Issue 16: How To Beat Cravings

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Welcome to Weekly.health’s 16th issue. Every week, we explore cutting-edge research, actionable advice, and science-backed nutrition insights to help you live longer and healthier.

Our aim is to help you live another 10 healthy years and cut your risk of age-related disease.

🗒️ In This Issue:

• 🔬 Longevity Spotlight: 10 factors for healthy ageing

• 📚 Books We’re Reading Right Now

• 📈 Research Digest: What’s new in nutrition science

• 🏋️‍♀️ Cravings and how to beat them

• 🛍️ Things You Might Like

• ❤️ Support Weekly.health: Help us keep the research flowing

• 📘 Glossary of Terms: Definitions for technical terms in this issue

🔬 Longevity Spotlight: 10 factors for healthy ageing

Only 23% of people meet ‘healthy ageing’ criteria - here’s what you can try:
A recent review of 39 studies and more than 300,000 participants showed that only 23% of people met criteria for ‘healthy ageing’. There was a sharp drop with age to 16% at ages 60-74, and down to just 6% at age 75+, showing that as we age we generally adopt less healthy practices. (source)

The review found a number of interventions associated with ‘healthy ageing’. We’ve picked out the top 10 for you here:

📚 Books We’re Reading Right Now

📈 Research Digest: What’s New in Nutrition Science

Here’s the best of recent nutrition research:

🥣 Homemade 800-calorie diet may reverse early diabetes
In this 48-week study, people with obesity and early type 2 diabetes followed a homemade very-low-calorie diet (around 800 kcal/day) for 12 weeks, then slowly reintroduced food. They lost about 15 kg, and two-thirds showed remission or major improvement. Meals used everyday supermarket foods (mainly soups, shakes, and simple protein-plus-veg dishes) costing roughly £26 per week. Always do this under medical supervision. (source)

🌾 High-fibre diet tolerated well - setting the stage for cancer prevention
In the Alaska FIRST study, adults consumed 44.5 g of fibre daily (including 23.7 g of resistant starch) for four weeks. They reported more gas (56% vs 31%) but less diarrhoea and discomfort than controls given 1 g/day. No one quit due to side effects. This trial tested tolerance only - the next Alaska FIRST studies will explore whether a high-fibre diet can lower colorectal cancer risk in Alaska Native people. (source)

🛌 Too much sleep may raise heart risks, unless you eat mediterranean
In a 7-year study of 952 people with heart disease, those sleeping over 8 hours a night had a 59% higher risk of major cardiovascular events. But here’s the twist: that risk rose 74% on a low-fat diet, and wasn’t significant for those following a Mediterranean diet. If you love long lie-ins, balance them with olive oil, veggies, and fish to keep your heart protected. (source)

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🏋️‍♀️ Cravings and how to beat them

Food cravings are intense, specific urges to consume certain foods, different to regular hunger because they are usually reward-driven instead of energy-driven.

Think about the last time you thought really intently about the fatty or sugary snacks that you like, or when you last couldn’t get chocolate off your mind. Those are cravings - you’re not hungry, you just want something, just because…

Our modern diets are full of hyper-palatable foods that have been engineered to tap into our primal and hormone-driven system to make us desire foods that don’t serve any functional use.

We don’t need chocolate to survive, and we live perfectly well without cake, as these foods aren’t nutritionally necessary.

So why do our bodies (and minds) make us want these foods? And how can we win back some control?

How modern diets and lifestyles keep us hooked

Certain types of foods, particularly those that have been ultra-processed and those full of simple sugars and delicious creamy fats, trigger the release of hormones such as dopamine.

Dopamine gives us a feeling of reward, satisfaction, and pleasure, which is what we feel immediately after a bar of chocolate.

Repeated hits of dopamine cause desensitisation-like effects, where brain structures change to lessen the effects of so much dopamine. But this creates a problem - to get the same satisfaction from foods, we must eat more, and more often.

Sugary and simple-carb foods also spike our insulin, but this quickly drops and makes us feel slow and lethargic, increasing hunger as a way to experience the insulin spike again. Repeated hits of insulin similarly cause desensitisation, and we find we more often feel slow and lethargic than we feel the positive effects.

People who are sleep-deprived or stressed also experience increased ghrelin, the hormone that makes us feel hungry, and decreased leptin, the hormone that makes us feel satiated.

Ultra-processed foods often have low levels of protein and fibre. Protein is highly satiating, making us feel less hungry, while fibre blunts the speed at which carbohydrates are digested into simple sugars, reducing the effects of insulin.

Combine all of these aspects of modern life together and it makes us subconsciously desire more of these foods, to maintain the good feelings. But by continuing, we only make the problem worse.

Short-term enjoyment is followed by long-term addiction-like eating, and increased risk of various diseases, such as diabetes.

How to beat the system

High-protein meals

A consistent finding is that high-protein breakfasts enhance satiety, reducing cravings later in the day. 35 g of protein at breakfast has been shown to notably reduce savoury cravings later in the day. (source)

In fact, high protein breakfasts have been shown to reduce total calories during both breakfast and lunch, even though the protein adds additional calories to the breakfast. One study compared a breakfast of 39 g of protein with a breakfast of low-protein pancakes. While the high-protein breakfast contained more calories, the total energy intake across breakfast and lunch was almost 200 kcal less, indicating that high-protein meals may reduce calories later in the day through improved satiety. (source)

In the above example, sugars from the pancakes may spike insulin, leading to higher cravings later as it falls, while the high-protein breakfast reduces hunger, leading to fewer cravings later.

Sleep and stress

Both a lack of sleep and an abundance of stress increase levels of ghrelin, the hormone that makes us feel hungry.

By not getting enough sleep, or by regularly putting ourselves in stressful situations, we experience increased reward-seeking behaviour, and this often comes out in the form of snacking.

An interesting finding is that sleep deprivation can also negate the craving-reducing effect of a high-protein breakfast. So if you’re considering eating more eggs at breakfast time, you also need to be getting your 7-9 hours of restful sleep, too. (source)

High-fibre foods

Dietary fibre has a few uses, but the most interesting to us is that:

Fibre slows the digestion of carbohydrates, blunting its effects on blood sugar. This leads to a smaller insulin response, reducing the likelihood of feeling a crash that leads to cravings for more carb-heavy foods.

Studies found that just 8 g of fibre at breakfast was enough to significantly increase satiety and reduce energy intake at lunchtime. (source)

Consuming low-GI foods (foods that have minimal effects on your blood sugar levels), we don’t experience the highs and lows cravings that we feel when we eat white bread, cookies, cakes, and other sugary or highly-refined carbohydrates.

By eating oats, barley, legumes (beans, pulses, etc), and whole-wheat bread and pasta, we reduce our cravings later in the day.

Healthy fats

Dietary fat slows digestion by delaying the stomach emptying. When food stays in the stomach for longer, this tells your brain that you’re full, and so reduces hunger.

This is one reason why low-fat diets often leave you still feeling hungry. With no fat in your diet your stomach empties quickly, which means you feel hungry sooner.

By including a small amount of healthy fats with each meal, and by not opting for low-fat foods (which often come with increased added sugar), your meal takes longer to digest and keeps you full for longer.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs)

These foods are often rich in sugar, fat, salt, and supposedly safe-to-eat chemical emulsifiers and additives. They’re hyper-palatable, which means they taste really, really good, and they often override the signals of satiety that tell us to stop eating.

This results in more snacking between meals, as the signals telling your brain to stop feeling hungry either aren’t there, or aren’t strong enough.

They’re also calorie-dense, and cheap to produce, meaning that you get more calories for a lower cost. (source)

A review of 384 foods showed that while unprocessed foods average 1.1 kcal/g, UPFs contained 2.2-2.3 kcal/g. (source)

Another review found that a diet high in UPFs led to roughly an increased intake of 508 kcal/day, even when macros, fibre, and sodium were matched. The review determined this to be because we can consume calories from UPFs at a faster rate because they are more energy dense. (source)

This might mean that if you compared two meals, one unprocessed, and one ultra-processed, the ultra-processed meal might be half the size of the unprocessed meal, even when they both contain the same number of calories.

Eating a whole-food diet and reducing ultra-processed foods can turn around all of these problems.

To help you avoid UPFs, you could;

• Consider if this food could have been eaten 100 years ago before modern UPFs were invented

• Avoid buying foods that are packaged in plastic unless it is a fruit, vegetable, nut, seed, or legume

• Avoid buying foods that have a long list of complex-sounding ingredients

• Only buy foods that resemble the original product, such as;

  • A sausage does not resemble a cut of pork

  • A burger does not resemble a steak

  • An ice cream does not resemble milk

  • A loaf of long-life white supermarket bread does not resemble a loaf of whole-meal bread from a bakery, which only lasts a few days

  • A bowl of sugary o-shaped cereal does not resemble whole oats or wheat

While this list isn’t perfect, UPFs often weren’t consumed 100 years ago, are packaged in plastic, have complex-sounding long lists of ingredients, and don’t resemble the original ingredients at all. If you cannot reasonably find the food in nature, it is likely a UPF.

Your key takeaways: How to beat cravings

Here’s a great starting point to beat cravings. By following these steps each day, you may find it easier to stick to a healthy diet, have more consistent energy through the day, and you may even find that it saves money, too.

1. De-stress and relax more

2. Get a solid 7-9 hours of sleep every night

3. Start your day with a high-protein breakfast

4. Include high-fibre foods with each meal

5. Add a source of healthy fats to each meal

6. Eat whole foods and avoid ultra-processed ingredients

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🛍️ Things You Might Like

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🙏 Thanks for Reading!

That’s the end of this issue of Weekly.health.

This newsletter is written by a small, independent team, led by James — who’s been following nutrition science for nearly 20 years and is now working towards a formal, industry-recognised qualification.

We’re based in England, so if you’re over the pond, you might notice a few strange spellings.

Our goal is to make cutting-edge, evidence-based nutrition advice simple, useful, and genuinely applicable to everyday life.

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See you next week!

📖 Glossary of Terms in This Issue (Alphabetical Order)

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