Keeping Fit: The dietary secret to a healthy weight and longer life

Published 12:05 am Sunday, February 3, 2019

If the idea of being able to eat plates full of food and still maintain or even lose weight appeals to you then you will love the information in this column. So many have tried diet after diet, gone from low fat to low carb, but a real dietary key lies in calculating a simple number: calories per gram of food.

Understanding caloric density

The major concept behind the majority of healthy weight management is the principle of caloric density. It may sound complex but it is really quite simple. We all have to eat a certain amount of food to feel comfortably full — an amount for most people that equals about two to three pounds a day. And if we eat less than that (by watching our portions) we run headlong into one of the biggest reasons for giving up a diet: hunger.

Most of us can deal with hunger for a while, but eventually it starts to gnaw away at our willpower and sooner or later we give in a little (or a lot!), and there goes the diet and back come the pounds. A much better approach is to eat the same, or an even greater, volume of food that has fewer calories by lowering the caloric density of the foods you put in your mouth.

Essentially, that is what caloric density is all about — the amount of calories you put in your mouth. It’s not the amount of food that matters — it’s the amount of calories taken in and absorbed.

Measuring caloric density

Caloric density is measured by the gram, so a food’s caloric density number tells you how many calories are in one gram of that food. This can be figured out by looking at any label and seeing how many calories that food has and dividing it by the serving size (listed in grams). For example: If a Pop Tarts label says there are 200 calories in one 50-gram Pop Tart pastry, that is 200 divided by 50 or a caloric density of four. That is four calories per gram of Pop Tart.

Lower your calories effortlessly

Obviously, the lower caloric density value of a food the better it is for weight control. This would include most whole plant foods, like fruits, vegetables, beans, potatoes and some whole grains, as well as some very lean meats like fish and non-fat dairy. These all have a low caloric density. This simply means that virtually all of them have only one calorie per gram of food and often much less.

For example, a package of broccoli may show a single serving as containing about 90 grams of broccoli but only 30 calories. That would be a caloric density of .33. It would take three slices of white bread to equal the same bulk of food (90 grams) in your stomach, but that would give you 237 calories — nearly eight times as much!

White bread’s caloric density, therefore, is eight times worse — about 2.6. In general, if a food has fewer calories than it does weight in grams (which you can read next to the serving size on any label) you will find it very hard to gain any weight eating that food. Cultures, like the traditional Okinawan in Japan, or the vegetarian Seventh-day Adventists in our country, stay lean throughout their long lives because the majority of the foods on their plates have low caloric densities of one or less. Their plates are full of vegetables, fruits, beans and whole grains but not calories.

Pump up the volume

Satiety expert Barbara Rolls and her colleagues at Pennsylvania State University proved out this principle by cutting more than 400 calories from people’s diets without changing portion sizes or sense of satiety. How? They recognized that people eat about the same amount, or weight, of food each day to feel satisfied, so they just altered the caloric density of their meals.

Instead of a typical ¾ cup bowl of box cereal with a caloric density of 3.4 per serving, they reduced the serving size slightly to ½ cup and filled in the rest with ½ cup low-caloric density fruit like strawberries (caloric density 0.3), and a ½ cup of soy milk (caloric density 0.3). Now the breakfast has a caloric density of 1.3. If we choose cooked oatmeal (caloric density 0.7) instead of boxed cereal we could eat even more food for the same amount of calories and get even more fiber to go with the antioxidant berries.

You see, by choosing foods with low caloric density, you’ll eat fewer calories, feel fuller, get excellent nutrition — and in all probability feel better, too! Remember the principle: calories per gram. This is the secret to saving you from a lifetime of excess weight and possibly even an early grave. Understand this concept and learn to build your meals around it and you will have mastered one of the most important skills for weight control.

Tom Morrison is a fitness coordinator at Bradley Wellness Center.