When we try to eat less, we usually feel hungry. Sometimes, we feel very hungry. At this point, we usually have two choices: suffer or eat.

When we cut back substantially on the amount of food we eat, especially between meals, we may find hunger distraction interferring with our mental focus and productivity. Going shopping, doing a big yard maintenance or household organization project, some engrossing and physically active, yet not too mentally demanding, activity to keep our minds off that gnawing in our middle, can solve the problem.

But some of us have no alternative but to stick to a project that requires focused mental concentration.

How, then, do we counter the hunger distraction?

Hunger distraction is occasionally a problem not just for me, but, judging from your email to annebarone.com, a problem for a number of you, too. So I am always on the lookout for something safe, effective, reasonably priced, and not requiring time-consuming preparation that can make us feel satisfied without adding excessive calories. If it tastes good too, that is a bonus.

Spring 2006 my son sent me an article clipped from The Wall Street Journal’s Health section titled “Seaweed Booms for Dieters in Japan: ‘Kanten’ Plan Uses Gelatin To Give Feeling of Fullness, But Exercise Is Still Needed” by Andrew Morse. According to the article, the kanten plan is a popular Japanese dieting method that uses a gelatin made from seaweed to trick the body into thinking it has eaten larger portions than it actually has. This calorie-free product expands in the stomach to give a feeling of fullness.

The article assured that not only was kanten the hot diet method in Japan, it had good recommendations from the medical community. The article quoted Osamu Tochikubo, a physician who teachs preventive medicine at Yokohama City University Graduate School of Medicine recommending kanten’s use in weight control.

Encouraged by that medical recommendation, I decided to test if kanten might have practical weight control use in the Chic & Slim lifestyle. My usual focus is French weight control techniques. Kanten seemed a good opportunity to check out Japanese techniques.

Kanten? What is kanten?

Until I read the WSJ article, I had never heard of kanten. But like many people concerned about healthy eating, I knew the product by the name under which it is generally sold in the USA in natural food stores: agar or agar-agar.

Vegetarians and those leery of supermarket gelatin, use agar instead of gelatin in recipes calling for that ingredient. An additional recommendation for agar is that it does not require refrigeration to become solid. For those wanting to serve an aspic or gelatin dessert outdoors in the hot summer, agar won’t liquify in the heat the way gelatin does.

According to the WSJ article, in Japan, kanten is served to dieters in noodles, jellies, coffees and salads, as well as taken mixed with juice. Included in the WSJ article was a strawberry kanten recipe likely to appeal to American tastes. This dish called for apple juice, agar, strawberries and optional flavoring and sweetening from maple syrup. I decided to try the recipe.

First, I needed agar. One source the article listed was iHerb.com, the online merchant from which I order vitamins, stevia and flaxseed oil. I ordered a 2 ounce (57 gram) bottle of NOW brand agar powder. While I waited for my agar to arrive, I shopped for apple juice and strawberries (frozen since they were out of season at the time). I thought I had a bottle of Vermont maple syrup in the cupboard, but apparently I had used it all with buckwheat pancakes. I decided to substitute liquid stevia for sweetening. The strawberries and apple juice would provide good fruity flavor.

If I had been in a rush for agar, I could have surely bought it at the little natural foods store here in town. Besides natural food stores, you might also find agar in some well-stocked supermarkets, and, of course, in oriental food stores under the name kanten. I understand there it will likely be in block form rather than powder.

The WSJ article warned that in preparing the kanten you must make sure that it is completely dissolved. If not dissolved, when eaten, kanten expands in the intestine, not the stomach. With intestinal expansion, you do not get the feeling of fullness that helps you eat less.

Trying the Recipe

From experience, I learned this is true. For my first trial, I simply poured boiling water over the whitish, tasteless agar powder and stirred. The powder looked as if it had dissolved. So I mixed it with some undiluted apple juice concentrate and drank the mixture as a beverage. I did not experience the feeling of fullness that I did when later, in subsequent experiments, I actually cooked the agar for five minutes as the instructions on the bottle of agar powder directed.

For my second experiment, I assembled ingredients to make the WSJ recipe of strawberry kanten. But before I actually measured the apple juice, I saw a possible problem if I prepared the recipe that provided multiple servings.

That possible problem was: it had been only a short time since my recipe testing of that Amaranth Brownie Recipe had added extra, unwanted pounds. (At that point I was still in the process of losing those extra, unwanted pounds). The last thing I needed was another recipe that would break through my Moderation Barrier and cause me to eat more at one sitting than was recommended. Especially a product that worked by expanding inside of you after you ate it.

I decided that I would work out a recipe to prepare one serving of strawberry kanten and prepare only that one serving. As I have frequently pointed out in the Chic & Slim books, and on the Chic & Slim website annebarone.com, if you do not have the food available, you cannot eat it. It is that simple.

A one-serving recipe for strawberry kanten required modifications of the recipe given in the WSJ article. First of all, that recipe had specified agar flakes. I had purchased agar powder. Please be aware that in substituting agar powder in a recipe calling for agar flakes, you must use a smaller quantity of powder than flakes.

How much less agar powder than agar flakes?

A Google search turned up a variety of answers to that question. They ranged from six times the quantity of flakes as powder to four and a half times as much flakes as powder.

Given the disparity in the equivalencies, I consulted the directions on the bottle of agar powder that I had bought. These instructed two tablespoons agar powder for 1 pint liquid (water, juice, whatever). (Why they just did not say 1 tablespoon for every cup of water, I do not know.) In any case, when I began testing this recipe, I decided to use one teaspoon of agar powder for one cup apple juice in each serving of strawberry kanten using the NOW brand agar powder. These proportions were more or less in line with those in the WSJ recipe (though not with the instructions on the bottle of agar powder).

Here is how I prepared my version of the strawberry kanten: (Recipes for three versions are found following the end of this article.)

I put one cup of apple juice in a saucepan and sprinkled the agar powder over the juice and let it soak 15 minutes. Then, I put the saucepan on the burner, brought the mixture to a boil, lowered the heat and simmered while stirring for 5 minutes.

You must make sure that you have a sufficiently large saucepan. While cooking, this mixture bubbles up and can boil over if you are not attentive. If it boils over, you have a sticky mess to clean up, I can assure you. When the cooking time was up, I set the saucepan off the burner to allow the cooked mixture to cool.

Theory

The idea behind the Japanese kanten plan is that you eat the kanten with a meal of smaller-than-normal portions. When the kanten expands in your stomach, you feel satisfied even though you have eaten less than you normally do. In order to follow this system when I was making only one serving at a time, I softened and cooked the agar powder, then, I put this agar and apple juice mixture into a one-serving blender container along with one-half cup of frozen strawberries and added several drops of liquid stevia. It took about 30 seconds to process on the whip setting to make a sort-of-sorbet. For elegance, I served this strawberry kanten sorbet in a crystal wine goblet. A lunch of a small serving of soup, a small chunk of my homemade French bread and the strawberry kanten sorbet for dessert gave me a full feeling that sustained me until afternoon teatime.

Actually, in these first experiments with the product, I became rather hooked on this strawberry kanten dessert. It provided my lunch fruit every day for the time of my kanten trial. True, it was more trouble to make the individual portion every day than to have prepared the six-serving recipe and then eaten one each meal. But for a from-scratch cook as I am, it was not too great a chore. (Though later, on my second set of recipe experiments, when the novelty of kanten/agar had worn off, I was not so exthusiastic about making one servings.)

Why One Serving?

As I pointed out earlier, another factor influenced my decision to make only one serving at a time. I frequently stress the importance of self-knowledge in your weight control efforts. Part of my self-knowledge is understanding that I have different Food Moods. Sometimes I find it not as necessary as at other times to keep only limited amounts of food on hand. But if I am stressed or focused intently on a project, I must be on guard against mindlessly overeating if a tasty food is too readily available.

Preparing only one serving at a time is more time consuming, as I said. On the other hand, when you are consuming your time preparing a food, you are not consuming your time eating food. This, of course, assumes that you are following that sensible French technique of never eating while you are preparing food. (Tiny tastes to check for seasoning are permitted when necessary, however.)

With the one-serving-at-a-time system, a second helping, would have required that I soak the agar fifteen minutes, then cook it for five minutes, and then, finally, process the mixture in the blender. By that time, surely I would have been feeling sufficiently satisfied with my lunch and the first serving of strawberry kanten, that I would not have wanted it anyway. Remember it takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to send the full signal.

Some months later, after the holidays, when I wanted to use kanten to help me take off a couple of pounds gained from rich holiday food (I do like cornbread sausage dressing with my roast turkey and pumpkin pie.) I decided that I did not want to bother with all those individual servings. My Food Mood was different than it had been when I first tried kanten/agar. This time I did not feel I required the discipline of the individual servings.

I modified The Wall Street Journal recipe to make a six-serving recipe using agar powder. Both my single serving recipe and my six-serving recipe are given at the end of this article.

Did the kanten/agar make me feel satisfied with a smaller amount of food?

Did kanten/agar play a role in taking off extra pounds I had gained?

The short answers to the above questions are: yes and yes.

Kanten/agar did make me feel satisfied with smaller portions of food. (Later in this narrative, I will tell you of an instance when it made me feel a bit too satisfied.) Ending a meal of smaller-than-normal portions with a strawberry kanten dessert helped me eat less. I did lose the pounds I had gained and was wearing my skinny pants again in a month or so. If a month plus seems like a long time to take off a few pounds, remember, my approach to losing weight is always a gradual one. Why? First, gradual mininmalizes discomfort. Second, gradual works for surer success because in a gradual progress you establish (sometimes re-establish) positive food habits that keep on paying dividends.

During my kanten experiments, I tried some variations. Several times, instead of using apple juice, I soaked and cooked the agar in one-half cup of water, then blended one-half cup plain yogurt with the one half cup frozen strawberries and stevia. This produced a dessert that was more like frozen yogurt than a French style sorbet made with fruit juice. I also substituted other frozen fruits. I did not much like the result when I replaced the frozen strawberries with frozen blueberries. The blueberry version tasted watery. Frozen apricots, blackberries and peaches worked well. Fresh strawberries instead of frozen strawberries also worked well, though to have a chilled dessert required putting the kanten dessert into the refrigerator for at least 20 to 30 minutes before serving.

The only real disaster I had in my experimentation with various fruits was when I tried frozen organic mango slices. I adore mangoes, a fruit I learned to love when I lived in West Africa.

Had the quality of mangoes been better, I believe that the mango kanten dessert would have tasted fine. But those organic mangoes that I purchased had been frozen green. Never mind, I thought, with the kanten, yogurt and enough stevia it would be edible. (I do so hate to throw out something expensive. And those frozen organic mango slices were pricey.) The taste was so sour that I finally added a two teaspoons of real sugar to the serving. That did improve the taste. But in an hour or so I was experiencing so much abdominal discomfort that I remembered that when I lived in West Africa, there was among some of the people a belief that eating green mangoes would cause a miscarriage. That is medically in doubt. But that version of the kanten dessert made with those green organic mangoes producted an adominal discomfort very much like labor contractions. So one can certainly understand how the miscarriage belief might have originated.

Comparing the various fruits I tried, strawberry produced the best kanten/agar dessert taste for me.

How exactly would I describe this taste of these kanten concoctions I was preparing?

Have you ever eaten gelatin fruit salad? Perhaps that is too simplistic. The commercial gelatin product usually used in the USA in gelatin fruit salad is heavily sugared. About 75 percent sugar to 25 percent gelatin, I understand. The fruit flavors in the product taste very artificial to me. That artificial fruit taste comes through even when real fresh fruit is added to the fruit salad, or fruit parfait.

Kanten/agar has no taste, though it does have a gelatinous texture. When you add the apple juice and fruit, the flavor is certainly that of the real fruit. Though as I said, blueberries just did not seem to hold up in the mixture. And I did squeeze in a little lemon juice with the apricots and peaches to intensify their fruit flavor.

I can say several positive things about kanten/agar and its usefulness in weight control. Yet, on the negative side, after the initial novelty faded, the time and effort required to properly prepare the product seemed more trouble than it was worth.

Making the six-serving version seemed to create a lot of mess to clean up. Though I was using the same ingredients and the same utensils as for the individual servings, the larger quantity seemed to dirty more containers and cause more drips and spills than making only one serving at a time. Having to put the six servings into individual storage containers was an additional chore.

Another negative of using kanten for weight control was the expense. The 2 ounce (57 gram) bottle of agar powder I ordered from iHerb.com, about the same price as at other online sources, cost almost $6. (Shipping charges additional.) The 2 ounce bottle will make approximately 22 servings using a teaspooon of agar in each serving.

Buying agar in a large quantity could cut the price per ounce about half. The last time I checked, iHerb.com offered a 2 pound jumbo jar of agar for $57.44. True it costs less per ounce to buy the 2 pound jar instead of the 2 ounce bottle. But with all new things, I suggest prudence.

If you have never tried kanten/agar, do not assume this will be your weight loss miracle. If you do want to try it, purchase a 2 ounce bottle for a trial period. If you decide it will work for you, you can then purchase a larger, more economical quantity should you choose. But I lost the approximately five pounds that those sinfully delicious Amaranth Brownies put one me with one 2 ounce bottle of agar powder. Of course, I only employed it on a limited time basis to augment my Chic & Slim lifestyle.

I understand that in Asian markets and in some health-food stores, kanten (also called Japanese gelatin) is sold in blocks and strands. Whether there would be notable savings in buying kanten in block or stand form, I do not know. I did check out several online sources of powdered kanten, and it was almost identical in price for weight to what I paid for the product labeled agar. I did not make any price comparisons in the flakes vs. the powdered versions of agar, however.

Of course if you simply cook the agar powder in some tap water and drink it, the cost is basically the price of the agar. But if you make it into a dessert, then you must consider the price of other ingredients.

Putting cost of ingredients and effort of preparation into the evaulation, is using the kanten/agar recommended for eating smaller portions in order to shed fat?

Ça depend, as the French say. That depends.

It depends on whether or not you enjoy and benefit from trying new aids to weight control. Some people do better with the old tried and true methods. Others achieve better results with something new. It depends on whether your budget can afford the cost. It depends on whether you have time to prepare the kanten/agar and whether you are willing to put out the extra effort for preparation. It depends on whether the kanten actually makes you feel sufficiently full that you eat less and consequently lose fat.

Many French, when they notice that they have gained a couple of pounds, will substitute mineral water for their wine with meals and cut back on bread until they lose the weight they want to lose. Still, all you have to do is take a quick walk through a French pharmacie to see all the weight loss products that the French often buy and use successfully. The French chose what is effective for them.

Whether or not something is effective for us is a good standard to apply to any weight control product.

Then, there is the plain fact that not every body responds in the same way to kanten. You may have been overeating such huge portions at meals that a little bit of plumped up seaweed might not swell to the size to fill your stomach.

As for the cost, if your budget is extremely tight, you might find more economical ways of dealing with hunger discomfort when you begin reducing portions. Such as? Such as eating a first course of les crudités, those raw vegetables that are low in calories, but have lots of fiber that help you feel full. A 32 ounce bag of carrots, or large stalk of celery is reasonably priced in most USA supermarkets most of the year. The same is true for radishes that the French think make an excellent healthy snack.

Earlier I mentioned an instance in which the kanten dessert made me feel more than satisified. What happened was this: One day the bread I was making was slow rising and had not finished baking when lunch time came. And I was hungry. I ate my dish of Santa Cruz (broccoli) soup. Then, I ate my strawberry kanten dessert. About an hour later, the bread finished baking and I ate a big slice. I had neglected to take into consideration the effect of the kanten when I cut that big slice of bread. For several hours I felt as if I had swollowed a large watermelon.

So now you have read Anne Barone’s Kanten Experience. One reason I share my experiences with products such as kanten/agar in detail is that I think it makes it easier for you to make a judgment about whether they are something you might wish to try. Some products and techniques will be successful for one person, but useless for the next. The more information you have in advance, the more likely you can avoid something that would waste time and money. At the same time, the more information you have in advance, the more likely you will identify a product or technique that could help you shed some stubborn fat.

After all, our goal is to be chic and stay slim, isn’t it?

Bonne chance!

If you want to try kanten/agar, my recipes are below.

RECIPES

Anne Barone’s Kanten Sorbet

1 cup apple juice

1 teaspoon agar powder (not flakes)

1/2 cup frozen fruit (do not thaw)

Sweetening to taste

Put the apple juice in a small sauce pan and sprinkle agar powder over the juice. Allow to soften for 10-15 minutes. Put the saucepan on a burner and bring mixture to a boil, simmer stirring for 5 minutes. Take pan off the burner and allow mixture to cool until it jells. (About 15 minutes)

Put the mixture into a blender container, add the frozen fruit and sweeten to taste. Process on whip setting. Serve in a wine goblet or elegant dessert dish.

Anne Barone’s Kanten Parfait

1/2 cup water

1 teaspoon agar powder (not flakes)

1/2 cup frozen fruit (do not thaw)

1/2 cup plain yogurt

Sweetening to taste

Put the water in a small sauce pan and sprinkle agar powder over the water. Allow powder to soften for 15 minutes. Put the saucepan on a burner and bring mixture to a boil, simmer stirring for 5 minutes. Take pan off the burner and allow mixture to cool until it jells. (About 15 minutes)

Put the mixture into a blender container, add the frozen fruit, yogurt. Sweeten to taste. Process on whip setting. Serve in a wine goblet or elegant dish.

Strawberry Kanten (6 servings)

2 cups water

2 Tablespoons agar powder

1 6-ounce can frozen apple juice concentrate

1 10-ounce package (about 2 cups) frozen strawberries, slightly thawed

Put the water in a sauce pan and sprinkle agar powder over the liquid. Make sure that the sauce pan is sufficiently large to allow the mixture to bubble up while it cooks. Allow the agar to soften for 15 minutes. Put the saucepan on a burner and bring mixture to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer while stirring frequently for 5 minutes. Watch constantly during cooking to prevent boiling over. Take pan off the burner and allow mixture to cool slightly.

In a food processor or blender, puree the strawberries with the apple juice concentrate until smooth. Add the strawberry and apple juice mixture to the dissolved agar. Divide the mixture into six individual serving containers. Cover all the containers and refrigerate. If you are planning to use only one serving of kanten per day, freezing at least three of the prepared desserts until the day of use will prevent spoilage.