Eat More, Weigh Less Index - Pounds/2500 Calories

On Cronometer, we have the option of adding a food to the Diary in grams. I would like to have the ability to quickly pull up the total WEIGHT of food we've eaten in a day. That option doesn't currently exist.

Dr. Terry Shintani wrote a book titled "Eat More, Weigh Less Diet". Copied From Internet: His "Eat More Index" is a scale that represents the number of pounds of a food it would take to supply the average 2500 calories needed by the average active woman or average inactive man.

To really grasp this concept, take a look at corn, which falls at 6.5 on the EMI scale. If a person were to eat only corn for a day, he or she would have to eat 6.5 pounds of it to get the needed 2500 calories - that's about 30 ears of corn (no butter) and most people would be too full to eat a full 30 ears of corn in a day.

Potatoes have an EMI of 9.6, so if you ate nothing but potatoes, without butter or milk, it would take almost 10 lbs of potatoes to give you the needed 2500 calories.

But my favorite example of this is broccoli, which is the only food that everybody agrees is good for a diabetic: with an EMI of 17.1, it would take over 17 POUNDS of broccoli to get that 2500 calories.

Comments

  • Karen_Cronometer
    edited September 2021

    That sounds like a neat idea. How do you implement the index for planning your food intake?

    Karen Stark
    cronometer.com
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  • I don't follow that diet. But if Cronometer were able to instantly tally the grams of food intake in the Food Diary, it would simplify things for someone interested in that approach.

  • You're discussing a measure of calorie density?

    I've not seen it discussed that way. I have seen it used the way it's described here:


    Basically, a less calorie dense food is less likely to be high fat (of the 3 macronutrients only fat has 9 calories/gram), and more likely to have a high water and/or fiber content.


    But the value doesn't reflect any effect of fiber on metabolism. Like the example from @starchivore its just a rough way to compare foods from a pure calorie perspective.

    For weight loss, weight gain, satiety, and other dietary goals are more helpful. Not for individual foods but for an entire meal. Glycemic index might be helpful in planning carb consumption with respect to satiety.

    I see a lot of requests for simple formulas that maybe aren't yet as well established. I wonder if cronometer could add room for a small handful of user calculations -- per food or for an entire day?

  • Could add room? I think the "Data Manipulation Department" at Cronometer are more interested in skiing nowadays. The Ask The Oracle search function, still, after years, can only give you a list of foods highest in a particular nutrient, NOT lowest. Of course, you can do the search on your iPad! Like the Henry Ford quip: You can buy any color vehicle you want, as long as its black.