How about we stop "fearing" certain foods and just eat a reasonably varied diet that is calorie restricted? Or if you want to simply lose weight, just calorie restricted.
Or do I have to bring up the people who have lived on nothing but twinkies or McD for a month and stil lost weight?
Yes. My issue is not losing weight - that's easy, I'll just not eat anything for a week. (I've lost weight before, usually when being violently sick.)
My issue is keeping the weight down. I've been in Dublin for three months and lost about 10 kgs (nasty commute, stressful job and so on). I've been back for two weeks and gained back two kgs. Wife's a great cook :)
I think you've succinctly expressed one of the core issues that we have as individuals and as a society: we love tasty food more than we love healthy food. We generally consider meals that derive flavor from fats and sugars as great/tasty/enjoyable while we relegate more healthy options as that which we only eat to either make up for or "save calories for" the meals that we really enjoy.
It not only helps in counting calories it also gives daily articles and a set of TO-DOs. I was 275 lbs around 2.5 months ago but since then have lost 22 lbs.
Regarding 'keeping the weight down', I learned from this app itself why it is difficult:
1. Not eating anything for a week is not only a bad strategy to lose weight it is actually a good strategy to gain weight afterwards. In my own experience whenever I tried to lose weight by eating less I lost a lot of weight but gained more than what I lost afterwards. You cannot stay hungry forever and if you lose more than 2 lbs per week your body goes into starvation mode, burning any stored energy rapidly, and rapidly storing anything you eat afterwards as fat just in case you don't get food again. Body is more intelligent than we think.
2. Once a fat cell is born it craves fat and that makes you hungry. Rapidly losing weight by staying hungry will only remove fat from fat cells but won't kill them. Weight loss must be sustained for longer time to have any permanent effect.
3. I have replaced white rice with brown rice, white bread with whole grain wheat bread and started eating sprouts and corn, oranges, guava etc. other fruits. Sprouts are killer deal man - you eat 200g of it you will hardly feel hungry for hours.
4. You need to do some physical exercise everyday - not intense, just walking is okay. But you have to be consistent so your body learns how much energy you are going to lose anyway and doesn't store much fat.
I have yet to start heavy exercises but I like the effect on my body :)
I have a feeling that if most people are exposed to a varied enough diet for a long enough time, they'll start eating more healthily. Your stomach has a complicated neural system of its own which seems to be entirely for learning and recognizing what food contains what nutrients, so that you can get everything your body needs.
Maybe for you. I could easily put down 6000 calories worth of peanut butter in one shot, but if I tried that with pasta I probably wouldn't break 4000, and with veggies I probably wouldn't break 1500.
I bodybuild and I'm trying to get contest lean currently. If that wasn't a concern I would certainly have a furious-pete level youtube channel; even among powerlifters and football players I've always been notorious for my appetite.
This. I (loosely) follow bulletproof/keto diet and never have to watch how much I eat, without gaining weight. I just eat until I'm full, and if I have some munchies later in the evening, as long as I don't snack anything rich in carbs, I have no problem in keeping a stable weight.
I used to weigh about 100 kilo's, until I changed my diet to LCHF, now I'm about 70. A few months ago, as a test, I switched to Soylent for 2 months, and gained almost 10 kilo's.
I just think a high carb diet is not something that is compatible with an office job.
>>"eat a reasonably varied diet that is calorie restricted?"
Define "reasonably" and "restricted". Otherwise, you might as well say "If everyone just did the right thing, everything would be as it should!" which has no actionable component.
>>"people who have lived on nothing but twinkies or McD for a month and stil lost weight?"
....but suffered dozens of other health problems that'll lead to an early grave.
This is basically the same thing as the Subway guy. He restricted his calories, fulfilled his nutrient goals and, most importantly, started walking a lot more.
Well that's interesting! I'm still convinced that living on Twinkies & McD's isn't going to result in quality health, but it's good to know the super-size-me person had to lie in his documentary.
Nutrition isn't just about calories. They're important, but if all we needed were calories, we'd just measure out 2000 kcal of sugar each day.
Fats, proteins, etc. are all important. Within eating a reasonable number of calories, make sure that the portion of calories from each source is appropriate. If you focus solely on calories, you will lose weight but you will also lose other aspects of your health.
> You probably saw the compelling story on CNN that a nutrition professor ate only Twinkies for 10 weeks and lost 27 pounds! Except they didn’t disclose one important fact — he got paid by Coca-Cola. Perhaps “Coke-Funded Nutrition Professor Tries to Prove Junk Food Healthy” is now a more appropriate title. And his surprising finding that junk food can be eaten without consequence: perfectly on message for Coca-Cola.
And? Did he did he supplement the diet by eating Coca-Cola's money as a source of fiber? Because it still sounds like he only ate twinkies and lost weight.
Or are you suggesting that his data was falsified?
I'd be more inclined to agree if it were a complicated subject with a lot of data to be cherry-picked and "interpreted." In this case, "lost 27 pounds" and "only ate twinkies" would be pretty hard to play games with.
But hey, maybe 20 different scientists ran the same experiment and only the one time when it was successful got published. No way to know for sure.
If you lose weight but end up with diabetes, or a serious vitamin deficiency, would you still think this research is legit?
Eating only one type of food for weeks will almost always result in losing weight, because it would disrupt the gut flora, as well as deprive one of necessary vitamins/minerals.
In order to be accepted as anything other than an anecdote, you would require a much more rigorous study with a LOT more people and a much higher level of scrutiny. We would want to control for external issues, possibly genetic complications, gut flora, blood glucose levels, liver and pancreas health, illness, infection, cancers, etc...
Anecdotal evidence if fine for discussion, but no one should act upon it without medical supervision.
A lot of the issues with unhealthy food are mitigated by a caloric deficit. Additionally, almost regardless of diet if you lose a significant amount of fat your markers are going to improve.
Better demonstrations would be:
* Compare people eating the same number of calories below requirements, but one on the twinkie diet and one on a healthy diet to see comparative changes in markers
* Perform the same experiment as before, but this time with both groups eating the same number of calories above maintenance.
Certainly agreed that eating things that aren't twinkies is healthier in the big picture. I doubt Coke wanted to prove that wrong, they just want the "IF YOU EAT ANY JUNK FOOD YOU'RE GOING TO GET FAT" crowd to shut up for a few minutes. And frankly, so do I.
A twinkie has 135 calories (or 270 for a pair). It isn't a hard thing to fit into your diet if you aren't constantly snacking on things.
Certainly, if you're not eating for performance, flexible dieting is absolutely a viable strategy.
On the other hand, if you're riding the razor's edge and trying to do something crazy like get into lower single digit bodyfat while gaining muscle and strength, even a little junk food can make a noticeable difference. I recognize that isn't the typical case though.
"A lot of the issues with unhealthy food are mitigated by a caloric deficit."
Which, if I understand correctly, is the whole point of the demonstration. You'll lose weight on a calorie restricted diet almost no matter what you eat. So long as people understand that weight loss should not be the sole measure of health, I don't see what the problem is.
> You'll lose weight on a calorie restricted diet almost no matter what you eat.
The problem is, a calorie restricted diet alone isn't always sustainable. Eg if you're eating crap, but so little that you don't gain weight, it's still going to mess you up (lethargy, irritability, lack of focus).
I also see a lot of people insane amount of salad or organic whatever because they think it will help them lose weight. God forbid if you eat junk food in front of them. You will hear everything wrong about processed junk food.
Nothing falsified about his data - just pointing out how its part of a larger campaign by companies like Coke to try and make sugar seem harmless, and lack of exercise the real enemy.
I mean, I could have a diet of pure whiskey for a month and lose weight. Weight loss on its own isn't healthy, especially if its only temporary.
> Because it still sounds like he only ate twinkies and lost weight.
The problem is that nobody can seriously eat only twinkies at a caloric deficit indefinitely. He was getting his caloric needs from sugar, and he was avoiding weight gain by undereating. If he kept it up for say, a year, he would have experienced all sorts of nasty symptoms– irritability, etc.
I'd liken it to staying awake for 3 days. Sure, you can do it, but it's not sustainable.
Even if I didn't know about the Coke association, the problem I would have with a 10 week study is that it's a 10 week study. It's not evidence of sustainability.
10 weeks of changing your diet in general will probably lead to weight loss as long as you're not increasing your total calories, but that doesn't mean that the diet is sustainable long-term. If you live on say, a few donuts a day, you'll lose weight, but it'll also give you terrible sugar crashes and you won't be able to focus. You'll be irritable. It will really suck, and you'll either end up eating more or seeing your quality of life suffer.
Calories in and out is the basic but bodies react to certain macronutrients differently in diabetes. Macronutrients belong in the conversation. Calories in/out may always work but might not be the most efficient.
Very often, broad calorie restriction leads to constant hunger and even malnutrition, and isn't sustainable over a lifetime. It makes a lot more sense usually to restrict sugary/refined carbs– soda, donuts, bread, buns, etc.
If you are smart about what you eat, you can run a large calorie deficit and still feel just fine. My typical day has me eating about 2400 calories and burning anywhere from 3400-3700, and I feel absolutely fine (even though I'm quite lean). I never get hunger-related cravings, when I go off my diet it's more about desire for variety.
My diet is primarily comprised of vegetables, beans, eggs and whey protein with a moderate amount of lean meat. I easily clear 225g/protein/day and ~120g/fiber/day, and I consume a lot of fermented vegetables (which definitely have a strong satiating effect).
The thermodynamic hypothesis is correct to the extent that the change in chemical energy potential retained in the body will be equal to energy absorbed from food minus energy expended by metabolism.
It tends to ignore the fact that energy expended by metabolism is a black-box function that takes energy absorbed from food as just one of its input parameters.
If you restrict calories below a threshold (that varies by individual), the body will flip genetic switches to enter famine survival mode. It will adjust metabolic functions to slow down weight loss by any means possible. When the restriction ends, some of those switches do not get toggled back to their previous state. So if you have ever tried a diet that included severe calorie restrictions or extended fasting, you may forevermore find it much easier to gain weight than lose it.
So if you want to go by the thermodynamic hypothesis, it is far safer for you in the long run to hold your diet constant and either increase exercise or thermogenesis (i.e. live through a winter at one of the poles).
Channel swimmers burn about 40 Mcal of energy. Marathon runners burn about 3 Mcal. But their bodies will prefer to use up all glycogen stores before digging in to body fat, and now some will eat glycogen gel during the event to avoid "hitting the wall" entirely. Fat-burning is maximized only after depleting glycogen, or when exercising below the aerobic threshold (and possibly also below the lactate threshold), between 60% and 70% of your maximum heart rate. Obviously, this would ordinarily set a hard limit on the number of kcal you can reasonably expend via exercise to lose body fat.
Thus, the uncanny effectiveness of ketogenic diets and "bonk training". Those practices intentionally deplete glycogen stores beforehand, so any exercise done in that state burns more body fat, regardless of your exercise intensity. Ordinarily, you could have 1500 kcal or more of glycogen stores. That's enough for 15 miles of running, or 2 hours of cycling. And that's a lot of exercise to do before you start to get more permanent fat-loss results.
It is much easier to eat just enough protein to serve the short-term needs of your body, eat the remaining caloric requirement to avoid switching to starvation mode as fat, and avoid all carbohydrates like the plague. Your body converts only as much protein as it needs into sugars, but not enough to replenish its glycogen, and switches to using fat as its primary energy supply, so any additional kcal you expend are coming directly from adipose reserves. (This sort of lifestyle may have unintended side effects.)
People don't want to just "lose weight". When they say that, they usually mean "lose fat". And that goal is a lot more complex than just kcal in minus kcal out.
We still don't fully understand how diet, exercise, metabolism, and appetite work together to produce visible effects on the body. But we do know that a single dietary strategy will not work for everybody, particularly the "just reduce calorie count" strategy.
That's a total misrepresentation of those advertisements.
The concept, which on its face is worthy of consideration, and is explained in the ads, is to consume a small amount of sugar an hour or so before your main meal to trick your body into feeling satiated before you reach for "those extra helpings at mealtime". Judging by the items they show being consumed, they're talking about ~100 calories.
And when they came out, I found them useful to put the calorie content of sugar into context, "18 calories per teaspoon". Given the insane anti-sugar propaganda of the time (and ever since), the ads provided some real value.
Now, I don't know if the theory is correct, it doesn't address my eating issues, but it's very much not "eat sugar as a pick-me-up".
The problem is that nutrition research is very fragmented, and most researchers study diseased states. Thus, you have people who study nutritional metabolism related to diebetes, heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, etc. Additionally, most of the researchers know a few metabolic pathways relevant to their research extremely well, but have very limited knowledge of the metabolic network as a whole.
It is unfortunate that very few researchers study nutrition as it relates to longevity or optimal human performance. There's very little money available for that type of work, and well-controlled nutrition studies on humans are expensive.
The role of liver function and glycogen should be included in this conversation.[1] There might be a lot more at work than just elevated blood sugar levels.
In most normal people, meaning without diabetes and other metabolism problems, the liver doesn't immediately convert sugar to fat. Rather extra sugar is converted to glycogen which can be easily accessed for energy. What happens when a runner carbo loads the night before a race? The pasta she eats is coveted to glycogen and stored in the liver not to fat.
However, when the liver storage of energy is full, it then converts the excess to fat. Think about this for a second. The glycemic index and load don't apply because most people convert excess blood sugar to a readily available energy stored in the liver as glycogen not fat.
The problem is that Americans culturally never deplete the storage of energy in the liver because of two reasons; first, Americans snack all the time and drink sugary drinks, and, second, which I don't understand, we have developed an idea that we should eat huge third meals at night.
A big dinner will completely replenish the energy stores in the liver leaving excess sugar that will be converted into fat during sleep. Perhaps, it is smarter to eat a decent breakfast that contains simple sugars which are absorbed faster into the blood stream, a big lunch which will provide energy for the rest of the day, and a small dinner to satiate hunger.
For a person who wakes up around 7am the fast should begin around 5pm in order to let the sugars deplete around bed time. There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping. And then in the morning break the fast.
There is no reason to have big dinners which are ridiculous.
> ... the fast should begin around 5pm ... there is no reason to have big dinners which are ridiculous
Actually there is a very big reason for why your advice is harmful, for me at least, but I suspect that for others as well. At 5pm I'm still at work, which means that whatever meal I'll have will be fast food and not a home cooked meal.
But even more problematic is that dinner is also the perfect opportunity to sit together with your family, as in that moment during the day that can be shared without feeling rushed and if you want to sit together with your wife and kids, anything less than 8pm is not doable, as afternoons are usually unpredictable, as for example that's also the time of day when people go shopping or solve other chores.
The family dinner is a matter of cultural inheritance that we've been forgetting and I'm willing to bet that this trait of modern life is much more harmful than fats, carbohydrates or whatever identified nutritional element is the enemy du-jour.
The American overweight problem is cultural and not an issue with eating high or low glycemic foods like the article states. If losing weight is an issue for someone. They are better off having a larger second meal and a smaller third meal even if that third meal is at 9 or 10pm so they can enjoy it with family or after work. The idea is not to have more blood sugar than then the liver can store as glycogen at bed time.
Everyone is different. If someone is really thin they probably should eat a massive third meal because the body does need stored body fat too.
Do you have any specific questions? I don't feel like a source is necessary here because this is generally accepted as fact and has been reproduced countless times. There is no science showing caloric timing being significant (physically) in terms of weight management. Mentally (as your sibling comment points out) sure, but physically absolutely not. You don't get fat from eating late, you get fat from eating an extra meal late.
The specific question I have is regarding what the liver does if very large meals are eaten within a short window (hence the relevancy of caloric/meal timing). Can't the liver only hold a certain amount of glycogen before having to transport the excess matter to the fat cells?
Sure, but since you've packed such a large percentage of your calories into this one meal, what happens to that fat at the later time when you would otherwise be eating again?
It shouldn't really make any difference. The point is fat is an energy store and your body is pretty good at storing excess calories and then using them again when needed.
Things do get a little more interesting, and the science becomes a little weaker, when you start thinking about nutritional timing in the context of body composition instead of overall weight. For instance, muscle protein synthesis remains pretty constant in someone with protein at most meals. But you are able to "spike" it about once every 3 hours (the mechanism seems to have a threshold around 8g of leucine, after which it can't be spiked again for another 3 hours).
So in theory the optimal way to eat the same number of calories, all else being equal, is evenly divided into a meal every three hours you are awake.
But it's a micro-optimization and doesn't make a huge difference, and again the science isn't super well reproduced there. People certainly succeed at elite levels with many different meal timings.
You are correct. Normal people should eat low glycemic foods also, true. But, not for the same reason that diabetic people have to. A diabetic person can't handle spikes in blood sugar, while a normal person can without consequence.
What is interesting is the mechanism that causes low glycemic food to digest slower. It's the fiber! Processed Uncle Ben's has .6 grams of dietary fiber per serving while brown rice has 3.5 grams per serving. For the same reason brown rice takes much, much longer to cook breaking down the cellulose to make it palatable, brown rice takes much, much longer to have it's energy absorbed into the blood stream, the fiber.
When a person eats low glycemic therefore high fiber foods, they are getting the same amount of satiation per same quantity of food, but that fiber is passing through without being absorbed. So, people eating low glycemic foods are consuming less calories for the same level of satiation. That is the 10,000 ft view but it more complicated than that because different foods have different levels of satiation based on many things that are more than just physiological but also psychological.
The article says that high blood sugar levels lead to weight gain which isn't entirely true in most people. High blood sugar levels while the liver has stored as much energy as it can in the sugar analogue glycogen leads weight gain and eating low or high glycemic foods doesn't matter.
Perhaps the strategy should be to eat when hungry and abstain when not hungry. (Americans tend to be good at the former but not the latter.) A one-size-fits-all approach to meal timing is not practical or effective.
> There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping
Night time is when humans are most hormonally active, and going to bed with an energy surplus will help engender a more anabolic state.
> leaving excess sugar that will be converted into fat
De-novo lipogenisis from sugar in practice does not happen humans. If you do something goofy like keep dietary fat under 5 grams and eat hundreds of grams of carbohydrate some monounsaturated fats can be synthesized, but it's fair to say that it basically doesn't happen.
Any fat on your body came directly from fats you ate. Sugar and carbohydrate only matter with regard to weight loss to the extent they displace fat metabolism.
And even if it did, it's good to keep in mind all the energy that is lost converting sugars into fat during DNL, which isn't exactly the most efficient process.
In terms of fattening macro-nutrients, the rank would be fat > sugars > protein.
People keep ignoring this simple fact (that fat is already fat after all), yet argue endlessly about physiological stuff and ancestor mumbo jumbo.
Quality sleep is a good enough reason for me to have available sugars while sleeping.
I rest my best after a nice dinner, whereas skipping it means that I'll take longer to fall sleep and more often than not end up waking up way earlier than I should.
Speaking about drinks (not just sugary) with the food - I was taught as a child not to do that and chew my food instead of washing it down with a drink. I imagine you can eat much more this way but, otherwise, this seems to be a harmful habit to me.
> For a person who wakes up around 7am the fast should begin around 5pm in order to let the sugars deplete around bed time. There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping. And then in the morning break the fast.
I can only speak from my own experience– but I'm a tall, skinny guy and if I don't eat for longer than a couple of hours, I start getting low blood sugar symptoms. My heart starts racing and I have trouble focusing or sleeping.
I did some reading about it, and I can't remember the exact science, but I think I read that if your blood sugar levels are too low, your brain worries that you'll go into a coma and it'll try to keep you awake.
Now that I wrote that down, it sounds a little pseudosciency, but that's consistent with my experience. Would love to hear from anybody who has a better understanding.
You've brought up good points about carbs. However, It's arguably better and more realistic to skip breakfast than to have a small dinner at 5pm. Typical breakfast foods are full of carbs and can be more easily avoided. This is how I and many others use Intermittent Fasting to avoid carb overload.
This seems like a huge premature optimisation. Reduced-calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients they emphasise [1]. For someone who wants to lose weight or maintain their current weight, eating a calorie controlled diet is the first (and often only) thing they need to do.
Eating a calorie-controlled diet is primarily a psychological challenge. They should therefore eat with whatever frequency and quantity they personally find makes sticking to a calorie-controlled diet easiest, whether that's eating 2 meals a day at 07:00 and 13:00, or eating 5 meals a day, or eating 1 meal a day at 21:00, or whatever works for them.
When talking about a diet you want to break it down into several dimensions.
1) Does this diet lead to weight loss? This boils down to burning more calories then consumed. As mentioned in a different comment you can lose weight eating only twinkies.
2) Sustainability of diet - can the diet be maintained over the long term, and this plays in to the psychological challenge you mentioned.
3) Long term health effects - does the diet promote overall long term health or have potential negative consequences. Something like the twinkie diet most likely does not. i.e. does a twinkie have enough vitamin c to prevent scurvy
4) Interactions with personal health conditions - how does the diet affect your own current health condition. I am sure a diabetic would not fare well on the twinkie diet
> For a person who wakes up around 7am the fast should begin around 5pm in order to let the sugars deplete around bed time. There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping.
This is not convincing. According to [1] it seems like system glucose utilization is only about 10-20% lower during sleep.
Muscles store even more glycogen than the liver btw (~500g vs ~100g).
I am particularly excited for the rise of easier genome sequencing and the role that will play in nutritional advice for individuals. The more we learn about genes and how people react differently to different foods the more intrigued I am by the idea of an "optimal" diet only being achieved on a person-by-person level.
"The more we learn about genes and how people react differently to different foods the more intrigued I am by the idea of an "optimal" diet only being achieved on a person-by-person level."
For me, it's implicit that optimizing diet can only be done on an individual basis. It's pretty obvious, at least to me, that taking maternal twins and having one be active while the other remains inactive for most of their lives leads to the need for different diets between the two.
Ok I was going to say something about genetic clustering and how there're probably just a few diets needed to cover most people. Then, behavior. Right, it also depends on where you are in your life (age, exercise, previous diet, health issues). It's fair to say an optimal diet is an individual thing.
I would say that's maybe 1/3 of what we need to know to accomplish your objective.
The other thirds are the 100 trillion microbes that make up your microbiome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbiota), and the fact that we still don't know hardly anything about the relationship of various foods and how we eat them to health. Especially since different genomes and microbiomes make this particularly difficult for quality research.
The problem with this is that the majority of your response to a given diet is actually a result of your gut microbial ecosystem. Not only does that mean an order of magnitude more genes are in play, but the microbial ecosystem is dynamic, and adapts to changes in diet, stress levels and a variety of other factors.
> It’s really important to distinguish between healthy fats and bad fats, healthy carbs and bad carbs
What a bunch of crap. They said the same thing about cholesterol after fucking up monumentally and the history repeats itself over and over again. Just man up, recognize how incompetent you are, how your non-scientific advice has been hurting people over the past 50 years and switch jobs because the science you're practicing is nothing more than a cult.
> He explained that saturated fat, found in fatty animal foods like meats and dairy products, raises blood levels of cholesterol and is not healthy
There is zero evidence that saturated fats are unhealthy. Fats don't make you sick. Neither do carbohydrates. Humans have been eating fats and carbohydrates ever since the dawn of men. It's part of our identity as omnivores.
What actually changed is making food an industrial process whose output is processed/synthetic food, which is much more profitable, while riding the waves of crap coming from nutritionists, coinciding perfectly with the obesity and diabetes epidemic. Low-fat milk for example is still on sale with health claims, even though it's a well known fact that it's much more unhealthy than normal milk.
I can't find a link for that now, especially since most sources on the internet claim otherwise. But I do recall reading something like that.
The gist of it was, that there is no observable correlation between the intake of saturated fats consumed, and heart disease. There is however correlation between consumption of meat products and heart disease. A point was made specifically that balancing the diet with vegetables specifically counteracts these negative effects.
I'd say that when it comes to nutrition, the burden of proof is on anyone making a claim. I think it's a good thing to require proof from anyone trying to tell you that eating or not eating something will be beneficial.
My problem with things being "good" or "bad" is that it's divorced of context. Carbs are not good or bad, but they are certainly bad in certain contexts and good in certain contexts. Different diets can be effective for different things. Some people are actually trying to gain weight, some people only need to change body composition, some people tolerate high fat well, some people don't etc.
So I agree with you, and my point is not to say that carbs are good for you or bad for you, but that anyone saying a major macronutrient group is good or bad without context has a large burden of proof.
This book is kind of a joke among people who are seriously interested in nutrition. There is some decent information in there, and the research Taubes is doing now actually seems like it might be pretty good, but the book has some really bad conclusions that are not supported by science. It's a good intro book, but take it with a big grain of salt.
It really depends on your goals and what you are looking to learn. It sounds like maybe you are trying to put on weight, in which case I can't recommend whole milk enough :) But if you want to be more specific about what you'd like to learn I can recommend some resources.
Gaining weight is a part of it, but I'm also curious about understanding things like, the relationship between low blood sugar and brain function, low blood sugar and sleep, stuff like that. Will be happy with anything you can point me to, thanks so much!
Sorry I took so long to get back to you. The stuff you are talking about is very complicated, and short of recommending you go read a bunch of textbooks front to back, I'd suggest just starting with some basic nutrition to get a foundation there, before getting into stuff like blood sugar + brain function.
This article will give you a good primer on nutrition with a focus on gaining weight:
If you have any other specific question I'd be happy to chat through them but HN is probably not the best venue. My contact info is in my profile, I love talking about this stuff so feel free to reach out.
> What actually changed is making food an industrial process whose output is processed/synthetic food
I wanted to include another note about the glycemic index. Processed white rice has .6 grams of dietary fiber while unprocessed brown rice has 3.5 grams of dietary fiber per serving. Often the glycemic index is a function of fiber because the fiber slows down absorption of sugar so it happens slower over a longer period of time; white rice has a glycemic index of 50 and brown rice has lower index of 38.
High fiber foods are more satiating per calorie because of the fiber. It's possible that low glycemic foods which are unprocessed lead to weight loss because of they are higher in fiber which just passes through the digestive system but feel just a filling. But I still disagree with the article that blood sugar spikes lead to weight gain in most normal people because the liver can absorb the sugar and release it later without converting it to fat.
Your comment prompted me to look up the GIs for brown and white rice. I checked several sources. Unfortunately GI numbers vary significantly depending on brand and preparation (and perhaps source).
The nominal GI of white rice is 73. But various brands and preparations can cause the GI of NS white rice to vary from 43 to 90. Long grain varies from 50 to 76. Uncle Ben's in a pouch runs around 48.
The nominal GI of brown rice is 68. But again, brand and preparation introcuces much variance, from 50 to 87.
The nominal GI of converted boiled white rice trends lower at 38 (Uncle Ben's) but can run as high as 87.
So what specifically is it about processed and synthetic food that makes them unhealthy, because saying 'processed' alone doesn't give an indication of a fundamental problem.
It's basically the lack of fiber, but it can also be the lack of micronutrients. That being said, you can absolutely have a healthy diet that has a fair amount of processed food in it.
> Low-fat milk for example is still on sale with health claims, even though it's a well known fact that it's much more unhealthy than normal milk.
I take issue with this claim. Neither is more healthy than the other. Whole milk has a lower glycemic index, and a higher ratio of fat to carbs/protein. But that's not always desirable. For instance, a higher glycemic index is more effective for building muscle (but also fat). So it's really a situation of matching behavior to goals.
There is a ton of evidence demonstrating the pro-inflammatory and obesegenic properties of saturated fat.
People want to vilify processed foods, but processing isn't inherently bad. Aspirin is basically processed willow bark, and it is more effective, precise and pleasant to consume. Granted, most processed foods haven't been designed with optimal nutrition as a goal, but the potential is there. We shouldn't be anti-processed foods, we should just demand that food manufacturers design "functional foods", rather than just try to create the cheapest, most addictive food possible.
As for the skim vs whole milk debate, a couple points - for starters milk fat is quite poor from a health standpoint, being high in palmitate. Additionally, the single biggest problem most people have is consuming too many calories, so why would you hold up the higher calorie option? It isn't like there are a ton of fat soluble vitamins in milk that you lose switching to a reduced fat option, it's just empty calories.
> There is a ton of evidence demonstrating the pro-inflammatory and obesegenic properties of saturated fat.
Yet most of those studies have been shown to be flawed and are contradicted by newer studies. The world's health organizations have been back-paddling on this, because wouldn't you know, the trans-fats that we ended up eating on our quest for low-fat are the fats that are actually linked to cancer or cardiovascular disease.
> People want to vilify processed foods, but processing isn't inherently bad. Aspirin is basically processed willow bark
Aspirin is not food. Name a processed food that proved to be healthy.
And it is true that we as humans have always modified our environment and selected for the traits we wanted in our domesticated crops and animals. We also adapted to new foods, like cow milk. But this process has lasted for tens of thousands of years at least, whereas current "innovations" are newer than 30 years without us knowing enough about food and nutrition to make health claims. One day humanity might get used to the current blend of processed foods based primarily on corn, soy and fossil fuels, but I for one refuse to be the sacrice generation ;-)
> milk fat is quite poor from a health standpoint, being high in palmitate
Milk is a very complex substance and this reductionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism) doesn't apply well to food. Here's one study that claims that people consuming high-fat milk are not more prone to cardiovascular diseases and even more so people consuming high-fat milk are less likely to get fat from it, versus people consuming low-fat milk: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00394-012-0418-1
> the single biggest problem most people have is consuming too many calories
Yet those extra calories are not coming from high-fat milk, but from the cheap high-fructose corn syrup that has been flooding the market for tens of years due to subsidies, most of it ending up in the processed food we consume, including low-fat milk, because in case you don't know, in the process of stripping the fat from milk and of ultra-pasteurizing it, the milk loses its texture and taste, plus it has to travel a lot, so it has to be supplemented with things such as powder milk, artificial colourants and preservatives (based on petroleum) and HFCS.
> It isn't like there are a ton of fat soluble vitamins in milk that you lose switching to a reduced fat option, it's just empty calories.
Not all calories are created equal and milk is rich in essential nutrients that we need, like calcium, vitamin A and D, phosphorous or B vitamins amongst others. Even its fatty acids are essential for us. And there are recent studies showing that the fat in milk helps our body absorb it better, yet we are stripping it out, then enhancing its taste in a process meant to fool our senses. You think it's just the fat that goes, but that's not true.
No, the research demonstrating saturated fat's pro-inflammatory and obesegenic properties isn't being refuted, if anything the pace of publications (particularly on the pro-inflammatory aspect) has increased.
Want healthy processed food ingredients? Try whey protein, oat fiber, coconut flour (it isn't just ground coconut), resistant corn starch, fish oil (purified to remove heavy metals and the like) or medium chain triglycerides. All of these are better for you than the whole foods they're derived from.
You realize with the epidemiology studies you linked me that the answer is almost certainly not some "magic substance" present in milk fat, but a confounding factor that correlates with consumption of whole fat dairy? I've seen epidemiology studies showing butter intake is the single best predictor of adiposity among a wide variety of measured variables; shouldn't the "magic of milk-fat" result in butter-consumers being leaner?
Basically all the vitamins and minerals present in whole fat milk are also present in skim milk. As for the fatty acids in milk being essential, there are two essential fatty acids: linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid. Linoleic acid makes up about 3% of the fatty acid composition of milk fat, while alpha-linolenic acid is only at about 1%; not exactly a great source.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "enhancing its taste in a process meant to fool our senses", the skim milk I buy has 2 ingredients: milk and vitamin d.
Every article on fats vs. carbs dilemma stresses out weight management issue, none of them mention any other effects, but weight.
As a skinny guy, what are the dangers of say french fries, honey, and fast food? What about when coupled with active life style and moderate exercise?
Fellow skinny guy here who's working my way out of it. I don't know if you relate to this, but when I used to eat french fries and fast food, I would have bouts of lethargy and mental dullness. I just sort of thought that's how life is. When I started eating healthier, I enjoy much better mental clarity. It's a world of difference, and it gives me 2-5x more quality time to do my best work.
As with everything, it depends largely on your genetics and natural inclination to becoming insulin resistant. Insulin resistance (IR) can occur in normal-BMI individuals. This is typically accompanied (caused?) by a large amount of visceral fat (internal, around your organs), which isn't what we typically see when we look at an overweight individual. IR is really just the first step to full type 2 diabetes.
Exercise and youth can negate much of a bad diet, but it will likely catch up to you eventually. Better markers than your weight might be HDL (should be high), triglyceride levels (should be low), and fasting blood sugar. If those are optimal, you're probably doing fine, but there isn't really a case to be made that you should continue to eat poor food choices if you can avoid it.
Having reached limits my body starts to reject anything fatty, salty, sweet ... basically most processed food. I thus was forced to eat raw vegies, raw, no sauce, not cooked, nothing, and it was a revelation. They're full of subtle taste, texture that tickle your senses just enough and will make you feel full very very quick, without any strings attached [1]. I miss the sophistication of traditional meals (spices, sauces) though, and am seeking for an in between solution.
[1] junk food satisfies you 10x more but leaves after taste, or sugar heavy, fat heavy feel in you.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadOr do I have to bring up the people who have lived on nothing but twinkies or McD for a month and stil lost weight?
My issue is keeping the weight down. I've been in Dublin for three months and lost about 10 kgs (nasty commute, stressful job and so on). I've been back for two weeks and gained back two kgs. Wife's a great cook :)
I think you've succinctly expressed one of the core issues that we have as individuals and as a society: we love tasty food more than we love healthy food. We generally consider meals that derive flavor from fats and sugars as great/tasty/enjoyable while we relegate more healthy options as that which we only eat to either make up for or "save calories for" the meals that we really enjoy.
It not only helps in counting calories it also gives daily articles and a set of TO-DOs. I was 275 lbs around 2.5 months ago but since then have lost 22 lbs.
Regarding 'keeping the weight down', I learned from this app itself why it is difficult:
1. Not eating anything for a week is not only a bad strategy to lose weight it is actually a good strategy to gain weight afterwards. In my own experience whenever I tried to lose weight by eating less I lost a lot of weight but gained more than what I lost afterwards. You cannot stay hungry forever and if you lose more than 2 lbs per week your body goes into starvation mode, burning any stored energy rapidly, and rapidly storing anything you eat afterwards as fat just in case you don't get food again. Body is more intelligent than we think. 2. Once a fat cell is born it craves fat and that makes you hungry. Rapidly losing weight by staying hungry will only remove fat from fat cells but won't kill them. Weight loss must be sustained for longer time to have any permanent effect. 3. I have replaced white rice with brown rice, white bread with whole grain wheat bread and started eating sprouts and corn, oranges, guava etc. other fruits. Sprouts are killer deal man - you eat 200g of it you will hardly feel hungry for hours. 4. You need to do some physical exercise everyday - not intense, just walking is okay. But you have to be consistent so your body learns how much energy you are going to lose anyway and doesn't store much fat.
I have yet to start heavy exercises but I like the effect on my body :)
But how much you are able to stuff yourself with isn't the full story without knowing how long it takes you to get hungry again.
How much?
> But how much you are able to stuff yourself with isn't the full story without knowing how long it takes you to get hungry again.
Certainly less than 2 days.
WHAT?! Please make a YouTube video. I will show all my friends and family. The amazing Peanut Butter Eating Hero.
I used to weigh about 100 kilo's, until I changed my diet to LCHF, now I'm about 70. A few months ago, as a test, I switched to Soylent for 2 months, and gained almost 10 kilo's.
I just think a high carb diet is not something that is compatible with an office job.
Define "reasonably" and "restricted". Otherwise, you might as well say "If everyone just did the right thing, everything would be as it should!" which has no actionable component.
>>"people who have lived on nothing but twinkies or McD for a month and stil lost weight?"
....but suffered dozens of other health problems that'll lead to an early grave.
"Super size me" -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/
http://www.sott.net/article/126285-Supersize-me-revisited-un...
http://www.cracked.com/article_20585_6-famous-documentaries-...
Moral: popular media is a horrible source of scientific knowledge
Fats, proteins, etc. are all important. Within eating a reasonable number of calories, make sure that the portion of calories from each source is appropriate. If you focus solely on calories, you will lose weight but you will also lose other aspects of your health.
http://observer.com/2015/10/here-are-the-people-coca-cola-ha...
And? Did he did he supplement the diet by eating Coca-Cola's money as a source of fiber? Because it still sounds like he only ate twinkies and lost weight.
Or are you suggesting that his data was falsified?
But hey, maybe 20 different scientists ran the same experiment and only the one time when it was successful got published. No way to know for sure.
Eating only one type of food for weeks will almost always result in losing weight, because it would disrupt the gut flora, as well as deprive one of necessary vitamins/minerals.
Anecdotal evidence if fine for discussion, but no one should act upon it without medical supervision.
Better demonstrations would be: * Compare people eating the same number of calories below requirements, but one on the twinkie diet and one on a healthy diet to see comparative changes in markers * Perform the same experiment as before, but this time with both groups eating the same number of calories above maintenance.
A twinkie has 135 calories (or 270 for a pair). It isn't a hard thing to fit into your diet if you aren't constantly snacking on things.
On the other hand, if you're riding the razor's edge and trying to do something crazy like get into lower single digit bodyfat while gaining muscle and strength, even a little junk food can make a noticeable difference. I recognize that isn't the typical case though.
Which, if I understand correctly, is the whole point of the demonstration. You'll lose weight on a calorie restricted diet almost no matter what you eat. So long as people understand that weight loss should not be the sole measure of health, I don't see what the problem is.
The problem is, a calorie restricted diet alone isn't always sustainable. Eg if you're eating crap, but so little that you don't gain weight, it's still going to mess you up (lethargy, irritability, lack of focus).
I mean, I could have a diet of pure whiskey for a month and lose weight. Weight loss on its own isn't healthy, especially if its only temporary.
The problem is that nobody can seriously eat only twinkies at a caloric deficit indefinitely. He was getting his caloric needs from sugar, and he was avoiding weight gain by undereating. If he kept it up for say, a year, he would have experienced all sorts of nasty symptoms– irritability, etc.
I'd liken it to staying awake for 3 days. Sure, you can do it, but it's not sustainable.
10 weeks of changing your diet in general will probably lead to weight loss as long as you're not increasing your total calories, but that doesn't mean that the diet is sustainable long-term. If you live on say, a few donuts a day, you'll lose weight, but it'll also give you terrible sugar crashes and you won't be able to focus. You'll be irritable. It will really suck, and you'll either end up eating more or seeing your quality of life suffer.
My diet is primarily comprised of vegetables, beans, eggs and whey protein with a moderate amount of lean meat. I easily clear 225g/protein/day and ~120g/fiber/day, and I consume a lot of fermented vegetables (which definitely have a strong satiating effect).
It tends to ignore the fact that energy expended by metabolism is a black-box function that takes energy absorbed from food as just one of its input parameters.
If you restrict calories below a threshold (that varies by individual), the body will flip genetic switches to enter famine survival mode. It will adjust metabolic functions to slow down weight loss by any means possible. When the restriction ends, some of those switches do not get toggled back to their previous state. So if you have ever tried a diet that included severe calorie restrictions or extended fasting, you may forevermore find it much easier to gain weight than lose it.
So if you want to go by the thermodynamic hypothesis, it is far safer for you in the long run to hold your diet constant and either increase exercise or thermogenesis (i.e. live through a winter at one of the poles).
Channel swimmers burn about 40 Mcal of energy. Marathon runners burn about 3 Mcal. But their bodies will prefer to use up all glycogen stores before digging in to body fat, and now some will eat glycogen gel during the event to avoid "hitting the wall" entirely. Fat-burning is maximized only after depleting glycogen, or when exercising below the aerobic threshold (and possibly also below the lactate threshold), between 60% and 70% of your maximum heart rate. Obviously, this would ordinarily set a hard limit on the number of kcal you can reasonably expend via exercise to lose body fat.
Thus, the uncanny effectiveness of ketogenic diets and "bonk training". Those practices intentionally deplete glycogen stores beforehand, so any exercise done in that state burns more body fat, regardless of your exercise intensity. Ordinarily, you could have 1500 kcal or more of glycogen stores. That's enough for 15 miles of running, or 2 hours of cycling. And that's a lot of exercise to do before you start to get more permanent fat-loss results.
It is much easier to eat just enough protein to serve the short-term needs of your body, eat the remaining caloric requirement to avoid switching to starvation mode as fat, and avoid all carbohydrates like the plague. Your body converts only as much protein as it needs into sugars, but not enough to replenish its glycogen, and switches to using fat as its primary energy supply, so any additional kcal you expend are coming directly from adipose reserves. (This sort of lifestyle may have unintended side effects.)
People don't want to just "lose weight". When they say that, they usually mean "lose fat". And that goal is a lot more complex than just kcal in minus kcal out.
We still don't fully understand how diet, exercise, metabolism, and appetite work together to produce visible effects on the body. But we do know that a single dietary strategy will not work for everybody, particularly the "just reduce calorie count" strategy.
It seems the best default is to try to simulate what we've been eating for a past 50000 years and modify accordingly.
When I first tried slow carb diet I lost 5kg in 3 weeks and my general well being improved. I tried it again, but the effect wasn't that strong.
The concept, which on its face is worthy of consideration, and is explained in the ads, is to consume a small amount of sugar an hour or so before your main meal to trick your body into feeling satiated before you reach for "those extra helpings at mealtime". Judging by the items they show being consumed, they're talking about ~100 calories.
And when they came out, I found them useful to put the calorie content of sugar into context, "18 calories per teaspoon". Given the insane anti-sugar propaganda of the time (and ever since), the ads provided some real value.
Now, I don't know if the theory is correct, it doesn't address my eating issues, but it's very much not "eat sugar as a pick-me-up".
It is unfortunate that very few researchers study nutrition as it relates to longevity or optimal human performance. There's very little money available for that type of work, and well-controlled nutrition studies on humans are expensive.
In most normal people, meaning without diabetes and other metabolism problems, the liver doesn't immediately convert sugar to fat. Rather extra sugar is converted to glycogen which can be easily accessed for energy. What happens when a runner carbo loads the night before a race? The pasta she eats is coveted to glycogen and stored in the liver not to fat.
However, when the liver storage of energy is full, it then converts the excess to fat. Think about this for a second. The glycemic index and load don't apply because most people convert excess blood sugar to a readily available energy stored in the liver as glycogen not fat.
The problem is that Americans culturally never deplete the storage of energy in the liver because of two reasons; first, Americans snack all the time and drink sugary drinks, and, second, which I don't understand, we have developed an idea that we should eat huge third meals at night.
A big dinner will completely replenish the energy stores in the liver leaving excess sugar that will be converted into fat during sleep. Perhaps, it is smarter to eat a decent breakfast that contains simple sugars which are absorbed faster into the blood stream, a big lunch which will provide energy for the rest of the day, and a small dinner to satiate hunger.
For a person who wakes up around 7am the fast should begin around 5pm in order to let the sugars deplete around bed time. There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping. And then in the morning break the fast.
There is no reason to have big dinners which are ridiculous.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycogen
.. which requires that lunch be the main meal, which could be difficult in countries where eating at your desk is normalised.
Actually there is a very big reason for why your advice is harmful, for me at least, but I suspect that for others as well. At 5pm I'm still at work, which means that whatever meal I'll have will be fast food and not a home cooked meal.
But even more problematic is that dinner is also the perfect opportunity to sit together with your family, as in that moment during the day that can be shared without feeling rushed and if you want to sit together with your wife and kids, anything less than 8pm is not doable, as afternoons are usually unpredictable, as for example that's also the time of day when people go shopping or solve other chores.
The family dinner is a matter of cultural inheritance that we've been forgetting and I'm willing to bet that this trait of modern life is much more harmful than fats, carbohydrates or whatever identified nutritional element is the enemy du-jour.
Everyone is different. If someone is really thin they probably should eat a massive third meal because the body does need stored body fat too.
Things do get a little more interesting, and the science becomes a little weaker, when you start thinking about nutritional timing in the context of body composition instead of overall weight. For instance, muscle protein synthesis remains pretty constant in someone with protein at most meals. But you are able to "spike" it about once every 3 hours (the mechanism seems to have a threshold around 8g of leucine, after which it can't be spiked again for another 3 hours).
So in theory the optimal way to eat the same number of calories, all else being equal, is evenly divided into a meal every three hours you are awake.
But it's a micro-optimization and doesn't make a huge difference, and again the science isn't super well reproduced there. People certainly succeed at elite levels with many different meal timings.
Why not both?
What is interesting is the mechanism that causes low glycemic food to digest slower. It's the fiber! Processed Uncle Ben's has .6 grams of dietary fiber per serving while brown rice has 3.5 grams per serving. For the same reason brown rice takes much, much longer to cook breaking down the cellulose to make it palatable, brown rice takes much, much longer to have it's energy absorbed into the blood stream, the fiber.
When a person eats low glycemic therefore high fiber foods, they are getting the same amount of satiation per same quantity of food, but that fiber is passing through without being absorbed. So, people eating low glycemic foods are consuming less calories for the same level of satiation. That is the 10,000 ft view but it more complicated than that because different foods have different levels of satiation based on many things that are more than just physiological but also psychological.
The article says that high blood sugar levels lead to weight gain which isn't entirely true in most people. High blood sugar levels while the liver has stored as much energy as it can in the sugar analogue glycogen leads weight gain and eating low or high glycemic foods doesn't matter.
You can also take a "home cooked meal" with you to work - for lunch purposes.
> But even more problematic is that dinner is also the perfect opportunity to sit together with your family
It is an opportunity - why do you think it is the _perfect_ opportunity?
> The family dinner is a matter of cultural inheritance that we've been forgetting and ...
There are many ways to share time together - it's not necessary to eat while doing so.
> There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping
Night time is when humans are most hormonally active, and going to bed with an energy surplus will help engender a more anabolic state.
De-novo lipogenisis from sugar in practice does not happen humans. If you do something goofy like keep dietary fat under 5 grams and eat hundreds of grams of carbohydrate some monounsaturated fats can be synthesized, but it's fair to say that it basically doesn't happen.
Any fat on your body came directly from fats you ate. Sugar and carbohydrate only matter with regard to weight loss to the extent they displace fat metabolism.
In terms of fattening macro-nutrients, the rank would be fat > sugars > protein.
People keep ignoring this simple fact (that fat is already fat after all), yet argue endlessly about physiological stuff and ancestor mumbo jumbo.
I rest my best after a nice dinner, whereas skipping it means that I'll take longer to fall sleep and more often than not end up waking up way earlier than I should.
I can only speak from my own experience– but I'm a tall, skinny guy and if I don't eat for longer than a couple of hours, I start getting low blood sugar symptoms. My heart starts racing and I have trouble focusing or sleeping.
I did some reading about it, and I can't remember the exact science, but I think I read that if your blood sugar levels are too low, your brain worries that you'll go into a coma and it'll try to keep you awake.
Now that I wrote that down, it sounds a little pseudosciency, but that's consistent with my experience. Would love to hear from anybody who has a better understanding.
Eating a calorie-controlled diet is primarily a psychological challenge. They should therefore eat with whatever frequency and quantity they personally find makes sticking to a calorie-controlled diet easiest, whether that's eating 2 meals a day at 07:00 and 13:00, or eating 5 meals a day, or eating 1 meal a day at 21:00, or whatever works for them.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246357
This is not convincing. According to [1] it seems like system glucose utilization is only about 10-20% lower during sleep.
Muscles store even more glycogen than the liver btw (~500g vs ~100g).
1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC293874/
For me, it's implicit that optimizing diet can only be done on an individual basis. It's pretty obvious, at least to me, that taking maternal twins and having one be active while the other remains inactive for most of their lives leads to the need for different diets between the two.
The other thirds are the 100 trillion microbes that make up your microbiome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbiota), and the fact that we still don't know hardly anything about the relationship of various foods and how we eat them to health. Especially since different genomes and microbiomes make this particularly difficult for quality research.
Tomorrow's blog headline: SCIENCE PROVES FRENCH FRIES ARE THE HEALTHIEST WAY TO EAT POTATOES
What a bunch of crap. They said the same thing about cholesterol after fucking up monumentally and the history repeats itself over and over again. Just man up, recognize how incompetent you are, how your non-scientific advice has been hurting people over the past 50 years and switch jobs because the science you're practicing is nothing more than a cult.
> He explained that saturated fat, found in fatty animal foods like meats and dairy products, raises blood levels of cholesterol and is not healthy
There is zero evidence that saturated fats are unhealthy. Fats don't make you sick. Neither do carbohydrates. Humans have been eating fats and carbohydrates ever since the dawn of men. It's part of our identity as omnivores.
What actually changed is making food an industrial process whose output is processed/synthetic food, which is much more profitable, while riding the waves of crap coming from nutritionists, coinciding perfectly with the obesity and diabetes epidemic. Low-fat milk for example is still on sale with health claims, even though it's a well known fact that it's much more unhealthy than normal milk.
The gist of it was, that there is no observable correlation between the intake of saturated fats consumed, and heart disease. There is however correlation between consumption of meat products and heart disease. A point was made specifically that balancing the diet with vegetables specifically counteracts these negative effects.
So I agree with you, and my point is not to say that carbs are good for you or bad for you, but that anyone saying a major macronutrient group is good or bad without context has a large burden of proof.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Fat-Surprise-Healthy/dp/145162...
This article will give you a good primer on nutrition with a focus on gaining weight:
http://www.barbellmedicine.com/potpourri/584/
If you have any other specific question I'd be happy to chat through them but HN is probably not the best venue. My contact info is in my profile, I love talking about this stuff so feel free to reach out.
I wanted to include another note about the glycemic index. Processed white rice has .6 grams of dietary fiber while unprocessed brown rice has 3.5 grams of dietary fiber per serving. Often the glycemic index is a function of fiber because the fiber slows down absorption of sugar so it happens slower over a longer period of time; white rice has a glycemic index of 50 and brown rice has lower index of 38.
High fiber foods are more satiating per calorie because of the fiber. It's possible that low glycemic foods which are unprocessed lead to weight loss because of they are higher in fiber which just passes through the digestive system but feel just a filling. But I still disagree with the article that blood sugar spikes lead to weight gain in most normal people because the liver can absorb the sugar and release it later without converting it to fat.
Here are some GI values for rice from the Mendosa GI list... http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm
The nominal GI of white rice is 73. But various brands and preparations can cause the GI of NS white rice to vary from 43 to 90. Long grain varies from 50 to 76. Uncle Ben's in a pouch runs around 48.
The nominal GI of brown rice is 68. But again, brand and preparation introcuces much variance, from 50 to 87.
The nominal GI of converted boiled white rice trends lower at 38 (Uncle Ben's) but can run as high as 87.
However from an authoritative article of 1000 foods in Diabetes Care from 2008, the GI of white rice is 89 and brown 50. http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-eating/glycemic_index_...
In the end, it seems you have to be very careful about exactly which products and preparations you're comparing.
Some would say it is the lack of fiber.
Edit: as a side note I love your username :)
I'm curious to hear a list of carbohydrates that humans have been eating since the dawn of men. Surely not glazed donuts. Did cavemen make bread?
Also, the first crops to be domesticated were grain crops.
Yes.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/humans-feas...
I take issue with this claim. Neither is more healthy than the other. Whole milk has a lower glycemic index, and a higher ratio of fat to carbs/protein. But that's not always desirable. For instance, a higher glycemic index is more effective for building muscle (but also fat). So it's really a situation of matching behavior to goals.
People want to vilify processed foods, but processing isn't inherently bad. Aspirin is basically processed willow bark, and it is more effective, precise and pleasant to consume. Granted, most processed foods haven't been designed with optimal nutrition as a goal, but the potential is there. We shouldn't be anti-processed foods, we should just demand that food manufacturers design "functional foods", rather than just try to create the cheapest, most addictive food possible.
As for the skim vs whole milk debate, a couple points - for starters milk fat is quite poor from a health standpoint, being high in palmitate. Additionally, the single biggest problem most people have is consuming too many calories, so why would you hold up the higher calorie option? It isn't like there are a ton of fat soluble vitamins in milk that you lose switching to a reduced fat option, it's just empty calories.
Yet most of those studies have been shown to be flawed and are contradicted by newer studies. The world's health organizations have been back-paddling on this, because wouldn't you know, the trans-fats that we ended up eating on our quest for low-fat are the fats that are actually linked to cancer or cardiovascular disease.
> People want to vilify processed foods, but processing isn't inherently bad. Aspirin is basically processed willow bark
Aspirin is not food. Name a processed food that proved to be healthy.
And it is true that we as humans have always modified our environment and selected for the traits we wanted in our domesticated crops and animals. We also adapted to new foods, like cow milk. But this process has lasted for tens of thousands of years at least, whereas current "innovations" are newer than 30 years without us knowing enough about food and nutrition to make health claims. One day humanity might get used to the current blend of processed foods based primarily on corn, soy and fossil fuels, but I for one refuse to be the sacrice generation ;-)
> milk fat is quite poor from a health standpoint, being high in palmitate
Milk is a very complex substance and this reductionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism) doesn't apply well to food. Here's one study that claims that people consuming high-fat milk are not more prone to cardiovascular diseases and even more so people consuming high-fat milk are less likely to get fat from it, versus people consuming low-fat milk: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00394-012-0418-1
Here's another study showing that people consuming full-fat diary have a 69% less risk of cardiovascular disease: http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v64/n6/abs/ejcn201045a.ht...
> the single biggest problem most people have is consuming too many calories
Yet those extra calories are not coming from high-fat milk, but from the cheap high-fructose corn syrup that has been flooding the market for tens of years due to subsidies, most of it ending up in the processed food we consume, including low-fat milk, because in case you don't know, in the process of stripping the fat from milk and of ultra-pasteurizing it, the milk loses its texture and taste, plus it has to travel a lot, so it has to be supplemented with things such as powder milk, artificial colourants and preservatives (based on petroleum) and HFCS.
> It isn't like there are a ton of fat soluble vitamins in milk that you lose switching to a reduced fat option, it's just empty calories.
Not all calories are created equal and milk is rich in essential nutrients that we need, like calcium, vitamin A and D, phosphorous or B vitamins amongst others. Even its fatty acids are essential for us. And there are recent studies showing that the fat in milk helps our body absorb it better, yet we are stripping it out, then enhancing its taste in a process meant to fool our senses. You think it's just the fat that goes, but that's not true.
Want healthy processed food ingredients? Try whey protein, oat fiber, coconut flour (it isn't just ground coconut), resistant corn starch, fish oil (purified to remove heavy metals and the like) or medium chain triglycerides. All of these are better for you than the whole foods they're derived from.
You realize with the epidemiology studies you linked me that the answer is almost certainly not some "magic substance" present in milk fat, but a confounding factor that correlates with consumption of whole fat dairy? I've seen epidemiology studies showing butter intake is the single best predictor of adiposity among a wide variety of measured variables; shouldn't the "magic of milk-fat" result in butter-consumers being leaner?
Basically all the vitamins and minerals present in whole fat milk are also present in skim milk. As for the fatty acids in milk being essential, there are two essential fatty acids: linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid. Linoleic acid makes up about 3% of the fatty acid composition of milk fat, while alpha-linolenic acid is only at about 1%; not exactly a great source.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "enhancing its taste in a process meant to fool our senses", the skim milk I buy has 2 ingredients: milk and vitamin d.
Exercise and youth can negate much of a bad diet, but it will likely catch up to you eventually. Better markers than your weight might be HDL (should be high), triglyceride levels (should be low), and fasting blood sugar. If those are optimal, you're probably doing fine, but there isn't really a case to be made that you should continue to eat poor food choices if you can avoid it.
[1] junk food satisfies you 10x more but leaves after taste, or sugar heavy, fat heavy feel in you.
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