The older text on this page promised a handful of foods that help you lose weight. A more useful question is narrower: when people are free to eat as much of a snack as they like, which snacks leave them eating less overall? One trial from the University of Toronto put four snacks side by side, and on paper dates are close to one of them. Here are the five foods, the four that were tested and the one that was not, and what the evidence does and does not show.
The trial behind the five
The study was published in the Journal of Food Science in 2013 (PubMed 23789934). Twenty-six children aged 8 to 11, all of normal weight, took part on four separate weekdays, one week apart. Each day they had the same breakfast, an apple as a morning snack and the same lunch. After school they were given one of four snacks and told to eat until they felt "comfortably full".
The four snacks were raisins, grapes, potato chips and chocolate chip cookies. The researchers measured appetite before and after the snack, and added up everything each child ate across the day. The children were the subjects, so the results apply to them first. Nobody's weight was followed over time.
1. Raisins
The children took in the fewest calories from raisins and grapes. By weight, they ate about the same amount of raisins as potato chips, roughly 75g. USDA FoodData Central puts dark seedless raisins at 299 kcal per 100g, so 75g of raisins is about 224 kcal. Raisins and grapes led to a lower total food intake across the day. The authors conclude that raisins, like grapes, show promise as an after-school snack for keeping snack intake low before dinner, compared with chips and cookies.
2. Grapes
Grapes also led to a lower total intake, and they did best on appetite. Measured as the change in appetite per calorie of snack, grapes lowered appetite more than any of the other three. FoodData Central lists raw red or green grapes at 69 kcal per 100g. The children ate a larger weight of grapes than of raisins, yet it was still one of the two lowest-calorie snacks.
3. Potato chips
Chips were the comparison that makes raisins look interesting. The children ate a similar weight of each, but the energy is very different. FoodData Central gives plain salted potato chips 532 kcal per 100g, so the same 75g would come to about 399 kcal, against about 224 kcal for raisins.
4. Chocolate chip cookies
Cookies were the only snack that raised the children's total food intake for the day compared with the other three. They also supplied the most calories of any snack. FoodData Central lists one type of commercial chocolate chip cookie at 492 kcal per 100g, with 32.9g of sugars.
What adults who eat dried fruit look like
There is no adult version of this trial here, but there are two surveys of American adults. One looked at 13,292 adults in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2004 (PubMed 21745628). Only 7% ate dried fruit, counted as at least an eighth of a cup a day. After adjusting for other factors, those who did weighed 78.2kg on average against 80.7kg, had a body mass index of 27.1 against 28.1, and a smaller waist. They also scored higher on a measure of overall diet quality and ate 6.6g more fibre a day.
A later analysis of the same survey, covering 2001 to 2012 and 29,684 adults, looked at raisins alone (PubMed 29056890). The 458 raisin eaters weighed 4.2% less and were 39% less likely to be overweight or obese. They also ate 9% more energy. One of the three authors is listed at Sun-Maid Growers of California.
Both are survey analyses built on 24-hour dietary recalls, and the raisin paper describes itself as cross-sectional. They show that dried fruit eaters tended to have better diets and lower weights, not that dried fruit caused either.
5. Dates, which the trial left out
Dates were not one of the Toronto snacks, and the second survey is about raisins only. The first survey counted dried fruit as one group, and its summary does not break out dates. What can be said is how close they are to raisins on paper. FoodData Central lists Medjool dates at 277 kcal per 100g, with 66.5g of sugars and 6.7g of fibre. Raisins come to 299 kcal, 65.2g of sugars and 4.5g of fibre. On those numbers, dates sit near raisins and far from chips or cookies.
One difference from the trial matters. The children ate raisins as an after-school snack, but the NHS advises that a 30g portion of dried fruit, such as dates, should be eaten at mealtimes, not as a snack between meals, to reduce the impact on teeth. That 30g counts as 1 of your 5 A Day, and for Medjool it comes to about 83 kcal. Having it with a meal, in place of a cookie-type dessert, keeps to that advice.
Buying dates from Kurma Mazafati Bam
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An earlier version of this post linked to https://KurmaHarga.com, and that link stays here.
This article is general information, not personal advice. If you plan a big change to the way you eat, speak to your GP or a dietitian first.