DALTON, Ga. — If the idea of being able to eat plates full of food and still maintain or even lose weight appeals to you then you will love the information in this article. So many have tried diet after diet, gone from low fat to low carb, but no matter what dietary plan you adhere to there is one group of foods that will always improve it …

The greatest food group in diet books

The fruits and vegetables group (especially vegetables) is the greatest topic for diet book authors to write on because it has no “avoid” lists. It only has what author and doctor Rex Russell calls “all you can eat and more than you ever thought of eating” lists. You may find a diet book telling you to cut down on the saturated fats, or the sugar and grains, or just carbs in general, but not vegetables.

Two types of carbohydrates

Carbohydrates, for all practical purposes, can really only be divided into two groups, fiber carbs and non-fiber carbs. Typically, dietitians and nutritionists try to steer people away from what they call refined carbohydrates. That is, carbs that have had their fiber removed or greatly reduced in the manufacturing process.

Without the fiber, such foods are usually absorbed quicker and have more calories by weight than the same volume of food with the fiber. Since fiber contributes no caloric value, and can even slow the absorption of other carbs (sugars), it can actually be subtracted from the carb grams listed on the label of any food you eat. So if you are eating a serving of broccoli, for example, with 5 grams of carbohydrate in it, since 3 of those grams are fiber, there is actually only 2 grams of useable carbs per serving of broccoli. This makes it an excellent food to eat when seeking to get or stay lean.

By contrast, a couple slices of white bread has less than 2 grams of fiber with as much as 28 grams of useable carbs. This greatly increases the amount of absorbable calories per gram of food, which is bad since most of us have to eat a certain amount of food to feel comfortably full, usually about two to three pounds a day. If we eat less than that, we tend to feel gnawing hunger pains associated with dieting.

This is the biggest deficiency in the American diet, we don’t eat enough fiber-rich foods — fruits, vegetables and whole grains — so the caloric density of our diets is unnecessarily way too high.

Lower your calories effortlessly

All vegetables and most fruits have a low caloric density. This simply means that virtually all of them have only one calorie per gram of food and often much less. For example, a package of broccoli may show a single serving as containing about 90 grams of broccoli, but only 30 calories. That would be a caloric density of .33. It would take three slices of white bread to equal the same bulk of food (90 grams) in your stomach but that would give you 237 calories, nearly eight times as much. White bread’s caloric density, therefore, is eight times worse — about 2.6.

In general, if a food has fewer calories than it does weight in grams (which you can read next to the serving size on any label) you will find it very hard to gain any weight eating that food.  Cultures, like the traditional Okinawan in Japan or the vegetarian Seventh-day Adventists in our country, stay lean throughout their long lives because the vast majority of the foods on their plates have low caloric densities of 1.5 or less. Their plates are full of vegetables, fruits, beans and whole grains, but not calories.

Pump up the volume

Satiety expert Barbara Rolls and her colleagues at Pennsylvania State University proved out this principle by cutting more than 400 calories from people’s diets without changing portion sizes or sense of satiety. How? They recognized that people eat about the same amount, or weight, of food each day to feel satisfied, so they just altered the caloric density (CD) of their meals.

Instead of a typical 3/4 cup bowl of box cereal with a CD of 3.4 per serving, they reduced the serving size slightly to a 1/2 cup and filled in the rest with a 1/2 cup of low-CD fruit like strawberries (CD 0.3), and a 1/2 cup of soy milk (CD 0.3) Now the breakfast has a CD of 1.3.

If we choose cooked oatmeal (CD 0.6) instead of boxed cereal we could eat even more food for the same amount of calories and get even more fiber to go with the antioxidant berries. Now you are eating healthy!

Tom Morrison is the fitness coordinator for the Bradley Wellness Center.