Soup Before the Meal: A Fall Habit That May Help You Eat Less

As the weather cools, soup returns to the table, and it turns out to be more than comfort food. A well-known experiment found that starting a meal with soup led people to eat noticeably less overall. This is general education, not medical advice.

The experiment

In 2007, Julie Flood and Barbara Rolls at Penn State published a study in the journal Appetite with 60 normal-weight adults. Each person ate a soup 15 minutes before a main meal on different days, and the researchers measured how much they ate afterward.

• When people ate soup first, their total meal energy intake, including the soup itself, was about 20 percent lower, roughly 134 fewer calories on average.
• The form of the soup did not make a significant difference. Broth with vegetables served separately, chunky vegetable soup and pureed vegetable soup all worked about equally.

Why it might work

Soup is mostly water, which adds volume and tends to make us feel full for the calories. Eating it slowly, as a starter, also gives the body a few minutes to notice that food has arrived. This connects with what we described in our look at why some foods fill you up more than others.

Keeping it in proportion

• It was a short-term experiment with normal-weight adults in a lab. It did not follow people over weeks or measure weight loss.
• The type of soup matters in real life. The lead author suggested broth-based soups with about 100 to 150 calories per serving, and warned that rich, cream-based soups could add calories rather than reduce them.
• It is one tool, not a rule. Our guide to plate size and portions offers other simple cues.

A simple fall vegetable soup

This is an original, flexible recipe for about four bowls.

• 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 chopped onion, 2 carrots and 2 celery stalks, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 can (15 oz) beans such as white beans or chickpeas, drained
• 1 small butternut squash or 2 cups diced pumpkin, peeled and cubed
• 4 cups low-sodium vegetable or chicken broth
• Salt, pepper, thyme and a few handfuls of chopped greens

Soften the onion, carrots and celery in the oil for about 5 minutes, add the garlic for a minute, then add the squash, beans, broth and thyme. Simmer 20 to 25 minutes until the squash is tender, stir in the greens for the last few minutes and season to taste. Beans add fiber and protein, which fits our guide to beans and lentils. Check the sodium on the broth label, using our guide to reading a nutrition label.

If you like to track what you eat, you can work out the nutrition of your own pot of soup in the recipe builder on Food Lookup. Disclosure: Food Lookup is our free tool, and it was not part of the research above.

Sources

• Flood JE, Rolls BJ. Soup preloads in a variety of forms reduce meal energy intake. Appetite, 2007;49(3):626-634.
• Penn State news release and ScienceDaily coverage of the study (for the lead author’s practical comments).