Eating less not the best way to lose weight

Eating less not the best way to lose weight, study shows

According to recent research that was just published in the journal Appetite, when it comes to dieting, what you eat has a greater impact on your calorie consumption than how much food you consume.

Perhaps choosing healthier foods, like salads, is more significant than how much we consume.

The new study was conducted by Faris Zuraikat, a doctoral student in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, and it is the result of a 1-year randomized controlled experiment that looked at the effects of various food quantities on weight reduction.

The earlier study sought to investigate the so-called "portion size effect," which happens when people are given larger quantities than they requested but nevertheless eat more food.

To this end, the previous trial trained the participants to gain more control over their portions, presenting them with useful strategies for portion size management.

In this new trial study, the researchers wanted to see if people who had been previously trained to manage their portions would respond differently to increasing portion sizes by comparison with untrained people.

As the study’s first author explains, the researchers “[w]ere also interested in whether those untrained individuals with overweight and obesity or normal weight differed in their response.”

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Calorie intake vs. portion size effect

To find out, the researchers gathered three groups of women: 39 women with overweight and obesity who had taken part in the portion-controlling trial, 29 healthy "control" women who had a regular weight and had not taken part in the previous trial, and 34 women who were overweight but had not taken part in it.

Every woman in the study had the identical foods once per week for four weeks, but the portions got bigger in a random order.

Furthermore, and maybe more importantly, there were variations in the food's caloric composition.

The menu included both high-calorie dishes like garlic bread and low-calorie foods like salads.According to the study, the ladies in all three groups ate more when given larger servings.

However, the group that had received portion management instruction in the earlier experiment ingested fewer calories than the untrained group.

The authors state that meals with a higher proportion of lower-[energy density] foods than controls were to blame for the trained participants' decreased energy consumption.

The principal researcher of the study notes that although all of the groups received the same meals, their food preferences varied.

"Compared to the untrained controls, the training participants consumed more of the lower calorie-dense items and less of the higher calorie-dense foods."

As a result, the calorie consumption of trained participants was lower than that of the control groups, whose intake was unaffected by their weight status.

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Why choosing low-calorie food is important

The results demonstrate that picking healthy, lower-calorie-dense foods was more effective and sustainable than just attempting to avoid sizable quantities of higher-calorie options, according to the study's main researcher, who also explains the relevance of the findings.

As Zuraikat continues, "if you chose high-calorie items but limit the amount you eat, portions will be too little, and you're likely to get hungry."

Co-author of the study and Penn State professor of nutritional sciences Barbara Rolls adds her two cents.

“The study supports the idea that eating less of the higher-calorie-dense foods and more of the nutritious, lower-calorie-dense foods can help to manage hunger while consuming fewer calories.”

Barbara Rolls

She continues, "You're modifying the quantities of the various food categories, but you still have a full plate."

Given that people who wish to lose weight are frequently advised to eat "a bit of everything," as long as it is done in moderation, the findings are especially noteworthy.

Instead, new study seems to indicate that choosing more nutrient-dense, calorie-reduced foods is much more crucial than attempting to eat less.

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