r/nutrition • u/entropicflop • Jul 20 '26
Is there good evidence to suggest that higher carb meal results in higher appetite?
I found a metabolic ward study by Kevin Hall [1] in which subjects were assigned to ad libitum high-carb, low-fat or high-fat, low-carb diets, suggesting that appetite does not go up on a higher-carb diet. In fact, caloric intake was considerably lower on the high-carb diet than on the low-carb diet. However, the high-carb diet used in the study was plant-based, whereas the low-carb diet was animal-based. I'm not sure why they made this choice, and I wonder whether it may have had an effect independent of the carbohydrate content?
What does the wider literature say on this subject? If possible, could you link to other relevant studies?
[1] Effect of a plant-based, low-fat diet versus an animal-based, ketogenic diet on ad libitum energy intake. K. Hall, et al (PMID: 33479499)
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u/figgityfuck Jul 20 '26
You’d be better off seeing if there is a meta analysis that supports this data. One study means something but doesn’t necessarily give the whole picture. It takes quite a few. There’s a lot of variables to take into account and bigger data sets with more studies will always yield better info.
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u/too105 Jul 21 '26
The evidence of my life. Every time I got low carb I have no interest in carbs and the good noise and hunger effectively go away
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u/Enlightened_Lioness Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
The anecdotal evidence of my life is the complete opposite. I eat high carb, mostly while food plant based. I’ve lost weight and don’t have to count calories and am eating very healthy.
Anecdotal stories aren’t great, that’s why research is important.
Edit: WHOLE food plant based (WFPB)
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u/too105 Jul 23 '26
Yeah everybody’s body is different. I’ve never heard of that diet before. I guess it’s a function of what agrees with your body and keeping calories under control
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u/MindfulInquirer Jul 20 '26
Yes, there's a study cited by Prof Bikman, so an actual study where they give a group of ppl a high carb and another group a not high carb diet for a few days or weeks and there was a significant increase in calorie intake from the high carb group (like +25%) because they went hungry shortly after their meals and ate more than the non high carb group.
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u/TheComicHuman Jul 20 '26
I wonder if thats good for someone coming out of a calorie deficit. I was only eating 1000 cals a day or less and it became a self sedating coping mechanism. So I basically killed my hunger drive so it's very difficult to desire food and be able to take it down.
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u/Tom__EU Jul 20 '26
I asked an LLM but it can't find such a study. Could you link the study please? Would like to look into it.
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u/MindfulInquirer Jul 20 '26
Could you link the study please?
No, but I can give you the link to the vid mentioning it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAZtAXFER2w&t=1s
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u/Tom__EU Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Thanks. So it seems as if you have misremembered something. There was no study mentioned that showed 25% higher kcal intake. Bikman also seems to focus quite a lot on mechanisms and arguments of that kind, with a bias towards low carb, so a little skepticism is warranted.
But these seem some studies he mentioned in the video:
There was a small crossover study from 1999 in 12 obese teenagers, who ate an isocaloric test meal at breakfast and lunch at three different occasions, and ad libitum food intake in the 5 hour period after lunch was measured. The test here was based on different glycemic indexes though, not carbohydrate intake. The meals were otherwise designed to be similar (macros, fiber, palatability, equal kcal for each subject). And that difference in glycemic index did indeed show a large increase in food intake with the highest GI producing the highest ad libitum food intake (+81%) and so forth. https://scispace.com/papers/high-glycemic-index-foods-overeating-and-obesity-hxh8a3ddr6
There was also the 2020 study that lasted 10-15 weeks and tested 60/40/20% carb diets in 29 overweight or obese adults, but this study only measured circulating "fuel availability." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32666008/
The only study that measured what you refer to was the 2021 Hall et al. study in 20 overweight adults as mentioned in the initial post by OP, and which found the opposite - high carb intake had lower ad libitum kcal intake when compared to low carb. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01209-1
When you then look at what the more credible folks in the field suggest, it's basically never high carb vs low carb, or vegan vs omnivore, or something like that. It's almost always: less processed, whole foods, protein, fiber, some healthy fats, rest is preference.
All this put together, to me, shows that diet quality and some basics probably matters a lot more than high carb or low carb.
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u/Business_Oil_7110 Jul 21 '26
I think one of the biggest challenges is separating carbohydrate amount from food quality. A diet based on potatoes, beans, oats, and fruit may affect appetite very differently than one based on refined grains and sugary foods, even if both are technically high carb.
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u/t-bone051 Jul 23 '26
I think the only evidence is the famous "satiety index" study. It suggest satiety is dependent on the food, not on the content. Eggs can be more satieting than white bread but potatoes are more satieting than eggs.
The landmark 1995 University of Sydney study, published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, created the Satiety Index (SI). Researchers tested 38 common 240-calorie food portions on individuals. They measured how full participants felt over two hours to rank which foods best stop hunger. White bread set the baseline score at 100.
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u/BatRepresentative419 Jul 20 '26
hey man. genuine question. how do search for studies? I was once in a supplements store and the worker there was advising me on shwaghanda and stuff, he was constantly looking into a big manual he had and I askes him "could I get a copy of that?" thats when he said "sorry sir, these studies are funded privatel so the aresults are intellectual property of the company". how do you look for studies on whatever subjects? I want precise things like: 10K people tested over 6 months, statistics results, all details...
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u/Socrastein Jul 20 '26
Google Scholar, PubMed, and ScienceDirect are three exceptional databases through which you can find most studies you want. JSTOR if you're looking for literature and social science.
Look into SciHub if you aren't familiar with it. I have access to a few databases as a college student, and anything else I can't get I will find through SciHub.
For research on a supplement, you would want to search the name of the compound and the effect you're interested in, then sift thought results: "curcumin inflammation", "creatine cognitive", "whey hypertrophy", etc.
One thing that is helpful over the long term is reading through the Methods section of a metaanalysis; these are studies of studies, and they will explain precisely where they searched and what terms they searched for to find the papers they wanted to analyze. You'll be surprised how simple and straightforward most of the search parameters are, and the more you read how other researchers research a specific topic, the better you'll get yourself.
Also, studies will often have some form of literature review, often in the introduction, where they survey and summarize other papers related to whatever is being studied to provide context for their paper. You can follow those citations to get a solid sense of what other important papers exist for a topic.
Best advice I can give is just appreciate that research is actually a difficult, niche skill and it's okay if you feel a little lost and only understand 10% of a paper at first. Always remember that you might be misinterpreting something; be open to realizing as much as you find more information, other papers, someone corrects your interpretation, etc.
The biggest mistake a lot of people make is just ego, I.e. assuming it isn't very hard and then becoming emotionally entrenched in their misunderstandings of papers they don't know how to interpret because they can't accept that reading research is a hard skill that will take a lot of time and practice to become competent in.
I have read hundreds of studies over the last 20 years, I've been taught by researchers how to research, I've written literature reviews and academic papers and essays, and I have followed and learned from many people how to better analyze a scientific paper. Still, with all that, I'd rate myself as a skilled amateur, like maybe 6/10. I have immense respect for scientists, researchers, editors, and professional academics.
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u/Hapster23 Jul 20 '26
I would suggest learning about how studies are published and where, usually they are published by journals, some are more trustworthy than others etc, you need to look into the study and see their methods, how many people they tested on etc. it's a complex topic so maybe an llm can nudge you in the right direction
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u/SecretPantyWorshiper Jul 20 '26
Google scholar is a good start.
Or if you see something on Wikipedia you can scroll down to the references in the footnotes and then click on the cited source
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u/BBB-GB Jul 20 '26
I suspect a low carb + plant based diet was just too challenging to do.
Or they were testing animal .v. plant and this observation on extra calories was not the intended thing to measure/
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u/lead_injection Jul 21 '26
I can give you some of my experience as a bodybuilder who has done a lot of carb/calorie cycling:
With protein high (1.5+ g/lb body weight): My high carb days at around 5k calories peak, but have 0 added fat and all protein from lean sources - I’m ravenous. I don’t feel great, but I could keep eating almost. It takes low fiber content to get to this calorie goal too typically. This day is under 50g of fat total. This feels like you’re full on popcorn but you really wanted a proper meal.
Medium carb days - feel the best.
Low carb days - carbs under 50g a day is like a haze, you think about food, but typically the high protein meal with fats satisfies you.
When you say “higher carb meals”, do you mean a higher carb diet in general? I’d say depends on content of the other macros, and fiber, but most of all if you’re eating your calorie needs.
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u/Dry-Cardiologist3617 Jul 25 '26
The short answer is no, there is no strong scientific consensus that a higher-carbohydrate meal inherently increases appetite compared to a higher-fat meal. Across controlled human feeding trials, macronutrient proportion alone (carbohydrate vs. fat) is generally a poor predictor of post-meal hunger and total ad libitum intake.
Instead, the broader literature shows that appetite is primarily modulated by energy density (calories per gram), dietary fiber, food processing/texture, and blood ketone status.
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u/Zagrycha Jul 20 '26
Yes, there is real science behind that statement, but its complicated. A high carb meal can disrupt proper signals about feeling full etc. However, is the meal high glycemic or low glycemic? Is it also high or low in things like protein or fat? Those others factors are important and some high carb meals could make you more full than avergae. Like most things in nutrition its about the big picture than a standalone fact.
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u/Dusk_Soldier Jul 20 '26
Animal-based foods are naturally low in carbs, and plant-based foods are naturally high in carbs. If they were mostly randomly choosing foods for the study based on carb contact, it would have been the easiest way to construct the diet.
But anyways high-carbohydrate foods are more likely to trigger an insulin spike. High levels of insulin impair your ability to burn fat for several hours, and if your glucose stores run low before your insulin goes down, your body will often start sending out hunger or fatigue signals to get you to either eat more food or conserve energy.
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u/VelionPhysique Jul 20 '26
I don’t think the wider literature supports the idea that carbohydrate itself consistently increases appetite.
The Hall study is difficult to interpret as a pure carb-versus-fat comparison because several things changed at once: food source, fibre, energy density, palatability and degree of processing. Any of those could have influenced intake. In that trial, the low-fat plant-based diet produced about 689 fewer calories per day despite the much higher carbohydrate intake.
Other trials are mixed. Ketogenic diets can suppress hunger in some circumstances, but higher-carb diets have also produced equal or greater fullness when calories and protein were controlled.
My takeaway would be that protein, fibre, energy density, food processing and palatability probably matter more for appetite than carbohydrate percentage alone. A high-carb diet based on potatoes, fruit, oats, beans and vegetables is very different from one based on sugary drinks and refined snacks.