Cabbage soup

The cabbage soup diet, honestly

This soup is famous because of a diet: seven days of eating as much cabbage soup as you like, plus a fixed list of fruit, vegetables, beef and brown rice on certain days. The plan promises a loss of 10 pounds in a week. People often do lose several pounds, and there is no mystery about why.

The plan usually circulated goes like this, with the soup eaten freely every day:

• Day 1: fruit, except bananas.
• Day 2: vegetables, plus one baked potato.
• Day 3: fruit and vegetables.
• Day 4: bananas and skim milk.
• Day 5: beef and tomatoes.
• Day 6: beef and vegetables.
• Day 7: brown rice, vegetables and unsweetened fruit juice.

The original soup was made with a packet of onion soup mix. The recipe on this page can stand in for it.

Why people lose weight on it:

• Very few calories. A bowl of this soup has 85 kcal, so even a lot of it adds up to far less than most people normally eat.
• Mostly water, not fat. Cutting carbohydrates and calories this sharply drains the body's glycogen stores, and each gram of glycogen is stored with roughly three grams of water. Much of the first week's loss is that water.

The water comes back as soon as you eat normally again. Even a deficit of 1,000 kcal a day for seven days adds up to only about 2 pounds of fat, so of a 10-pound drop, a pound or two at most is fat. Most days of the plan are very low in protein, and a steep deficit with little protein costs some lean tissue as well. A week of it is unlikely to harm a healthy adult, though fatigue, hunger and gas are common. It is not suitable for anyone on diabetes medication, anyone pregnant, or anyone with a history of disordered eating. And there is no evidence that cabbage burns anything: the idea of "negative-calorie" foods is a myth.

How to use it instead

The soup itself is useful. It is cheap, it fills you up and it has very few calories. Use it as part of a normal diet rather than in place of one:

• Have a bowl before lunch or dinner. A low-calorie soup eaten first tends to reduce how much you eat at the rest of the meal.
• Make it a full meal with protein. Stirring in 1 pound of shredded cooked chicken or browned lean ground turkey brings each bowl to about 15 g of protein. A can of white beans adds about 3 g a bowl, and more fiber.
• Keep a pot in the fridge for when you are hungry between meals.

Keeping the cabbage from going gray

Overcooked cabbage turns gray and soft and starts to smell sulfurous. That smell comes from sulfur compounds that build up the longer cabbage boils. Twenty to 25 minutes of simmering is enough. The cabbage should be tender but still a little green and holding its shape. If you reheat the soup, bring it just to a simmer rather than boiling it again.

Variations

• Smoky: use fire-roasted tomatoes and add a pinch of chipotle powder with the paprika.
• Sweet and sour: add a tablespoon of brown sugar with the vinegar. That is closer to the Eastern European cabbage soups.
• With beef: brown half a pound of lean ground beef before the vegetables, and use beef broth.
• Savoy or red cabbage: savoy is more tender and needs only 15 minutes. Red cabbage turns the soup purple-brown but tastes the same.

Keeping it

Four days in the fridge and three months in the freezer. It freezes well, since there is no potato or pasta to go grainy, though the cabbage softens a little more on thawing.

What it is worth nutritionally

About 85 kcal a bowl of about 1 3/4 cups, with 3 g of protein and 15 g of carbohydrate, including about 4 g of fiber. Cabbage is a good source of vitamin C and vitamin K. On its own the soup is too low in protein and fat to be a balanced meal. That is the main problem with the diet named after it, and it is easy to fix in a normal week of eating.