Volumetrics - Mpeg - 4

I'm Curt Parker, telling the continuing story of Penn State and the surrounding community. This is In Motion. Now that March is upon us, one question begs to be asked. Have you made good on your resolution to get into shape? For many people who had made pacts to eat less and exercise more, the promises and determination have fallen by the wayside. Many give up, and succumb to so-called quick fix remedies such as pills, restrictive diets, or gadgets supposedly designed to melt the pounds away. Beyond all the fodder that litters the landscape of what is called the diet industry, there's one tried and true simple fact: to lose weight, your caloric solution at the end of the day must be in the negative. Simply put, burn more calories than you take in. While there are many different eating plans on the market, most depend on eating only certain foods and restricting the amount of calories taken in. In both cases, satiety, or the sensation of fullness may not be reached, thus making it difficult to maintain any diet. Penn State researcher Dr. Barbara Rolls has been studying satiety and the types of foods that cause it. Well, the components of foods that affect satiety, or that feeling of fullness that you get at the end of a meal, are the energy or calorie density. Because, you get good satisfying portions of food. Surprisingly, we've found and others have found that over a day or two people tend to eat a pretty consistent weight or volume of food. So, if you lower the energy density you can have a full plate of food without very many calories and that appears to be really important for weight management. The other components are the protein content, calorie for calorie we think that lean protein is more satisfying than carbohydrates or fat. And the other important component for feeling full is the fiber content. High fiber foods have been shown to help with hunger control and to help with weight management. So basically this boils down to eating more fruits and vegetables. According to her research, Dr. Rolls found out that lowering the energy density or calories per gram in food would allow enough food to be consumed for satiety to be reached, which means fewer calories are consumed. She synthesized these findings into her new book, The Volumetrics Eating Plan. The new book, The Volumetrics Eating Plan, is really a consumer friendly, practical guide, step-by-step, here is how you manage you weight. And it's based on the dietary guidelines the Institute of Medicine reports. So it's not a gimmick, this is me telling you in a rateable form how to do it. The plan works like this--by simply taking every day foods, such as pancakes, for instance, and extracting some of the high, energy-dense ingredients, such as syrup, and white flour, and replacing it with whole wheat flour, rasperry sauce, and fruit, a higher volume of food is eaten while the caloric intake is lowered. Her plan is stocked with useable alternatives to the common energy dense choices that many of us make every day. It's very easy to overeat high energy density foods, those are the foods that pack a lot of calories into a portion and typically they're high fat foods; fat has nine calories per gram whereas carbohydrates and protein have just four. But the other thing that really can affect the calorie density, in fact has the biggest impact on calorie density and on the portions of food that we eat is the water content. Water is the biggest component of food, and because it adds weight, and volume, and no calories, it lowers the calorie density. So if you bulk on foods with high water content foods, like fruits and vegetables, you get a much bigger portion for the same number of calories. Dr. Rolls is one of the many researchers around the country that are fighting the epidemic of obesity: an epidemic that now endangers more than just adults. We are in the midst of an epidemic of obesity, it's really quite frightening to those of us who have worked in this field for a number of years, because the kids are really becoming obese at an alarming rate, starting at frightening ages. Age eight, we're seeing obese kids, by early teens we're seeing kids with diabetes, heart disease. So we need to be responsible. As parents we need to set an example to our kids and eat a good balance of nutritious foods. For more information of the volumetrics eating plan, check out this website. And for more about the ongoing story of Penn State, be sure to tune your web browser to live.psu.edu I'm Curt Parker, and this has been In Motion.