Caloric Density and Why We Overeat Without Realizing It with Alan Goldhamer, D.C.

Added: 2026-04-30

[00:00:00]I don't think so. And neither does your brain. And your brain's not stupid. So when you give your brain access to 100 density foods like salad, it says fine, I'll eat the salad until real food comes along. Because your brain knows it is not going to survive eating salad alone.

[00:00:25]Fruit, on the other hand, has 300 calories a pound. three times the caloric density of salad because of its higher um sugar content. It has a higher caloric density. So fruit tastes better to us than salad because tasting better means that when you put fruit in your mouth, your brain perceives the hydrochloric density and produces more dopamine to reward you. Because although, you know, you still need seven pounds of fruit a day to survive, at least it's physiologically or biologically possible. You could do it.

[00:01:00]I mean, it would still be a full-time job, but at least it could be done. If you increase the caloric density of the food, largely with the advent of cooking, uh, potatoes, rice, and beans, for example, have about 500 calories per pound serving. So you would only need about 4 lbs of these foods in order to be able to survive. And so if you're hungry, it's likely you'd rather have potatoes, rice, and beans than salad because your brain will give you more dopamine. It will taste better to you and of course will favor survival.

[00:01:36]But what if we invented new foods post-industrial revolution that increased caloric density? What if we could in invent a food for example that instead of having 500 calories a pound had 1,500 calories a pound? Do you think it would result in more dopamine stimulation? Therefore, would people like it better? And I don't know what if we called that food ice cream and we introduced it at the World's Fair. Do you think it would get rave reviews?

[00:02:04]Now, ice cream is an interesting substance. It doesn't appear in nature.

[00:02:07]You've never slipped on the ice cream or fallen in an ice cream pond. It takes a little bit of tricky manufacturing in order to produce it actually. And if you take ice cream and you warm it up to room temperature and you eat it, it's described as sickly sweet. It's so sweet that it makes you sick.

[00:02:29]And yet it has the same amount of sickening sugar when it's cold. The difference is it tastes great. Because when it's artificially cold like ice cream, it fools your satiety mechanisms.

[00:02:42]Your taste buds are not designed to accurately detect sweet in a a substance like that because as I said, it doesn't exist in nature. And as a consequence, when you have to super saturate ice cream in order for you to detect this the sugar because you don't detect sweet well when something's very cold, just the way your taste buds work. So when they super saturate ice cream with sugar, it tastes great. Unless you warm it up to room temperature and taste it and then it's sickly sweet, it makes you just as sick when it's cold, but you don't know it because you're fooling your natural taste mechanisms.

[00:03:19]Now, what if we wanted a a food with a higher caloric density, that is a higher calories per pound than ice cream? Do you think people would like that? Do you think they would call it the staff of life?

[00:03:33]And sure enough, bread has 1,500 calories per pound. And the reason is, if you take wheat, berries, which boiled would only have 500 calories a pound, but you grind it into a powder and then you add salt, oil, and sugar to it, you get something with three times the caloric density, which is 1,500 calories a pound. That's before you turn it into a butter boat and spread coagulated cowpus all over it, which increases chloric density even further.

[00:04:06]Now, if you take bread and you withdraw the salt, oil, and sugar as well as the yeast, you end up with something that's called matzah. And matzah is punishment on Passover. And people aren't tending to get fat eating matzah because what they're doing is they're using the wheat and water as a carrier agent to drive the sugar, oil, fat, and salt uh to your pallet. Uh the same thing happens with u beef. For example, if you just take beef and boil it, uh people aren't that hot to be gnawing on boiled beef. On the other hand, if you use beef as a carrier agent to carry the salt and the sauces and the uh other material to your pallet, uh usually by a trained professional called a chef, which is trained on how to use salt, oil, and sugar and deliver it to the pallet using a limited number of often federally subsidized stable foods, um you end up with a bit of a problem. So, have you ever been in a restaurant and you notice that they have a basket of bread right there on the table and it's hot and steamy and you know your brain smells that and thinks, "Oh, baby, give it to me." And you have a piece or two or three, don't you? And pretty soon you notice that the bread in the basket is completely gone. There's no more bread.

[00:05:28]And so you push that naked basket to the edge of the table and you wait and you wait for the waiter or waitress to come around in order uh to notice that. And finally they do and they look at your empty basket and they say to you, "Oh, did you want some more bread?"

[00:05:48]Now the first thing you have to do is pretend like you didn't know that the basket was empty. And you look at the basket and you say, "Oh, sure. Why not?

[00:05:59]But what you're really thinking is, do they want a tip or not? And they bring you some more bread. You may even have some more of that. But you never go into that restaurant and say, "Excuse me, waiter, could you please bring me three large baked potatoes because I'd like to eat those potatoes before I order my dinner." You don't order and eat three large baked potatoes before you order your dinner because three potatoes would have about 500 calories would physically fill up your entire stomach and there'd be no left uh room left for greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying, flesh, processed foods uh that the restaurant features. On the other hand, if you fill up your stomach with bread, that same 500 calories of bread, uh that only takes about a third of the stomach to get 500 calories of bread. So, there's plenty of room left uh to fill up other materials.

[00:06:54]When you think about this, it's a rather startling, but bread with 1500 calories a pound is only slightly less than pure sugar at 1,800 calories a pound. Now, I bet many of you do not go into restaurants and um take that sugar that's on the table. You notice they have that little basket of packets of sugar. And I'll bet you don't take 11 of those baskets, crack them open, and just eat them. Now, you might say, "Well, why not? It's free.

[00:07:25]The sugar is so cheap, they don't even have to charge for it."

[00:07:30]But you don't do that because it kind of sounds disgusting. On the other hand, many of you have had uh one of those small uh sodas uh the old style that used to have, you know, 9 or 12 ounces in it, which has somewhere around 11 uh teaspoons of sugar in it. Uh and you don't think too much of that. In fact, that used to be a special treat, but now we've got the big gulp, the super big gulp, the double gulp, and the express gulp with free refills. And I think pretty soon just getting a soda pop at your local fast food is going to be uh where chiropractors get most of their business from having to carry the things out of the restaurant. I'm pretty soon pretty soon to get a soda pop, you're going to need a bucket.

[00:08:17]It's startling to know that teenagers in the United States that tw up to 25% of their total caloric load now comes from the sugar in soda pop alone. not just sugar, but just in uh sugarsw sweetened beverages. But we do not know why they're getting so fat and getting sick and developing what used to be called adult onset diabetes at a younger age.

[00:08:43]It's just a complete mystery. What's the problem?

[00:08:48]What if we wanted to go even further and we wanted to come up with a substance that had even higher chloric density?

[00:08:54]Instead of 1,800 calories a pound, we wanted to go to 2500 calories a pound. Do you think people would like that? Something that had 25 times the caloric density of salad. Do you think it would taste 25 times better because it would result in so much more dopamine stimulation