Healthy Eating & Diet
This article is from the WebMD Feature Archive
Satiety: The New Diet Weapon
There's nothing new about taking in fewer calories to lose weight. What is new in fighting the battle of the bulge is a diet weapon that reduces calorie intake by managing hunger.
It's called "satiety." Not exactly a word that rolls off your tongue (pronounced "sa-TIE-atee"). It's a diet and nutrition buzzword for the state of feeling full, one word in a new vocabulary that includes terms like "energy density," "sensory-specific satiety," and "volumetrics."
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If you've ever wondered why you fill up on a bowl of oatmeal but can eat three doughnuts before feeling satisfied, the reason is the comparative satiety levels of these foods. Susanna Holt, PhD, developed a satiety index, reported in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Taking 240-calorie portions of popular foods, she ranks them according to how they compare with a slice of white bread, which carries a rank of 100. Oatmeal has a high satiety level at 209, while a doughnut's rank is 68. Interestingly, a 240-calorie serving of boiled potatoes rank highest at 323, but French fries score just 116.
Weapons for Your Diet Arsenal
Two experts in nutritional research and weight loss talked to WebMD about their very different approaches to helping people take in fewer calories and lose weight while eating nutritious, balanced meals, and without going hungry.
David L. Katz, MD, MPH, a medical correspondent on ABC's Good Morning America, uses flavor management to turn off appetite, described in his new book, The Flavor Point Diet: The Delicious Breakthrough Plan to Turn Off Your Hunger and Lose the Weight for Good.
The strategy of Barbara Rolls, PhD, author of The Volumetrics Eating Plan and The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan, substitutes foods that have fewer calories by weight compared with those that are energy dense to feel full on fewer calories.
Turn Off Your Appetite
The variety of food we dieters eat may be doing us in. An abundance of different flavors at one meal overstimulates the brain's appetite centers so you overeat before feeling full, says Katz, who is director of the Yale Prevention Research Center in New Haven, Conn. His Flavor Point diet is based on studies of sensory-specific satiety, or the tendency to feel full and stop eating when flavors are limited, and do just the opposite when flavors are varied.
Research shows that different types of flavors, such as sweet, salty, and sour, activate their own appetite centers in the brain. Katz says this is why you might feel full after eating a savory meal but still have room for dessert. "Once you turn on an appetite center, you must eat until it registers fullness. If you turn on many centers at once, you must eat until they're all full."
Katz calls the point at which satiety is reached the "flavor point," and his diet plan restricts the types of flavors so you'll reach it without overeating. This isn't a cabbage soup type of diet. There's plenty of variety in the six-week plan, based on lean protein, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
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