Cracking the Nutritional Code: How to Escape Food Addiction and Maximize Satiety

I have a dream that one day, every food in your diet will compete for space on your plates based on the nutrients it provides to crush your cravings and leave you feeling energised.

Sadly, Big Food has mastered the science of engineering foods to be addictive, maximising profit at the expense of your health and vitality.

However, the good news is that we can now reverse engineer Big Food’s cunning ways to identify foods that nourish you, help you escape the food addiction trap, and satisfy your cravings.

In this article, we’ll demonstrate how we’ve applied this approach to all 8,535 foods in the USDA database, cracking the nutritional code to empower your food choices.

If you’re eager, you can dive into the interactive version of the chart here (on your computer) or read on to learn more.

Contents

How to Read the Chart
How to Use the Chart
Food Groups
Comparison of Food Groups
How Could This Be Used?
Check Out the Interactive Chart
Learn More About High-Satiety Foods

How to Read the Chart

The horizontal axis represents our Food Addiction-Satiety Index (i.e., satiety per calorie), calibrated using 872,925 days of data. Foods towards the right are designed to help you feel satisfied with less energy, while foods towards the left are likely intended to keep you coming back for more.
The vertical axis is our nutrient density score. A food with a perfect 100% score would provide the optimal nutrient intake for all 34 essential nutrients you need to thrive (i.e. vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fatty acids).
Finally, the colouring is the protein percentage. Red signifies low protein, while foods shown in green have a high protein percentage.

Add foods towards the top right of this chart to get the nutrients you need to thrive and boost satiety. This will empower you to escape food addiction and leave behind the foods towards the bottom left.

At least, that’s what we continually see when Optimisers follow this approach in our 20/20 Macros and 20/20 Micros courses.

How to Use the Chart

You have to try it yourself to see its power, but let me give you a guided tour of the fascinating features of this powerful tool.

When you open the chart, start by hovering over each point to view the details for that food in a pop-up box.

Search

Next, try using the search box to find specific foods.

For example, if we search for ‘McDonald’s,’ we see that everything on the menu has a pretty low satiety score—it’s almost as if they know how to engineer foods to keep customers coming back.

The magic of fast food is not that it’s full of sugar, salt or low protein. Instead, the perfect blend of nutrients hits our multiple bliss points — just enough to make it optimally palatable, but not so much that it becomes too strong and drives sensory-specific satiety.

Or, if we search for “chocolate”, we see that chocolate ice cream is likely to be pretty hard to stop eating (as if you didn’t already know).

Use the Sliders

Next, you can use the sliders to zoom in on foods with higher satiety and nutrient density. Click and drag the slider to tighten it and see your desired range for satiety, nutrient density, protein (%) or carbohydrate (%).

As you can see in the snip below, the highest-satiety, nutrient-dense foods tend to be non-starchy veggies, offal, and some seafood. These foods have a strong taste because they pack in a ton of nutrients per calorie, driving sensory-specific satiety and signalling to your body that you don’t need much of that food to get its nutrients.

While at it, you can also check out the lowest-satiety foods.

Progressively Upgrade Your Diet

Remember, increasing satiety per calorie is not about eating only foods in the top right of the chart.

Everyone wants overnight success and to push from 0 to 100, but you can’t live only on these foods — they won’t give you enough energy.

Optimisers with the best long-term success treat it as a game of progressively adding high-satiety nutritious foods as they watch their cravings for seductive and addictive low-satiety foods disappear.

In our courses, we guide Optimisers to progressively upgrade the core 20 foods and 20 meals they eat most often.

Food Groups

Modern diet camps like to demonise certain nutrients (carbs, fat, saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, sugar, etc.) or food groups (e.g., plants, animal foods, ultra-processed foods, etc.).

But what if we could cut through the noise, dogma, and confusion by examining these foods through the lens of satiety vs. nutrient density?

Baked Products

The interactive satiety vs nutrient density chart starts to get super cool when we dive into the food groups.

Use the drop-down menu on the right to select a food group, such as baked products. You’ll quickly see that bread provides little in the way of satiety or nutrient density.

But instead of simply believing that “bread = bad,” you can see that bread has lower satiety because it tends to provide less protein and nutrients and is baked to perfection to hit multiple bliss points.

Breakfast cereals

If you select breakfast cereals, you’ll see they all score pretty poorly in terms of nutrient density and satiety.

Meat

Conversely, while many demonise meat, most meat ranks well on the satiety vs nutrient density spectrum.

Seafood

Similarly, anything from the sea is also pretty amazing!

Vegetables

Then we have vegetables, which are also nutritious and satiating.

Rather than considering certain food groups as “good” vs “bad”, this agnostic approach empowers us to assess all foods based on the nutrients and, thus, satiety they provide.

You may not enjoy, be able to access or afford certain foods where you are. That’s OK; there are plenty of other great options!

Comparison of Food Groups

As you can see in the charts above, the individual foods in each food group have a wide range of scores. There are better and worse choices within each category.

But if we wanted to keep things simple, which food groups should we prioritise and avoid?

The table below shows each food group’s average satiety score and nutrient density to summarise this at a high level.

The best: Towards the top of the table, we have seafood, pork, beef, lamb, vegetables, poultry and offal with a higher satiety score
The worst: At the bottom, we have baked products, fast food, restaurant foods, snacks, cereals, nuts & seeds and grains.

food group	satiety score	nutrient density	count
Finfish and Shellfish Products	64%	72%	264
Pork Products	61%	62%	340
Beef Products	59%	61%	954
Lamb, Veal, and Game Products	59%	60%	458
Vegetables and Vegetable Products	57%	56%	825
Poultry Products	56%	63%	385
Offal	56%	67%	22
American Indian/Alaska Native Foods	56%	30%	163
Beverages	48%	21%	221
Spices and Herbs	48%	45%	60
Dairy and Egg Products	46%	44%	283
Fruits and Fruit Juices	44%	27%	359
Legumes and Legume Products	44%	41%	380
Soups, Sauces, and Gravies	42%	24%	450
Baby Foods	39%	38%	366
Sausages and Luncheon Meats	35%	45%	166
Fats and Oils	35%	8%	171
Sweets	29%	14%	356
Nut and Seed Products	29%	38%	137
Cereal Grains and Pasta	29%	35%	181
Breakfast Cereals	25%	36%	356
Snacks	23%	29%	177
Restaurant Foods	23%	46%	109
Fast Foods	21%	38%	360
Baked Products	18%	22%	872
Meals, Entrees, and Side Dishes	17%	31%	120
Average/total	43%	42%	8535

How Could This Be Used?

In the past, I’ve dreamed that this satiety vs nutrient density paradigm could be implemented into government nutrition guidelines. Nutrition should primarily be about nutrients.

Food Policy & Dietary Guidelines

Last year, I was excited that RFK Jr. might make an impact on the nutrition system.

So far, most of the discussion has centered on substituting seed oils for tallow and eliminating food additives. This may help a little, but a quantitative approach to satiety and nutrient density would be much more powerful and directly target the root cause of why so many people overeat.

However, due to numerous conflicts of interest and lobbying from vested interests, I won’t hold my breath for a nutrient-first approach to the nutritional guidelines anytime soon.

Financial Incentives?

A robust, quantitative system like this could even be used to change the financial systems in the food industry, as the Food Compass system aims to do.

Imagine if we could impose a levy on foods designed to be addictive, which could be used to subsidise nutritious, higher-satiety foods. But when I floated this idea in the past, I found that most people don’t trust the government to make unbiased, data-driven decisions that would empower people. The other challenge is that such a system would make processed foods less affordable for the many who currently can’t afford quality food.

Education and Empower Yourself!

So my dream, at least for the short term, is that you, dear reader, will use this information to transform your diet, experience radical success (as many in our 20/20 Macros and 20/20 Micros courses have), and tell your friends about it.

Our best hope is for a grassroots, bottom-up movement. As more people become enlightened about the power of nutrients in nutrition, the movement will grow.

Check Out the Interactive Chart

If you’ve made it this far, it’s time to explore the interactive chart of all the USDA Foods here, explore some of the regular foods in your diet and learn how prioritising foods with a higher satiety and nutrient density could help you. Seeing is believing.

Join a Course

If you want extra help finding Your Optimal 20/20 foods and meals to upgrade your nutrient density and satiety, we’d love you to check out our courses.

In 20/20 Macros, we’ll show you how to transform your current foods and meals to boost satiety using our data-driven algorithm. This will empower you to beat food addiction and crush your cravings.

Then, in 20/20 Micros, we’ll show you how to identify Your Optimal 20/20 at the micronutrient level to unlock the power of nutrient density and boost your energy so you can thrive and live your best life.