staying healthy in the fast laneReducing Caloric Density
You can reduce the CD of your diet by understanding a couple
of principles. If most of your diet is whole fruit and vegetables,
then you have a great start to reducing CD. You can generally eat
as much of these two food groups as you want. Be cautious about
eating too much dried fruit because it takes the water content out
and makes it a high-calorie-dense food (concentrates the sugar
as well). Remember: Foods high in water content (including fruit,
soups, and cooked grains) and fiber dilute calories and naturally
reduce the CD. They also generally happen to be very high in nutri-
ent density as well.
Cooked whole grains, beans, and potatoes in their skin are
in the moderate caloric density range, along with lean fish and
poultry. I would choose these plant foods over the animal foods in
moderation because they have fiber and provide more bulk in the
stomach, and they contain more micronutrients. If you take this
same amount of cooked grain and make it into bread with whole or
refined grain flour, you increase the CD significantly (up to seven
times).^5
Even though I have been encouraging whole, sprouted grain
breads as more nutritious and health promoting than refined flour
breads, the truth is that one slice of bread, whether from refined
wheat flour or whole or sprouted wheat, is essentially the same in
caloric density. Bread is still a moderately high calorically dense
food, and you need to watch how many servings of bread products
you eat (in fact, the CD of a slice of the sprouted whole grain bread
I eat was 2.64, and a slice of pure white sandwich bread in the lo-
cal grocery store was 2.5). Generally, but not always, as the fiber
content of the bread increases, the CD goes down, refined or whole
grain. This is one reason people recommend going off all bread
on a weight loss regime. But—here is a big IF!—if you are eating
a whole- or sprouted-grain versus a refined-grain bread, you will
eat less of the whole-grain bread because it will provide more bulk
from its higher fiber content and is more nutrient dense. So you
will feel fuller, and the whole grain will stabilize your blood sugar
better so you won’t crave and eat more of it to be satisfied. The