What’s the least satiating (per calorie) food?
- sugar
- oil or
- a Big Mac.
I recently posed this question on X and got a divided response. Most people voted for sugar, and the Big Mac came in last.
But if this were reality, we would see kids outside supermarkets snorting bags of pure sugar and sculling bottles of canola oil after school. Instead, we see long queues of cars at the fast-food drive-throughs and little Uber Eats scooters buzzing from KFC to everyone’s couch.
Today, McDonald’s sells 550 million Big Macs a year, or 16 per second. In this article, I want to decode the secret to McDonald’s 300 billion burger sales since 1967.
Key Points
- Satiety is the absence of hunger and keeps you satisfied for longer with less energy over the long term. Meanwhile, satiation is just the feeling of fullness after eating.
- Our satiety algorithm considers multiple nutrients to more accurately predict how much we’ll eat of a particular food.
- The bliss point is the concentration of each nutrient that nearly satisfies our cravings but keeps us wanting more. Food manufacturers leverage this to make their products more appealing and profitable.
- While foods like sugar and oil are empty calories, ultra-processed foods like the Big Mac are engineered to hit multiple nutrient bliss points to keep you wanting more.
- To free ourselves from the allure of ‘addictive foods’, we need to move beyond the nutrient bliss points by prioritising nutrient-dense foods that satisfy our cravings more efficiently and with less energy.
Understanding Satiety Per Calorie
Satiation is the feeling of fullness after you eat when you lose interest in eating and go off and do something else.
But short-term satiation is not that interesting or helpful.
It’s easy to ‘hack’ fullness by adding a ton of water or fibre to your food. But a big bottle of water or a bowl of lettuce won’t stop you from being ravenous a few hours later.
Unfortunately, when we’re super hungry, we tend to opt for energy-dense foods to quickly turn off our appetite.
But by itself, satiety does not consider how much we eat to satisfy our hunger. That’s why we need to consider satiety per calorie. Foods and meals with a higher satiety per calorie empower us to eat less over the long term, thus achieving sustainable weight loss and improving our metabolic health.
As you will see, blockbuster food products like the Big Mac provide the lowest satiety per calorie. These foods often make us feel addicted to them, leading us to consume a lot more energy than our bodies require to stay healthy.
How We Calculate Satiety
For more than five years, we’ve been working to quantify satiety. The latest update to our algorithm is calibrated using 655,283 days of data from people living all over the world.
After some intense number crunching, we identified a range of factors that help us more accurately understand how much energy someone consumes each day.
The lowest-satiety foods allow us to get a lot of energy down the pie hole before we feel full and stop eating.
Meanwhile, the most satiating foods trigger sensory-specific satiety sooner and empower us to quench our hunger with less energy over the long term.
Hedonics vs Satiety
If you’ve been trying to ‘be good’ and restrict calories, fat or carbs, you might find yourself face down in the cookies, ice cream, or both. These foods are not great, but they are not the absolute lowest satiety foods from a daily perspective. It’s just hedonics or eating for pleasure to meet a short-term craving.
While avoiding foods that are designed to bring us maximum short-term pleasure is part of the story, we’re more interested in the factors that help you proactively crush your cravings before they get out of control.
High-sugar foods may appear super seductive if you’ve been trying to deprive yourself, but you won’t binge on sweets all day, every day. Once the glucose stores in your blood, liver, and muscles are filled, you’ll lose interest in sugar and start seeking out fatty foods with a little bit of protein.
Instead of just hedonic foods, our satiety algorithm is designed to identify the foods we’ll eat more of if that’s all we have to eat all day, every day. Rather than seductive snacks, these are the foods that are designed to be eaten all day, every day.
Carbohydrates and Their Satiety Impact
To illustrate, let’s look at the satiety response to carbohydrates. The chart below shows the satiety response to carbohydrates in our food. Notice that we see a peak calorie intake when our food contains 48% carbohydrates.
What we often consider to be ‘bad carbs’ are actually a similar blend of carbs and fat that fill the glucose and fat fuel tanks in our bodies at the same time.
- To the left of the chart, low-carb foods like oil or sirloin steak are more challenging to overeat than burgers and fries.
- Meanwhile, most people don’t overeat high-carb foods like plain rice, fruit or even sugar.
- Foods that most often feel ‘addicted to’ are not high carb or low carb. Instead, they hit our carbohydrate bliss point between the extremes.
The chart below shows the simplified version of this chart that we use in our satiety algorithm highlighting our carbohydrate bliss point that food manufacturers target.
While there are constant arguments over whether ‘low carb’ or ‘high carb’ is best, few people manage to consume a high-carbohydrate diet for long. Instead, we gravitate back to the carbohydrate bliss point.
Protein: The Satiety Key
We’ve talked a lot about protein leverage in the past, but it was a massive lightbulb moment when it finally sunk in that protein leverage is not linear.
- Counterintuitively, when we get less than the minimum (bliss point) protein intake, we will crave foods that contain more protein but eat less.
- But we eat much less when our food contains a greater protein concentration (i.e., a higher protein percentage). Foods with a higher protein concentration satisfy our cravings for protein more efficiently.
With 18% protein, the Big Mac is close to the protein bliss point of 12.5%. It has the right balance of protein and energy to keep us eating (and storing) more energy.
The satiety response to protein predicts that we won’t binge on refined sugar or oil forever. Once you fill your fat and/or glucose fuel tanks, like a nutrient-guided missile, your appetite will send you in search of higher protein foods to balance the energy from sugar and oil.
The chart below shows how we model protein in our satiety algorithm. Note the kink at the lower protein end, which means that low-protein foods like fruit aren’t penalised as much as muffins, pizza, and burgers, which hit the protein bliss point.
Like most processed foods, the Big Mac is designed to be the perfect balance of tasty but slightly bland, never giving us enough of one flavour or nutrient to trigger sensory-specific satiety.
My market research for this article (not my regular diet).
Big Food goes to great lengths to ensure that no one flavour or nutrient dominates enough to trigger sensory-specific satiety before it’s all gone.
Similar to carbohydrates and fibre, protein is a big deal. But it’s only one of the nutrients we crave. Rather than “protein leverage”, perhaps it’s really nutrient leverage?
Sodium’s Role in Food Cravings
Salt is one of the three primary nutrients (i.e. fat, sugar, and salt) that food manufacturers know will sell more products.
It should be no surprise that MacDonald’s has optimised the Big Mac to hit our bliss point for sodium. Meanwhile, you’ll add salt to your steak and asparagus to make them tastier. But if you add too much salt, you’ll eat less because it’s “too salty.”
Again, our satiety algorithm pinpoints the foods that contain just the perfect amount of sodium. While we crave some, foods that contain way too much sodium become repulsive.
How Fat Affects Satiety
Like carbs and sodium, the Big Mac hits the bliss point for 38% fat, nearly bang on. Foods that contain this unique balance of fat and carbs are rare in nature other than in spring and autumn when the seasons change.
Sugar and Its Impact on Satiety
Most of us understand that we have an appetite for sweet foods. But if all we had to eat was sugar for a week, it would quickly taste “sickly sweet”, and you’d lose interest in eating.
We won’t binge on oil or steak to satisfy our sugar cravings. The burger (with 7% sugar) is close to the sugar bliss point.
Again, our simplified satiety algorithm highlights the foods that hit our bliss point for sugar to make us feel addicted without being too sweet.
Interestingly, when we break up the data, sugar is a more significant satiety factor on a low-carb diet than on a low-fat diet. If you’re a fruitarian living on 30 bananas a day, sugar won’t be as seductive as for some on a higher-fat diet who add sugar to their fat bombs.
Calcium: Essential for Satiety
The cheese in the burger provides just enough calcium to exceed the calcium bliss point. Asparagus has much more calcium (per calorie), so we hit sensory-specific satiety for calcium much sooner. Meanwhile, sugar, oils and steak aren’t seductive sources of calcium.
Again, our data-driven satiety algorithm helps us pinpoint food that contains the Goldilocks amount of calcium and aligns with eating more.
Potassium’s Role in Satiety
Potassium powder tastes bitter by itself, but it’s the yin to sodium’s yang. While we don’t crave potassium the way we crave salt, it’s still critical to survival.
Again, the Big Mac has just enough sodium to hit our bliss point, while the steak and asparagus hit our limit for potassium with a LOT less energy.
Iron: How It Influences Satiety
The burger has enough iron to meet our minimum needs but not enough to satisfy. Again, sugar and oil are poor sources of nutrients; they are just ‘empty calories’, so we’ll eat less of them, while foods like steak and asparagus will help us meet our requirement for iron with less energy.
Riboflavin (B2) and Satiety
The Big Mac even hits our bliss point for riboflavin (B2), a surprisingly prominent satiety factor. But notice how it contains just enough to keep us eating more, unlike steak and asparagus, which will trigger sensory-specific satiety per calorie for vitamin B2 with much less energy.
The Secret to Big Mac’s Popularity
So, the secret to making a blockbuster food product like the Big Mac is to engineer it to hit as many bliss points as possible.
This is how food manufacturers get you hooked on their creations and maximise their profit at your expense.
What’s the Solution?
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that living on sugar or oil is a great idea. You will eat less if all you have is refined carbs or fat with minimal protein, minerals and vitamins. However, you will also mindlessly binge all the junk food as soon as you get access to it.
The way to turn off your appetite is to ensure you exceed the bliss point concentration for protein and each of the minerals and vitamins by prioritising high-satiety, nutrient-dense foods to trigger sensory-specific satiety on multiple levels.
Once you learn to satisfy your cravings more efficiently, Frankenfoods engineered to hit your nutrient bliss points will lose their power over you, and you’ll be free from your addiction to food.
Action Steps
Empowered by this understanding, we have a clear path to escape the clutches of the lowest satiety, addictive foods.
1. High Satiety Foods
The easiest place to start your satiety journey is with our high-satiety food infographic and food lists here. These foods target the statistically significant satiety factors identified from our analysis of 655,283 days of data from people living all over the world.
2. Nutrient Dense Foods
But if you want to make sure you’re exceeding all your nutrient bliss points and moving towards the Optimal Nutrient Intakes, check out our nutrient-dense food lists and infographics here. You don’t have to live on only these foods but notice how, when you add more of these foods to your diet, the seductive and addictive ultra-processed foods lose their power over you.
3. Satiety vs Nutrient Density
Once you’re ready to dive deeper, check out our interactive food search tool, which shows 700+ foods on the spectrum of satiety vs nutrient density.
Not how there are some foods with moderate satiety foods towards the bottom of the chart that are actually quite nutrient-poor, like refined sugar and oil, that we’re not above to binge on by themselves. But for greater satiety, prioritise foods towards the right. To boost your nutrient density, prioritise foods towards the top of the chart.