NoExcusesGym

 Cutting how much food you eat – and calories – may take one simple step: eating a low-calorie soup before you dive into the main course.

Participants in a university study who ate soup before their entrée cut their calories by 20 percent compared to when they went straight to the meal.

“Using this strategy allows people to get an extra course at the meal, while eating fewer total calories,” said Julie Flood, a doctoral student in nutritional sciences at Penn State University who helped conduct the study. “But make sure to choose wisely, by picking low-calorie, broth-based soups that are about 100 to 150 calories per serving.

“Be careful of higher-calorie, cream-based soups that could actually increase the total calories consumed.”

Chunky or low-cal?

Dr. Barbara Rolls, a nutrition expert at Penn State University who also conducted the project, said the findings expand upon previous studies on consuming lower-calorie soups as a way to cut the amount of food you eat at a particular meal.

Some research, however, showed the chunkier soups were the most filling, but Penn State’s team found that low-calorie soups also will fill you up, Rolls added.

Rolls and her team served soups made with separate broth and vegetables, chunky vegetable, chunky-pureed vegetable,  and pureed vegetable to get a sense of whether texture affected the way people ate. The soups were made with various combinations of chicken broth, broccoli, potato, cauliflower, carrots and butter.

The concept of “volumetrics� – eating a satisfying volume of food while controlling calories and meeting nutrient requirements – is based on studies led by Rolls in her Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior at Penn State.

source: nubella news

(by Marcela Vanharova)