For example, if I eat a small steak with 500 calories, will I feel full for longer than if I ate 10 rice cakes with 30 calories each?
In: 88
So hunger will be effected by raw calories , portion size and also by the type of food
Juice is full of calories but doesn’t fill you up for hunger much since it goes through you with less digestion needed since it’s liquid already
Carb rich foods will get “burned up”faster in digestion (simplifying a lot here) so you will get hungry faster with them
Protein and fat takes a really long time to digest so you won’t feel hungry for a lot longer with them
So if you had 1000 calories of each
Juice < rice < steak would be the order of how long they would let you feel fulfilled
Remembering that you have had food is fairly significant in not feeling hungry too. If you don’t remember eating, then it must be food time again.
Decidedly not eli5 paper on it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763421005224
A lot of people don’t realise that hunger is not the same feeling as “feeling full”. It’s possible to have a full stomach but still be hungry, and to be so empty that your stomach rumbles but not feel hungry.
The human body is very good at knowing what it needs. Eat a pile of rice cakes until you physically can’t eat any more and your body will realise that it hasn’t had the nutrients that it needs and will continue to send you the hungry signal.
The problem is that humans have become rather bad at correctly interpreting both feelings.
Bit of both. You feel hungry because your stomach is empty, but when it comes to filling it, it depends. You can divide calories into 3 categories:
* Protein – 4kcal/g, it builds muscle, bones. It takes time to digest and is filling because of it
* Fat – 9kcal/g, it carries flavour but is very calory dense. It can be filling, but it depends on the exact food.
* Carbohydrates – 4 kcal/g, it includes all sugars, and is the least filling of the three. It’s digested very quickly. Notice when you eat white bread, you salivate a lot. Your saliva already digests sugar before you even swallow it.
* Sidenote: why are fruits so healthy but have sugar? First of all, they don’t have as much as you think – e.g. watermelon is 6% sugar, 12%. Chocolate bars have as much as 60%. **Fibre**, also a carbohydrate, slows down the digestion, helping your blood carry the sugar better and the food stays in the stomach longer, making you feel full longer.
As you know, a chocolate bar has a lot of calories but won’t keep you full for long because it’s all sugar. However, a steak is mostly protein and fat, so will keep you for longer. Sounds common sense, right?
Liquids, like milk or soda, are also digested really quickly. So you could drink 3L of coke or milk but feel the need to eat almost immediately.
I also mentioned that empty stomach means hunger. What if you fill it with things that take up space but don’t have much calories? You’ll feel full! That’s why fruits, vegetables, rice cakes, etc. are really important when dieting and are recommended by nutritionists. You feel full without eating a lot of calories, making your weight loss adventure more pleasant.
Back to your question – will you feel full longer after a steak or 10 rice cakes? I think I’d feel full after the steak, thanks to the protein which takes time to digest.
It’s mostly about the actual density, size and composition of the food and not as much the caloric content.
Rice cakes are mostly air and the actual food material is much more quickly digested compared to the protein of a steak. The steak should leave you more full for longer, though obviously every body is slightly different.
In generap though, the stomach can only judge fullness by physical volume, not calories. Calories aren’t a real thing, it’s a measurement system we invented to judge energy density.
This is why calorically-dense food is an issue, we never evolved to deal with it. Because our stomachs only evaluate based on physical volume, we can eat significantly more calories than we should because three chocolate bars has about the same weight as a whole bowl of salad so our stomach treats them as the same even though the former has way more calories.
You can fill up pretty fast eating cellulous noodles in a flavorful broth with no useful food calories at all. (That is, it’s indigestible. It would certainly burn in a calorie test). Trying to eat that instead of food, you’d feel full but sick in pretty short order.
As to your example:
The steak will likely make you feel full longer. The meat takes longer to digest opposed to the relatively easy to break down carbohydrates in the rice cakes.
Not all calories are the same. Check out what is known as the “satiety index”
[https://www.diabetesnet.com/food-diabetes/satiety-index/](https://www.diabetesnet.com/food-diabetes/satiety-index/)
Generally speaking, the more water, fibre and protein a food has, the longer it will make you feel full.
For instance, you’ll see that 100 calories of wholemeal bread is about 50% more satiating than 100 calories of white bread (because of the fibre content), but potatoes are more than 200% more satiating (because they contain lots of water as well as fibre).
Beef (which is rich in protein) is around 75% more satiating per calorie than white bread, but fish (which is high in both protein and water) is 125% more satiating.
The worst foods from a satiety point of view are baked goods made with refined white flour like cakes and croissants that contain fat and sugars but little protein, fibre or water. A croissant is only half as satiating per calorie as white bread, which means you have to eat twice as many calories of it to feel as full.
Hunger is a big thing to try to ELI5, but here is what I know from attending diabetes conferences and reading the occasional research article on it:
Hunger is caused by a chemical released by your stomach (ghrelin), and it stops when another chemical counters it (leptin). We keep getting new research revealing things that make the stomach release each of these chemicals differently. For example, sleep deprivation increases ghrelin and decreases leptin.
With things that you eat, there is some research showing that the weight of what you eat is important. Heavier food weight leads to more leptin and delays ghrelin, light foods favor ghrelin coming back sooner. So foods like broccoli are really good for weight loss because they are dense but low in calories while providing useful vitamins and minerals. Fish is good because the fish is heavy, and the fish oil is a healthy oil that also seems to help control hunger throughout the day.
IIRC, rapid expansion of the stomach can trigger leptin release. So drinking a bunch of water helps control hunger because your stomach expands, thinks it is full, and releases the leptin to say “stop putting things in here”. This lends itself to the saying about how if you think you are hungry, drink a glass of water and then wait 20 minutes; if you are still hungry after that go ahead and eat. This might suggest that portion size is the winning factor of what you asked, but then you also have to look at the composition of those portions. Like, glucose (a sugar found in a lot of foods) is immediately usable by the body without having to convert it. This is great if you are a nurse and a patient gets fainty after a blood draw, since you can give them an apple juice and they will recover quickly. This is bad for managing hunger though, or for weight loss, because if it is a major part of what you just ate you will get to feeling hungry sooner and be loading your body up with sugars.
Someone might look at this information and think “Oh, sugar bad, protein and fats good”, and that also isn’t true. There are bad fats out there that will increase other health risks (like heart health), and high protein diets are not inherently healthy. Definitely talk to your doctor before making a decision to start one of these diets, because there are good ways to do them, bad ways to do them, and a lot of people on the internet insisting they know the good way if you just follow their blog or whatever. Definitely don’t look at an ELI5 from a guy who is sharing the information he has from articles and conferences and make a lifestyle change based off of it.
The body has no “calorie counter” function.
Hunger is a complex phenomena, but there are a few hormonal drivers.
In the short term, the hunger hormone ghrelin is signal for hunger to go up. The concept of satiety is roughly the inverse of ghrelin level – foods that lead to higher satiety lead to lower ghrelin. Note that satiety is typically measured for 2 hours and that’s a bit misleading.
In the longer term, the hormone leptin is secreted by fat cells. More fat cells means more leptin, and that drives hunger down. Unfortunately, people who are insulin resistant are also leptin resistant so high leptin levels do not down-regulate hunger.
Your question is about satiety. Generally speaking, a steak will have high satiety because it has a lot of protein and fat, and rice cakes are almost pure carbs, and will likely lead to high satiety that goes away a couple of hours later.
The feeling of hunger or fullness is stretch receptors in the stomach being triggered. Its one method the body has to help regulate if/when to eat.
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