Drink Soup, not Soda for Weight Loss
The Effect of Food Viscosity on Satiety
How do we know when to stop eating?
It’s not because we get to a certain number of calories. We don’t naturally stop eating because we hit 500 or 800 or 1000 calories, because for all of human history (several million years), we don’t know exactly how many calories we ate. Yet despite this, until about the late 1970s humans largely avoided both starvation and obesity.
We also don’t stop eating because when we eat a certain amount of nutrients — protein/ vitamins/ minerals etc. Again, we have no idea how many nutrients we eat and yet managed to avoid kwashiorkor (protein deficiency), except in severe famine. The idea that we eat until we get enough protein/ vitamins/minerals and therefore if we eat nutrient sparse (non nutrient dense) foods we need to eat more food overall is largely unsupported by historical facts or scientific evidence.
Why do we stop eating? The answer is really very simple. We stop eating when we are full (assuming there is enough food, and no psychologic reasons for eating). What makes us hungry and what makes us full (and therefore stop eating)? That…
