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A baked potato is peak satiety
Satiety depends on food
Satiety depends on the specific food. A high-protein food can be made unfilling: a tasty protein bar is processed, refined, and built to be very palatable, and eating one leaves little sense of fullness. A 200-gram chicken breast is very satiating.
Protein's role
Among the macronutrients, protein is the biggest lever, partly because of its higher thermic effect, which burns a little more per day even though TEF is a small slice of total expenditure. It helps preserve lean body mass during a diet and helps build or preserve it at maintenance and in a surplus.
Appetite effects are specific to individual foods rather than to whole macronutrients. That is why carbohydrate can't be labeled unfilling as a group, since it depends on the carbohydrate.
How was the satiety index measured?
Susanne Holt and colleagues at the University of Sydney published it in 1995 in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Volunteers ate 240-calorie portions of 38 foods, and rated their hunger every 15 minutes for two hours. Each food's score was compared against white bread, set at 100. Boiled potatoes scored 323, the highest of the foods tested.
Why does protein fill people up more?
Protein triggers release of gut hormones that signal fullness, including PYY, GLP-1, and cholecystokinin. Its amino acids also reach the brain and liver, which sense them. Digesting protein costs more energy than digesting fat or carbohydrate. These effects together make protein the most satiating macronutrient in most feeding studies.
What makes potatoes so filling?
A baked potato is about 75 percent water, so it adds volume with few calories per gram. Potatoes also contain a protein called proteinase inhibitor 2. In rat studies by Slavko Komarnytsky and colleagues in 2011, an extract of it raised levels of the fullness hormone cholecystokinin and reduced food intake.
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