The older version of this page opened with holiday feasts and promised a few weight loss foods. It mentioned almond butter, protein and green vegetables along the way, but also wandered into kitchen clutter and newsletters. This version keeps the promise more narrowly. Below are four foods that were each tested against another snack in a controlled trial, with what happened to hunger, intake or weight. The fifth is dates, and they sit a little apart from the others, because none of the trials described here used them.
The old page also carried a link to https://KurmaHarga.com, which stays here.
1. Apples, eaten three a day
A trial run from a primary care unit in Rio de Janeiro gave 49 women, aged 30 to 50 and all with a BMI above 25, one of three extras to add to their usual diet for 10 weeks: three apples a day, three pears a day, or three oat cookies a day. The three extras had about the same calories (around 200 kcal) and about the same fibre (around 6 g). What differed was energy density. The apples came to 0.63 kcal per gram and the cookies to 3.7.
The apple group's daily energy intake fell by 25.05 kcal and their weight by 0.93 kg. The cookie group's intake rose slightly and their weight barely moved (+0.21 kg, not significant). The authors' reading was that the low energy density of the fruit, not its fibre, made the difference (de Oliveira and colleagues, 2008).
2. Pears, in the same trial
Pears did almost exactly what apples did. Their energy density was 0.64 kcal per gram, daily intake fell by 19.66 kcal and weight fell by 0.84 kg over the 10 weeks. The abstract describes the fruit as added to the women's usual diet. A drop of under 1 kg in 10 weeks is a modest change, so read it as a hint about swaps rather than a plan.
3. Watermelon instead of low-fat cookies
At San Diego State University, 33 overweight or obese adults ate either 2 cups of watermelon or low-fat cookies with the same calories every day for 4 weeks, then switched. Compared with the cookies, the watermelon left people less hungry, with less desire to eat and more fullness. Body weight, BMI and waist-to-hip ratio went down during the watermelon weeks, while body fat went up during the cookie weeks (Lum and colleagues, 2019). Each food was eaten for only 4 weeks, by 33 people. USDA FoodData Central lists raw watermelon at 30 kcal per 100 g, the lowest figure in the table further down.
4. Prunes as the snack before a meal
Prunes are the nearest thing to dates on this list, since both are dried fruit. Two short studies tested them.
In Athens, 45 healthy, normal-weight people took part in a crossover study, eating a snack before lunch under each of two conditions. One snack included dried prunes and the other was a bread product with the same weight and calories. After the prune snack they ate less dessert and less energy at the meal, and they reported less hunger at every point between the snack and the meal (Farajian and colleagues, 2010).
Back in San Diego, 19 women had fasted and then ate 238 kcal of dried plums, low-fat cookies or white bread, or just water, on separate days. The dried plums scored higher than the cookies on a satiety index over the next two hours. When a meal was put in front of them afterwards, though, they ate no less after the dried plums than after the cookies (Furchner-Evanson and colleagues, 2010). So feeling fuller did not always mean eating less.
5. Where dates fit next to these foods
Dates were not part of any of the trials above, so nothing here shows what a daily date snack would do to weight. What can be compared is the energy density. USDA FoodData Central lists these figures per 100 g:
| Food (FDC record) | Energy | Fibre |
|---|---|---|
| Watermelon, raw (167765) | 30 kcal | 0.4 g |
| Apples, raw, with skin (171688) | 52 kcal | 2.4 g |
| Pears, raw (169118) | 57 kcal | 3.1 g |
| Prunes, uncooked (168162) | 240 kcal | 7.1 g |
| Dates, Medjool (168191) | 277 kcal | 6.7 g |
| Dates, Deglet Noor (171726) | 282 kcal | 8.0 g |
Dates land close to prunes, at around 2.8 kcal per gram. That is more than four times the apples in the Rio trial, though still below the oat cookies at 3.7. Put another way, the roughly 200 kcal that came as three apples in that trial would be roughly 72 g of Medjool dates. If dates are your snack, the lesson from the fruit trials is about the portion: a few dates in place of a biscuit, not a bowl of them on top of one.
Sayer dates, the variety this site is named after, come from Khuzestan in Iran and are amber-brown and semi-dry. The table does not include Sayer, so this page gives it no calorie figure.
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