my clinical dietician 4 meetings to get that into my head at least.
- lopsidedmarble 1y ago
  The effectiveness or viability of protein maxxxing in diet is tangential to the stated goal of TFA: satiety. My point was more to say the 'protein all the things' angle of TFA has more to do with the popularity of this diet advice right now than anything informed by satiety research.
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago

sys32768 1y ago

Potatoes are king of satiety. I dice up two giant baked potatoes for lunch daily and mix with a lean protein and some toppings like sliced jalapenos and sometimes Greek yogurt. At 3 PM, I drink a Premier protein shake but don't eat again until 7AM the next day, yet I am still full by bedtime. Breakfast is a larger protein shake with fruit or almond butter + almond milk. Easiest diet ever, and I feel great and hardly crave bread or sugar now.

anon291 1y ago
While I commend you for your effort, protein shakes are ultimately basically ultra processed food. They have their uses, but if this is the standard diet for humans in 2025, then something is wrong with how people are eating.
- titanomachy 1y ago
  I mix whey, full-fat yogurt, and frozen fruit in a blender. I think it's a decently healthy breakfast, even if blending is technically a type of "processing". Unless you mean the packaged protein shakes, in which case I agree, and also incidentally they are kind of gross.