High Protein Foods are More Satisfying

This is a simple truth that those in the Low-Carb world have known for many years – that a meal rich in protein will help you last between meals without getting an attack of the munchies.

Why have the scientists taken so long to catch up?

I’ve long maintained that higher protein foods are always going to be the most filling. Mainly because they take longer for the body to digest, therefore remain in the stomach and intestines that little bit longer, meaning our bodies aren’t signalling us saying “hey, we’re hungry – give us more food!”

And to a certain extent – now- science is starting to back that up.

Protein Rich Foods ARE More Filling

I’ve long maintained that higher protein foods are always going to be the most filling. Mainly because they [private_silver]take longer for the body to digest, therefore remain in the stomach and intestines that little bit longer, meaning our bodies aren’t signalling us saying “hey, we’re hungry – give us more food!”

And to a certain extent, science does back that up.

If you look over the research papers that have been carried out, certainly over the last ten years, they clearly show that 8 out of 10 people ate less after a protein-rich meal than they did after a meal that was low in protein.

The BBC recently carried out a test to prove whether this was so or not. What they did was to take 3 volunteers who worked long hours, and were used to snacking on the job.

The BBC Reveals the Truth

What they wanted to do was to see if they could give them a meal that would set them up for the long day ahead, so that they wouldn’t need to snack whilst working on their shifts. They fed each of the volunteers a meal that had the same calorific value but whose contents varied in the proportion of fat, protein and carbohydrates – one being high in fat, one high in protein and one high in carbohydrates.

After the meal, they were kept under close observation, to make sure that they couldn’t sneak any crafty snacks. After a four hour period, they were each given pizza slices to eat, and carefully observed as they tucked into the richly-deserved reward.

It Works…

The one who ate the most was the one who had the initial meal that was high in carbohydrates. The quantity he ate was closely matched by the one whose diet was high in fat. The person who ate the smallest amount during the lunch-break was the one who had had the protein rich meal.

It was a very simple test, but it did rather prove the fact that if you don’t want to get hunger pains between meals, then make sure your meals are high in protein.

It’s as simple as that.

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Cheese, Cream, more cheese, in fact everything and anything dairy can be found on the Snack Box Diet plates.

Eating high calcium, higher fat dairy foods, may not be the heart attack weighting to happen foods many people think they are. In fact they can be one of those foods that actually helps you to lose fat, and for good reason too.

Danish Study on Eating More Calcium

Now, a recent study conducted in Denmark has observed that the more calcium you eat in your diet the less body fat you will have, and therefore the less you will weigh. This points to the fact that not only is dairy a high-energy food, it could be that dairy itself can help you absorb less fat.

Professor Arne Astrup, Head of Human Nutrition at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, Denmark, undertook a study to prove this fact.

In the study, a group of volunteers spent one week eating a diet that was high in calcium, typically more than 2000milligrams of calcium a day; and week 2 was on a low calcium diet, where they were eating around about 500milligrams of calcium a day.

These diets were designed so that they had the identical amount of calories and crucially, they also had the same fat content each week.

The known science led the researchers to expect that the higher calcium diet would indeed cause the body to absorb less fat than on the lower calcium diet.

Better than Expected

However, the results that actually came out were even better than expected, in fact on the higher calcium diet tests on the subjects excretions showed that they passed through twice as much fat as they did on the lower calcium diet.

Putting that another way, on the higher calcium diet they absorbed only half the amount of fat than they did on the lower calcium diet.

What this means for snack box dieters is that when you eat dairy products, not all of their calories count.

But of course, that still doesn’t give you an excuse to binge out on cheese!