Which matters more—the amount of calories we eat or the quality of those calories?

Diet gurus often try to trick us by positioning this question as an either-or choice. But don’t buy into that.

The answer is both.

Quality matters

We’ve all experienced the feeling an hour or two after eating a heavy meal full of sugar, salt and fat. Energy levels plummet, and indigestion rules the rest of the day.

This is our bodies saying, “Feed me better stuff, please.”

Research consistently shows that people who eat fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and whole grains live longer, healthier lives. Nearly every health organization in the world advises eating more of these foods and cutting back on saturated fat, sugar, and processed foods.

But quality isn’t the only thing that matters. We also have to focus on the raw number of calories, whether good or bad.

Quantity matters too

Author Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food gave us what may be the most elegant encapsulation of a healthy diet ever written: “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.”

Eating real food primarily made from plants covers the quality side. Apples rather than Apple Jacks. Frozen berries rather than frozen dumplings.

Unfortunately, many people forget the last part of Pollan’s triad: not too much.

It turns out that the key distinction in whether a diet helps lose weight is simply caloric intake. Low-fat diets, low carb diets, intermittent fasting, and others all can work. A recent review of the available research found “no apparent statistically significant difference in weight loss between low-carb and low-fat diets after one year."

That conclusion came with one caveat: caloric intake was held equal. No matter what, the underlying fact is that consuming more calories than we burn will not result in weight loss.

To ensure a good sense of our caloric intake, a good strategy is to track what we eat.

The problem with tracking is that it can be a tedious process. The rare exception is our anal retentive cofounder, Geremy, who has been tracking for nearly 10 years every calorie he eats, every step he takes, every hour he sleeps, and every alcoholic drink he consumes.

For those of us less fond of spreadsheets and without obsessive-compulsive tendencies, tracking is hard and inconvenient.

That’s where snacks can come in handy.

Snacks help track

One of the many upsides of snacks is we know right from the package what’s in them.

Compare that to, say a bowl of chana masala and brown rice. It’s hard to tell how much chana and rice lie underneath the tasty Indian staple. What’s in the masala sauce? What kind of oil is in there, and how much? With most meals, unless we’re measuring, weighing and watching, it’s a lot of guesswork.

With packaged snacks, the nutrition labels tell us exactly how many calories we’re consuming. That makes for easy tracking, so the quantity side of the caloric equation is covered. Just hang onto the wrapper.

The downside of most packaged snacks is that they violate the quality rule. Logging all our Snickers Ice Cream Bars and Rice Krispy Treats won’t help us in the long run.

Of course, there is one marketplace you may know that can help you with both pieces of the calorie puzzle—quality and quantity.

Happy tracking, and healthy snacking.

-Justin, Geremy and the airfare team