Satiety Index: The Secret to Long-lasting Fullness - Optimising Nutrition

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Uncover the mystery of satiety with our comprehensive guide on the Satiety Index. This eye-opening exploration sheds light on the Food Satiety Index Score, a key to unlocking sustainable weight loss.

Bid farewell to insatiable cravings as you delve into a world where feeling satisfied doesn’t come with a calorie-heavy price.

Learn about the foods that keep you full longer and embark on a journey towards better health, armed with the knowledge of the satiety index.

ContentsThe Most Satiating Foods Per Calorie<br>The Food Satiety Index (1995)<br>Nutrient Optimiser Data<br>Why Do We Eat?<br>Why Do We Overeat?<br>What if Nutrition Was About Nutrients?<br>Macronutrients<br>Specific Appetite<br>Nutrient Leverage<br>Satiety Index Score<br>Highest Satiety Recipes<br>Satiety FAQs<br>More on Satiety

The Most Satiating Foods Per Calorie

Our satiety analysis demonstrates that we achieve the greatest long-term satiety when we obtain more of the essential nutrients from the foods we eat.

While all the essential nutrients are important, protein, fibre, calcium, potassium, and sodium all have the most statistically significant relationship with eating less.

Foods and meals that contain more of these nutrients per calorie satisfy your cravings and empower you to feel satiated over the long term with less energy.

The chart below shows how this works using a range of popular foods.

The horizontal axis is nutrient density (per calorie).

The vertical axis is nutrient density (per serving).

The colour coding is based on our Satiety Index Score.Foods in green have the highest Satiety Index Score and are harder to overeat.

Foods in red towards the bottom left corner have the lowest Satiety Index Score and are easier to overeat.

For more detail, you can click here to dive into the interactive Tableau version on your computer. When you mouse over each point, you’ll see more info for each food. You can also use the tabs to see separate charts for animal-based foods, dairy, plant-based foods, and seafood.

The nutrient-dense foods towards the right of this chart contain a lot of nutrients per calorie. However, getting enough protein and energy from non-starchy veggies like spinach, asparagus, and watercress alone is hard. If you tried to only eat these foods, you’d find yourself craving energy-dense, nutrient-poor comfort foods — like the doughnut in the bottom left corner — before long. You also wouldn’t get a lot of nutrients because we don’t tend to eat these foods in large quantities.

Meanwhile, the foods toward the top of this chart provide more nutrients per serving. You can use these foods to build the foundation of your diet because they provide adequate energy and plenty of nutrients in the amounts we typically consume.

In our Macros Masterclass, we guide our Optimisers to prioritise foods towards the top of the chart to get adequate protein and energy to align with their goals. With the foundation in place, in our Micros Masterclass, Optimisers learn to prioritise more of the foods towards the right that fill their remaining micronutrient gaps and further increase satiety.

Overall, foods that contain more essential nutrients tend to have a higher Satiety Index Score. Thus, they satisfy our cravings more effectively than the nutrient-poor, low-satiety foods towards the bottom left.

If you’d prefer a simple printable list of optimal foods tailored to your goals and preferences, you can download our suite of optimised pdf food lists tailored for a range of goals (including maximum satiety) in our Optimising Nutrition Community.

Get the Optimised Food Lists

To learn more about satiety and how we developed our revolutionary Satiety Index Score, read on!

The Food Satiety Index (1995)

Given the critical importance of understanding our satiety response to food, little has been done to quantify it. Perhaps the most helpful study undertaken in this area thus far was A Satiety Index of Common Foods (Holt et al., 1995), performed by The University of Sydney in Australia.

In this study, participants were fed 1000 kJ portions (239 calories) of 38 common foods. Researchers then measured subjective hunger and fullness every fifteen minutes over three hours, followed by how much they ate at a buffet.

In the Food Satiety Index, white bread was given an arbitrary score of 100%. So, any food that scored above 100% is relatively more satiating per calorie than white bread, and vice versa.

The results for the 38 foods are shown in the satiety index chart below. You can view the full satiety index list in the original paper here.

Unsurprisingly, processed carb-and-fat combo foods like croissants, cakes and doughnuts (shown towards the bottom of the chart above) scored poorly, while high-protein foods like meat and fish scored well.

But surprisingly, the cooked and cooled white potato (with no salt or oil) outperformed everything else with a score of 323! This...