This Thanksgiving: Eat Soup and Lose Weight?

Some friends of ours are tweaking their Thanksgiving Day holiday menu to include soup. Not only as an appetizer but as part of the main meal which I guess will consist of several main courses. The logic being: eat soup and lose weight. Or better yet, eat soup for Thanksgiving and don't east as much.

How many times while we were growing up did our parents or grandparents remind us that "soup is good for you!" Whether it was soup for a cold or a sore throat I always wondered where that conventional wisdom came from. Soup indeed can cure a lot what ails us, but eat soup and lose weight? And on Thanksgiving? Come on now.

Well I stand corrected. According to the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2010 version), there is some evidence that "soup, particularly broth or water-based soups, may lead to decreased calorie intake and body weight over time." The more I think about it the more it makes sense: eat soup, lose weight. It's the same logic that tells us to drink more water which in turn fills up our tummies and ultimately diminishes our appetites.

Furthermore, the Slimming Resources website points out that when people eat a low-energy-dense, high-volume food like soup before a meal, they are more likely to eat less at that meal overall. At the same calorie levels, low-energy-dense foods provide a greater volume of food compared to high-energy dense foods. This may help people feel full on fewer calories.

Eat Right, not "Less"?

The conventional wisdom used to be that if you "ate less" you would lose weight. While there may be some peripheral truth in that statement, the proper mindset should be eat more low- energy-dense foods, which are water-rich and have fewer calories per gram (in other words eat more soup, more often) and that in turn will aid in your weight management.

These days everyone touts the benefits of soup and you can easily find soup diets that range from cabbage to tomato. But the whole soup mentality is still relatively new. It's only been since about 2004 the first notable study on low-energy dense foods was conducted at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. It was discovered after a one-year study that subjects who ate two servings of soup a day as part of a reduced-calorie diet lost an average of 16 pounds .

The original findings of that study are just as valid today as they were seven years ago: the consumption of soup, particularly broth-based varieties with vegetables or lean protein, is an effective weight control strategy.

In fact, nutritionists now recommend that if you eat soup as an appetizer it can reduce food intake by as much as 20%. Which brings me back to the original "eat soup before, during and after the Thanksgiving meal" and eat less and lose weight. It all makes perfect sense to me now!

Soup: as much as you want

I think we walk a fine line when we start talking about soup as a weight management tool. I mean, there's soup (i.e. mostly liquid or heavy on vegetables like celery or cabbage) and then there's extreme soup which is stock full of meat and potatoes, heavy on salt and ultimately is less like soup and more like a main course. In fact, isn't there (or didn't there used to be) an advertising campaign that bragged about "soup so thick you can almost cut it with a knife" or something to that effect? I'm thinking that kind of soup will not help you lose weight.

Soup shouldn't be limited to Thanksgiving. It's a year-round weight management tool that works! The fact that is might help tone down the typical feast-or-famine mentality so inherent to Thanksgiving is just an added benefit!