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I have a solution to the obesity epidemic, that would be realistic to implement. Right now the factors for what we analyse in nutrition is calories, macro nutr

I have a solution to the obesity epidemic, that would be realistic to implement. Right now the factors for what we analyse in nutrition is calories, macro nutrient content, and micronutrient content. What we really care about is satiation and satiety. These are words that no one talks about, and but get to the core of the issue. If I eat this food, how many calories will I consume before feeling full?(satiation). After eating this food, how long until I feel the need to eat again? (sateity). Unfortunately the research and measurements of these values is thin. We need to fix that. We already know things like whole milk better provides satiation and sateity than skim milk, and children that drink whole milk actaully have less obesity than skim milk drinkers. If we just measured and labeled foods with a sateity/satiation index (what we really care about), then people would actually have a chance to pick better foods. Right now it is damn near impossible to determine if eating eggs and bacon for breakfast is more likely to drive over eating vs cereal. It can be measured, but we just don't do it.

lifeformed 13y ago
That's an interesting idea. Is Satiation/sateity easily measurable? Is it proportionally consistent among everyone, or do some people get satiated more by some foods than others?
- ihsw 13y ago
  It depends on many factors, from the objective to the subjective. Objectively the measurements would vary according to the people, eg: obese vs not obese, old vs young, ethnicity, dietary history, and so forth. Subjectively it would vary according to cultural norms and personal opinions, for example. Additionally people can be accustomed to certain foods regardless of such measurements. There is some serious interest in diets like Ketogenic or Paleolithic, which espouse similar dietary requirements to what the parent suggested (eg: whole milk has significantly more fat than skim milk, as such they affect satiation and satiety differently from each-other).
- nijk 13y ago
  Satiety is on the label, written as fat/protein/fiber. Everything except carbs.
mc-lovin 13y ago
Excellent point. Furthermore, new foods can be developed that achieve better combinations of satiation and satiety, and other desired outcomes. I think it's fair to say that the entire medical profession has in the past suffered from a tendency to convince people to maximize their health, rather than maximize the combination of their health, and whatever other outcomes people desire, such as eating tasty food or feeling satiated. This tendency is flawed because it is not consistent with what people want to do, and is always therefore an uphill battle. As the field matures, this is definitely changing, but the discussion around nutrition shows there is still a long way to go.
tbirdz 13y ago
I've heard that the volume and weight of the food contributes more to the feeling of fullness than the caloric content.
mahyarm 13y ago
Fibrous vegetables tend to be the lowest calories/highest satiation foods there are. I replace all the snacks I eat at work with carrot sticks recently, and I think might be losing weight without thinking about it much.
- darkchasma 13y ago
  I can eat carrots till I'm orange in the face, but I never feel full. I seem to need meat or fat for that.
  - jdrobins2000 13y ago
    Try adding hummus, if you are into that sort of thing. I thought the same thing, but found that I felt great after eating veggies and hummus. Fresh fruit like Fuji apples, oranges, and red grapes are great instead of sweets or soda. And I've found coconut water to be the best beverage all around. I still like my meat, soda, and banana splits too, but as in everything, moderation is key.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      A lot of hummus recipes are high fat, high carb calorie bombs.
      - jdrobins2000 13y ago
        What?!? Source please. It appears somewhat high in fat, but no saturated fat, nor is it high in carbs. Some fats like olive oil are actually good. Not to mention, I'm talking about adding it to fresh vegetables, not eating a whole tub of it by itself.
    - croisillon 13y ago
      Great idea, or adding mayonnaise !
  - mahyarm 13y ago
    I never feel fully 'satisfied' with the carrots, but I do feel physically full after eating them. It's a far better alternative to the candy, nuts, yogurts, fruits and oatmeal bars that we have at my work for snacks, which are extremely calorie dense and don't really make me feel full physically. As a tweak to my general food lifestyle, it's far easier to maintain than a diet or cooking for myself consistently.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle. The obesity epidemic is a direct result of sitting in an office 9 to 5 (or 6,7,8,...) and making two meals a day full of fat and sugar, because you're craving. When you have a better lifestyle, you naturally gravitate towards better food, because you have time to cook (as opposed to pizza/snacks) or look for good dinner (as opposed to drive-thru), have time to go to the grocery store buy vegetables/fruits more frequently (as opposed to industrialized food which doesn't spoil), and even time to appreciate food itself making various small meals a day. EDIT: I would like to know why the downvote. The correlation between obesity and office workers is a recurrent research topic.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jcampbell1 13y ago
  > There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. Satiety is a measure of how hungry you will feel. It doesn't make sense to call hunger a factor. I agree that we need to measure the quality of the food correctly, and I suggested a way to do it. The correlation between office work and obesity too small to call it a direct result. I believe the obesity epidemic is caused by three things: 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible. 2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero. 3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals. These meals are replaced commercially created meals (lunchables, mcdonalds) thus #1 applies more often. #2, #3 are good things. The best fix is to design a system where profits are maximized by making tasty foods that with the constraint that the foods don't incorrectly inform our biochemical hunger feedback mechanism. My plan attempts to address this problem.
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    > 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible. The problem is, what is irresistible for someone who makes two meals a day is different than what is irresistible for someone in a different diet, lifestyle or even mood. While I was busting my ass inside an stressful office until 10:00 PM without eating, I wanted to get home and sink my teeth in a pepperoni pizza as fast as possible while watching TV. Nowadays I'm on a different lifestyle and, mind you, I woke up craving for squid, for some reason (the body talks). I went downtown, bought fresh squid, cooked a risotto myself with the things I like. A low fat, low sodium, high protein, Zinc and Selenium rich meal - the exact opposite of pizza, but satisfied me just as much today. You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.
koggit 13y ago
For satiation index, I suggest we use micronutrient-to-macronutrient ratio. More simply stated, "nutrient density". Raw fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and lean meat all contain a high ratio of micronutrients to calories. Ignorant consumers could finally stop avoiding cashews and avocado, and start avoiding low-fat pop tarts and cereals.
- nandemo 13y ago
  Skim milk still has a lot of protein. I consume a lot of milk but whole milk can be unpalatable so I mostly drink low-fat, which still has some fat and a lot of protein: There are 102 calories in 1 cup of 1% Fat Milk. Calorie breakdown: 21% fat, 47% carbs, 32% protein. It also naturally contains calcium and vitamins B and D. http://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/generic/milk-cows-fluid-1%25-fat http://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/generic/milk-cow...
- vidarh 13y ago
  The problem with nuts is that a reasonable serving is very, very small. If you get people to actually buy and take a decent (calorie wise) serving and eat it slowly, it works great. But it's all too easy to eat a 800kcal-1000kcal bag of nuts without thinking about it. I think a huge part of the problem in general is large packs of food. Ready-made sandwiches in packs with 800-900kcal, for example, or nuts or high-calorie drinks sold in quantities that ought to be anywhere from 2-3 to 10+ servings. Ready-meals that comes only in massive portions that might work ok if you're buying it to split 2 or 3 way, but that are often horribly oversized if you eat alone. It's all great and economical when you're buying stuff to put in the cupboard and have the willpower to resist eating larger quantities, but clearly we can see that people don't. And unfortunately there's little reason for most manufacturers or supermarkets to offer smaller alternatives, as we're too easily seduced into buying the larger packs. Personally I found my soda intake dropped substantially after I started buying my weekend soda "allowance" in 250ml bottles instead of 0.5l or 1.5l bottles, for example. And a lot of my other diet maintenance boils down to picking smaller containers, smaller plates, smaller glasses for everything except water.
lukifer 13y ago
I don't think this is a magic bullet, but it's very important. There are biological feedback loops in satiety, and high-carb diets do make one artificially hungry. After giving up sugar and grains, it's a lot easier to maintain caloric equilibrium by just eating until I'm full, and I usually only need two meals per day.
- almaIV 13y ago
  Giving up grains or sugars isn't necessary, though, especially since "giving up sugar" would entail giving up fruit, and grains, while high in carbs, are some of the most nutritious foods you can eat. In fact, most nutritional recommendations I've read recommend a ratio of 60/20/20 for carbs/fats/protein. Instead of thinking about whether something is "high carb" or not, it's better to think about the digestibility of the carb. Kidney beans, for example, are high-carb and high satiating. Sugar is all-carb and not satiating at all. You can find the satiation relative to carbs by examining the food's glycemic index.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    A caveat: 60/20/20 might work for reasonably sedentary people.... Most people doing exercises, especially resistance exercise, will want much more protein. 40/20/40 or relatively close to that is a common split. Many will up the fat too (at the expense of carbs). At 60/20/20, there's absolutely no way I'd manage keeping up my lifting program.
    - bosie 13y ago
      I assume the split is in percentage of calorie intake? genuine question: how do you eat 40% protein? say you need 2700 calories on a workout day => 1080 protein calories => 250g of protein per day. that's more than 1kg of lean meat/fish a day?
      - vidarh 13y ago
        Yes, it's in percent of calorie intake. I do end up with a lot of chicken and prawn, and a lot of jerky, as well as milk, and various protein supplements (shakes with up to 90% protein by dry weight, mixed with water - generally tastes foul; people writing sales copy for protein products are the most blatant liars in the world). It's not unusual for me to eat a lunch consisting of 400g of lean chicken breast (ca. 100g of protein), ca. 600g of chicken drumsticks (ca. 70g of protein), a small-ish sausage and egg sandwich (~25g protein), a yoghurt drink and a flapjack. The rest I'll make up with a small meal in the evening. My intake on exercise days is actually ~2800kcal so you hit pretty much where I am. But note that 2800kcal on exercise days is above my maintenance level at 103kg, at relatively advanced (but not competitive) levels on most my lifts. Most people will need less than that, and you can get by on substantially less - you will just see less progress. It is fairly self-limiting. A lot of people you see struggling with the same weights in the gym over and over are simply eating too little. The evidence for very high protein diets goes in all kinds of directions, though the evidence for increasing protein to support muscle growth is fairly good as far as I know. There's evidence for various degrees of beneficial (from a muscle building perspective) effects of up to 3g-4g of protein per kg of lean body weight depending on who you ask. Though the main reason to aim for that kind of level simply "in case" it makes a difference, and because it allows for slip-ups without affecting the gym routine much, and unless you have kidney problems there are few to no negative effects. Note that even a lot of gym goers would qualify as relatively sedentary...
almaIV 13y ago
Satiation index exists already, in the form of Glycemic Index. It's not designed to measure satiation, but in practice that's what it does. Eating low GI foods will make you feel full; eating high GI foods will not.
hkolek 13y ago
Sure there's enough talk about satiety. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18703413 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18703413 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptin
tocomment 13y ago
That's really smart! I guess you'd want to list satiety units per calorie to compare across different foods and sizes.
Shorel 13y ago
> What we really care about is satiation and satiety. These are words that no one talks about, and but get to the core of the issue. No one talks about it? It seems you have missed the keto bandwagon.
wutbrodo 13y ago
I was under the impression that macronutrient makeup was a pretty solid proxy for satiation/satiety. Perhaps the reason there isn't a ton of research behind satiation/satiety is that it's largely a "solved problem" (in terms of research being "thin"; I do think adding more clarity on packaging isn't a bad idea).

lifeformed 13y ago

That's an interesting idea. Is Satiation/sateity easily measurable? Is it proportionally consistent among everyone, or do some people get satiated more by some foods than others?

ihsw 13y ago
It depends on many factors, from the objective to the subjective. Objectively the measurements would vary according to the people, eg: obese vs not obese, old vs young, ethnicity, dietary history, and so forth. Subjectively it would vary according to cultural norms and personal opinions, for example. Additionally people can be accustomed to certain foods regardless of such measurements. There is some serious interest in diets like Ketogenic or Paleolithic, which espouse similar dietary requirements to what the parent suggested (eg: whole milk has significantly more fat than skim milk, as such they affect satiation and satiety differently from each-other).
nijk 13y ago
Satiety is on the label, written as fat/protein/fiber. Everything except carbs.

mc-lovin 13y ago

Excellent point. Furthermore, new foods can be developed that achieve better combinations of satiation and satiety, and other desired outcomes. I think it's fair to say that the entire medical profession has in the past suffered from a tendency to convince people to maximize their health, rather than maximize the combination of their health, and whatever other outcomes people desire, such as eating tasty food or feeling satiated. This tendency is flawed because it is not consistent with what people want to do, and is always therefore an uphill battle. As the field matures, this is definitely changing, but the discussion around nutrition shows there is still a long way to go.

tbirdz 13y ago

I've heard that the volume and weight of the food contributes more to the feeling of fullness than the caloric content.

mahyarm 13y ago

Fibrous vegetables tend to be the lowest calories/highest satiation foods there are. I replace all the snacks I eat at work with carrot sticks recently, and I think might be losing weight without thinking about it much.

darkchasma 13y ago
I can eat carrots till I'm orange in the face, but I never feel full. I seem to need meat or fat for that.
- jdrobins2000 13y ago
  Try adding hummus, if you are into that sort of thing. I thought the same thing, but found that I felt great after eating veggies and hummus. Fresh fruit like Fuji apples, oranges, and red grapes are great instead of sweets or soda. And I've found coconut water to be the best beverage all around. I still like my meat, soda, and banana splits too, but as in everything, moderation is key.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    A lot of hummus recipes are high fat, high carb calorie bombs.
    - jdrobins2000 13y ago
      What?!? Source please. It appears somewhat high in fat, but no saturated fat, nor is it high in carbs. Some fats like olive oil are actually good. Not to mention, I'm talking about adding it to fresh vegetables, not eating a whole tub of it by itself.
  - croisillon 13y ago
    Great idea, or adding mayonnaise !
- mahyarm 13y ago
  I never feel fully 'satisfied' with the carrots, but I do feel physically full after eating them. It's a far better alternative to the candy, nuts, yogurts, fruits and oatmeal bars that we have at my work for snacks, which are extremely calorie dense and don't really make me feel full physically. As a tweak to my general food lifestyle, it's far easier to maintain than a diet or cooking for myself consistently.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle. The obesity epidemic is a direct result of sitting in an office 9 to 5 (or 6,7,8,...) and making two meals a day full of fat and sugar, because you're craving. When you have a better lifestyle, you naturally gravitate towards better food, because you have time to cook (as opposed to pizza/snacks) or look for good dinner (as opposed to drive-thru), have time to go to the grocery store buy vegetables/fruits more frequently (as opposed to industrialized food which doesn't spoil), and even time to appreciate food itself making various small meals a day. EDIT: I would like to know why the downvote. The correlation between obesity and office workers is a recurrent research topic.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jcampbell1 13y ago
> There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment. Satiety is a measure of how hungry you will feel. It doesn't make sense to call hunger a factor. I agree that we need to measure the quality of the food correctly, and I suggested a way to do it. The correlation between office work and obesity too small to call it a direct result. I believe the obesity epidemic is caused by three things: 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible. 2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero. 3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals. These meals are replaced commercially created meals (lunchables, mcdonalds) thus #1 applies more often. #2, #3 are good things. The best fix is to design a system where profits are maximized by making tasty foods that with the constraint that the foods don't incorrectly inform our biochemical hunger feedback mechanism. My plan attempts to address this problem.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  > 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible. The problem is, what is irresistible for someone who makes two meals a day is different than what is irresistible for someone in a different diet, lifestyle or even mood. While I was busting my ass inside an stressful office until 10:00 PM without eating, I wanted to get home and sink my teeth in a pepperoni pizza as fast as possible while watching TV. Nowadays I'm on a different lifestyle and, mind you, I woke up craving for squid, for some reason (the body talks). I went downtown, bought fresh squid, cooked a risotto myself with the things I like. A low fat, low sodium, high protein, Zinc and Selenium rich meal - the exact opposite of pizza, but satisfied me just as much today. You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.

koggit 13y ago

For satiation index, I suggest we use micronutrient-to-macronutrient ratio. More simply stated, "nutrient density". Raw fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and lean meat all contain a high ratio of micronutrients to calories. Ignorant consumers could finally stop avoiding cashews and avocado, and start avoiding low-fat pop tarts and cereals.

nandemo 13y ago
Skim milk still has a lot of protein. I consume a lot of milk but whole milk can be unpalatable so I mostly drink low-fat, which still has some fat and a lot of protein: There are 102 calories in 1 cup of 1% Fat Milk. Calorie breakdown: 21% fat, 47% carbs, 32% protein. It also naturally contains calcium and vitamins B and D. http://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/generic/milk-cows-fluid-1%25-fat http://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/generic/milk-cow...
vidarh 13y ago
The problem with nuts is that a reasonable serving is very, very small. If you get people to actually buy and take a decent (calorie wise) serving and eat it slowly, it works great. But it's all too easy to eat a 800kcal-1000kcal bag of nuts without thinking about it. I think a huge part of the problem in general is large packs of food. Ready-made sandwiches in packs with 800-900kcal, for example, or nuts or high-calorie drinks sold in quantities that ought to be anywhere from 2-3 to 10+ servings. Ready-meals that comes only in massive portions that might work ok if you're buying it to split 2 or 3 way, but that are often horribly oversized if you eat alone. It's all great and economical when you're buying stuff to put in the cupboard and have the willpower to resist eating larger quantities, but clearly we can see that people don't. And unfortunately there's little reason for most manufacturers or supermarkets to offer smaller alternatives, as we're too easily seduced into buying the larger packs. Personally I found my soda intake dropped substantially after I started buying my weekend soda "allowance" in 250ml bottles instead of 0.5l or 1.5l bottles, for example. And a lot of my other diet maintenance boils down to picking smaller containers, smaller plates, smaller glasses for everything except water.

lukifer 13y ago

I don't think this is a magic bullet, but it's very important. There are biological feedback loops in satiety, and high-carb diets do make one artificially hungry. After giving up sugar and grains, it's a lot easier to maintain caloric equilibrium by just eating until I'm full, and I usually only need two meals per day.

almaIV 13y ago
Giving up grains or sugars isn't necessary, though, especially since "giving up sugar" would entail giving up fruit, and grains, while high in carbs, are some of the most nutritious foods you can eat. In fact, most nutritional recommendations I've read recommend a ratio of 60/20/20 for carbs/fats/protein. Instead of thinking about whether something is "high carb" or not, it's better to think about the digestibility of the carb. Kidney beans, for example, are high-carb and high satiating. Sugar is all-carb and not satiating at all. You can find the satiation relative to carbs by examining the food's glycemic index.
- vidarh 13y ago
  A caveat: 60/20/20 might work for reasonably sedentary people.... Most people doing exercises, especially resistance exercise, will want much more protein. 40/20/40 or relatively close to that is a common split. Many will up the fat too (at the expense of carbs). At 60/20/20, there's absolutely no way I'd manage keeping up my lifting program.
  - bosie 13y ago
    I assume the split is in percentage of calorie intake? genuine question: how do you eat 40% protein? say you need 2700 calories on a workout day => 1080 protein calories => 250g of protein per day. that's more than 1kg of lean meat/fish a day?
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Yes, it's in percent of calorie intake. I do end up with a lot of chicken and prawn, and a lot of jerky, as well as milk, and various protein supplements (shakes with up to 90% protein by dry weight, mixed with water - generally tastes foul; people writing sales copy for protein products are the most blatant liars in the world). It's not unusual for me to eat a lunch consisting of 400g of lean chicken breast (ca. 100g of protein), ca. 600g of chicken drumsticks (ca. 70g of protein), a small-ish sausage and egg sandwich (~25g protein), a yoghurt drink and a flapjack. The rest I'll make up with a small meal in the evening. My intake on exercise days is actually ~2800kcal so you hit pretty much where I am. But note that 2800kcal on exercise days is above my maintenance level at 103kg, at relatively advanced (but not competitive) levels on most my lifts. Most people will need less than that, and you can get by on substantially less - you will just see less progress. It is fairly self-limiting. A lot of people you see struggling with the same weights in the gym over and over are simply eating too little. The evidence for very high protein diets goes in all kinds of directions, though the evidence for increasing protein to support muscle growth is fairly good as far as I know. There's evidence for various degrees of beneficial (from a muscle building perspective) effects of up to 3g-4g of protein per kg of lean body weight depending on who you ask. Though the main reason to aim for that kind of level simply "in case" it makes a difference, and because it allows for slip-ups without affecting the gym routine much, and unless you have kidney problems there are few to no negative effects. Note that even a lot of gym goers would qualify as relatively sedentary...

almaIV 13y ago

Satiation index exists already, in the form of Glycemic Index. It's not designed to measure satiation, but in practice that's what it does. Eating low GI foods will make you feel full; eating high GI foods will not.

hkolek 13y ago

Sure there's enough talk about satiety. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18703413 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18703413 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptin

tocomment 13y ago

That's really smart! I guess you'd want to list satiety units per calorie to compare across different foods and sizes.

Shorel 13y ago

> What we really care about is satiation and satiety. These are words that no one talks about, and but get to the core of the issue. No one talks about it? It seems you have missed the keto bandwagon.

wutbrodo 13y ago

I was under the impression that macronutrient makeup was a pretty solid proxy for satiation/satiety. Perhaps the reason there isn't a ton of research behind satiation/satiety is that it's largely a "solved problem" (in terms of research being "thin"; I do think adding more clarity on packaging isn't a bad idea).