volumetrics

By anders pearson 03 Jul 2001

this article about diets, calories, and food volume and weight caught my attention not because i particularly care about dietary issues (i’m substantially underweight), but because of something i once read in Nikola Tesla’s autobiography.

the article mentions that the volume and weight of food that people eat in a given day stays much more constant than other factors such as the amount of calories, and so the way to reduce your calorie intake without being hungry is to not reduce the amount of food you eat, just to reduce the calorie/volume ratio of the food (by eating things like fruits and vegetables that are primarily water).

i found this interesting because one of Tesla’s little idiosyncracies (the man was seriously obsessive-compulsive) was that he absolutely refused to eat anything without first calculating it’s volume in cubic centimeters to several significant digits. perhaps he was just way ahead of the curve on this volumetrics thing. wouldn’t be the first time.