Accidentally Burn Fat While Eating More Food

Carrie: This is Carrie Brown and Jonathan Bailor from the Smarter Science of Slim and today we’re going to talk to you about society…

Jonathan: Society! We’re not going to talk to you about society, folks, we’re going to talk to you about satiety.

Carrie: Satiety – that’s such a strange word!

Jonathan: Satiety is a strange word, and we’re going to finish up on satiety and we’re going to talk about the second factor that influences the quality of a calorie, which is aggression.

Carrie: All right.

Jonathan: And we don’t want to be aggressive, we want to be unaggressive. So, picking up where we left off last week, satiety is how quickly a calorie fills us up and how long it keeps us full, and we want to eat SANE, high-quality calories or satisfying calories, because by doing so we cause our body to trigger a fat-burning hormonal response, we lower our set point, and with satiety specifically we enable ourselves to take in more nutrition and to feel more satisfied while accidentally consuming fewer calories.

And we will, Carrie, be eating more food because as we talked about last week, satisfying foods are rich in water and fibre. Being rich in water and fibre makes these foods large, so when we eat more, smarter, the volume of food we will be eating is bigger. I mean, think about a big salad – salad takes up a huge amount of space compared to, like, a little squished-down, bread-heavy sandwich, right? So we’re going to be eating a higher volume of food, taking in more nutrition, feeling more satisfied, and accidentally consuming fewer calories, which is totally different from starving ourselves, both psychologically and metabolically.

Carrie: So you know, Jonathan, I’ve been doing this thing on Friday nights that I call the “Friday night dinner” where I have a couple of friends of mine who come over and I’ve been teaching them about SANE food, and every week I cook a SANE meal for them and they are amazed that they’re half-way through the main course and they’re already, like, “Please tell us there’s no dessert because we won’t be able to eat it”. And we’ve never had one week where they’ve been anything less than completely satisfied by the end of a one-course meal.

Jonathan: The easiest rule to apply when you go SANE is if you ever feel hungry, or if you ever feel like you’re leaving the table and you’re not satisfied, you are not going SANE. Remember, we’re in this for the long term and in the long term hunger and feeling deprived is not sustainable. So rule number one is “be satisfied”. Eat a lot of high satiety foods – water and fibre and protein determine the satiety of a food. We talked about water and fibre last week, let’s talk about protein this week, Carrie.

Carrie: All right – I love protein.

Jonathan: I love some protein and Dr Holton over at Harvard University loves protein as well, because he concluded at the end of a study that protein, like we said, along with water and fibre, were significantly and positively correlated with satiety scores. So this has been known for decades in research circles, that the amount of protein in food impacts the other two factors which influence whether our brain is telling us whether we’re hungry or full, and those are our short-term and our long-term satiety hormones. Remember from last week that whether or not we feel satisfied is a function of the volume of food in our digestive system as well as our short-term and long-term hormonal balance. Water and fibre have to do with that volume component, and protein in large part, and also to some extent fat, control the short-term and long-term hormonal balance. So more protein means more “full” signals being sent to our brain’s satiety centres via our hormones, and I like to say that more protein enables us to FULL ourselves into burning bunches of body fat! Instead of FOOL – geddit?

Carrie: You know, I think you should stick with the scientific stuff and let me do the jokes, okay?

Jonathan: All right, no that’s fair, that’s fair…

Carrie: But let me get this straight before we go on.

Jonathan: Get it straight, get it straight.

Carrie: So it’s the protein that does stuff to our hormones which send a signal saying we’re full, whereas the starchy vegetables and the water actually physically stretches our stomachs that tells us we’re full. Is that right?

Jonathan: That is exactly right – perfect, perfect.

Carrie: Okay, got it.

Jonathan: So, these scientific findings that Carrie just mentioned have been repeated in many, many clinical trials. Let’s do a quick sample of them here. Some of the most famous research was done right here locally (we’re here in Seattle). This was done at the University of Washington where individuals ate an unlimited quantity of calories while having the percentage of protein in their diet increased from 15% – which is what’s recommended by the Food Guide Pyramid, My Plate, and close the average consumption – increased from 15% to 30%. They responded by unconsciously, meaning they didn’t mean to do this, avoiding 441 calories per day without feeling hungry. So, just to rephrase, they said, “People in this study – eat as much as you want, but we’re going to take you from 15% of your calories from protein to 30% of your calories from protein – eat as much as you want”, and the people unconsciously ate 441 fewer calories per day, not feeling hungry, not feeling deprived, but almost 500 calories just gone.

Carrie: As I said a couple of times in the last podcast, that was my experience when I started eating SANEly. That was my exact experience – eating protein made me full and kept me full.

Jonathan: Carrie, focusing on you, because you are a wonderful example of satiety, the next two studies I believe are from your home. We’ve got one from Sussex and we have one from Leeds.

Carrie: Oh, well, Sussex is closer – they talk like me in Sussex. They don’t talk like me in Leeds but …

Jonathan: How do they talk in Leeds?

Carrie: I can’t do a Leeds accent.

Jonathan: You can’t do a Leeds accent?

Carrie: But it doesn’t sound anything like I do.

Jonathan: Not nearly as delightful as your accent?

Jonathan: All right, so let’s do the Sussex study first.

Carrie: Okay.

Jonathan: So these are all individuals who sound like Carrie.

People either ate a high protein or a low protein meal. The high protein people unconsciously ate 26% less than the low protein people at their next meal, again without feeling hungry.

Let’s go on to the Leeds study. People ate the exact same weight of food, but one group ate a higher percent from protein. The higher protein group unconsciously ate at least 19% fewer calories without feeling hungry.

One more study, and in this study people ate more or less protein for lunch. The more protein group got full on 12% fewer calories at dinner than the less protein group.

So Carrie, these studies show two things. One – in isolated meals, consuming more protein fills us up with fewer calories. It also shows us that the more protein we eat, just as time goes on, where also again those hormonal signals have been altered in our body … so just further down the road, we don’t get home from work and we’re not just, like, raiding the fridge and raiding the cupboards because we just don’t have those burning overeating tendencies because we feel full.

Carrie: Actually, you know, I just went on vacation and I tried this when I got to the airport. I had breakfast when I flew out and I specifically ate just protein, and I was on the plane for five and a half hours. I ate nothing on the plane, and I wasn’t hungry at all. So that plate of protein I had before I took off got me through that entire flight and it was not a short flight.

Jonathan: And let’s be very, very, very clear because we’ve said – I’ve said specifically a lot – it causes you to eat fewer calories. The goal is not – do not try – to eat fewer calories. Again, starvation is unhealthy. Try to eat more water, fibre and protein-rich food. Those are completely different approaches. Human psychology has told us for decades that if you tell a person “don’t do X”, eventually they’re going to do X and probably even more of it because we don’t like to be told not to do things. That’s not our approach. Our approach is “do Y”. Do water, fibre and protein-rich foods. Do fill yourself until you are completely full. I myself am a volume eater – I eat until I am full. Like, I probably eat until I’m uncomfortably full sometimes because I just like that feeling. You can do that all you want, as long as it’s SANE food.

Carrie: Right. The other thing I’ll mention about the plane was I’m so glad that I knew the effect that protein has and that I ate this protein-rich meal before I got on the plane because what they were offering on the plane … none of it … it was all inSANE. There were no SANE options available on the plane, so had I got on and found I was hungry after an hour, I would have had no option in the SANE department.

Jonathan: Carrie, I love that because it goes back to eating so much SANE food that we’re too full for inSANE food. Again, avoiding overeating is easy when we’re too full to eat foods that trigger overeating, such as starches and sweets. And another reason why you didn’t have any SANE options on the plane – as we’ll see here, because I’ll list our satisfying foods here in order of satiety – is that satisfying, high quality foods generally need to be refrigerated, and on a plane they don’t want to refrigerate a bunch of stuff, so they’re going to feed you processed starches and sweets because again they’re cheap and they’re easy and – I don’t know about you, but I don’t think of myself as cheap and easy, so … Carrie, why are you laughing?

Carrie: You’re asking if I see myself as cheap and easy? You have to ask?

Jonathan: So more satiety, as Carrie said, makes us too full for low quality food, we consume more nutrition, we’re very full, we create a positive hormonal balance in our body, and in doing that we do accidentally what is completely impractical to do deliberately, and that is to create a caloric deficit in our body, enabling our body to burn stored energy, a.k.a. body fat, not storing fat because again we have an abundance of nutrition including a lot of protein which helps us preserve our lean muscle tissue.

So, we have less low quality food, we have more high quality food, we have less clogging, lower set point, we’re burning more body fat, we’re behaving more like naturally thin people … and Carrie, here is what we should eat if we want to eat more satisfying food. Are you ready?

Carrie: I’m ready.

Jonathan: All right, so, I like to rate foods in terms of stars, with five stars being the highest score and zero stars being the lowest score.

Carrie: I wish you people could see Jonathan, because he just gets so excited, he’s waving his arms around, and the more excited he gets the more he waves – and it’s just adorable!

Jonathan: Well thank you, Carrie, and I will post this graphic as well as picture of myself waving my arms around in the show notes – maybe the former, not the latter.

So, waving my arms around, the highest satiety food in the world – there’s a tie, there’s a two way tie, Carrie, and it’s exciting because the Olympics are taking place right now and we have a tie for first place.

Carrie: All right, two gold medals comin’ up!

Jonathan: Two gold medals – so, high in water, fibre and protein – non-starchy vegetables. So anything that’s green, basically – broccoli, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, cauliflower (though I realise cauliflower isn’t green – I’m moving off the green things now), mushrooms, carrots, squash, all that kind of stuff – non-starchy vegetables. Awesome. Five stars. Single most component of eating high satiety foods is eating a lot of non-starchy vegetables.

Tied for first place – high quality protein, any kind of seafood, high quality meat such as organic, grass-fed beef, free range chicken, pork, turkey, eggs and select, SELECT dairy products such as Greek yogurt, which has an incredibly high percentage of protein, as well as cottage cheese which has an incredibly high percentage of protein. So those are our two gold medal winners, our two five-star-satiety groups of food.

Carrie: I do want to point out though that distinction you made when you say “non-starchy vegetables” because not all vegetables are as SANE as each other. There are some, as in parsnips and potatoes, that will behave in your body more like a sugar than they will a vegetable, and so not all vegetables are good.

Jonathan: That’s exactly right, Carrie – non-starchy is critical. I’m going to say a general rule here; now there’s exceptions to it, but it’s a general rule. The general rule is that if it grows ABOVE ground – good. If it grows below ground – bad. Noteworthy exceptions: onions are a non-starchy vegetable and they are just fine for you as are carrots, and beets are also. Corn grows above ground – it is not a vegetable, it’s a starch, it’s terrible for you. So there’s exceptions, but generally speaking, if it grows above ground it’s a non-starchy vegetable and good for you, and if it grows below ground, not as good. And things like potatoes are starch – they’re not a vegetable at all, they are much lower on the list and we’ll get to it in a second, but think about things generally that you put in a salad.

Carrie: And, while I’m here, people might like to know that I’ve done some recipes which will have you make you think you’re eating potato when you’re really eating squash. And I’ve found that my friends love that because they kind of get the emotional fix of the potato without the starch.

Jonathan: Beautiful, Carrie. There’s all kinds of SANE substitutions and I hope we can continue to get into this as we cover podcasts. Another great SANE substitute for potatoes is eggplant. So eggplant has a similar consistency. And for things like rice which is an inSANE starch, cauliflower – you can even buy a cauliflower ricer which will turn the non-starchy vegetable cauliflower into an incredibly, surprisingly tasty rice substitute.

Carrie: Yeah, I’ve made a couple of essentially what look and taste like rice salads, which are actually made with cauliflower instead, and I’m working on some other cauliflower recipes to that will have you thinking that you’re eating potato. So again, you get the emotional satisfaction of eating potato without actually eating the starch or the rice.

Jonathan: So we covered the gold medal winners in the satiety category. There’s then some silver medal winners which are legumes and fruits as well as nuts and seeds. And then we get into things which are just not satisfying at all. And one quick disclaimer – remember that satiety is only one of four factors that determine the quality of a food. So before you go run out, I’ll spoil it here – non-starchy vegetables are completely SANE and seafood, high quality protein, completely SANE. Pack yourself full of as much of that stuff as you want, but do remember that satiety is just one of four factors. However we will see that water, fibre and protein is consistent throughout all four factors, in saying that the more water, the more fibre, the more protein, the more SANE it is.

So, with that in mind, what are our least satisfying foods, or foods that require the most calories to fill us up and that keep us full for the shortest period of time because they’re dry, they’re fibre-free and they’re protein-poor? Well let’s just think about it, Carrie – what is dry, meaning that if you put it in a blender it would turn into a powder and not a liquid? Well, sweeteners, sugar, anything like that – anything you ADD – again, when I say sweetener I mean added sweeteners, I don’t mean the naturally occurring sugars in fruits – added sweeteners, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, organic cane, all the million things that are called “sugar”. They’re all sugar and they’re all not satisfying – as well as any kind of starch. Yes, whole grain bread is more satisfying than white bread, but it is still terribly dry, very low in fibre and protein-poor compared to our more satisfying options. So any kind of starch, any kind of sweetener is completely unsatisfying, and something that we should eat so much of the other stuff that we’re too full for those things.

Carrie: Okay.

Jonathan: One other thing I want to mention here is oil. Remember, when we talk about SANE, we talk about satisfying foods – again, it’s water, fibre and protein. So oil, by definition, is not necessarily satisfying because again it doesn’t have water, fibre or protein in it. There are better and worse oils. My general recommendation is to use oils only as needed. Things like coconut oil, flaxseed oil, to some extent olive oil are wonderful oils, but if you think about it, they’re not whole foods, right? Coconut oil is not as satisfying as coconut. And flaxseed oil – not as satisfying as flaxseeds. So I would simply say enjoy those whole foods and know that the oils are not necessarily going to kill you but let’s not overdo it.

Carrie: So one thing about coconut oil – because when I asked you about this when I started eating SANEly and I asked you which oils to cook with and you said coconut oil, and I’d never used it, and so I automatically thought, well, I don’t want everything to taste of coconut. But, good girl that I am, I went and got some coconut oil (which is half the price at Trader Joe’s by the way; if you have a Trader Joe’s near you, go get it there). I took it home and I took the lid off and BOY does that stuff smell like coconut. I mean, MAJOR coconut going on.

But, I’ve got to tell you, if you’re put off by that, when you cook with it you will not taste it – there’s no coconut taste at all. It cooks beautifully, it has a very, very high flashpoint so you can heat it to a very high temperature without it burning or without setting your house on fire (which is always a handy thing), but no coconut flavour to your food at all. So I just want to tell you that because you may be put off by the thought of it. Don’t be – coconut oil is awesome.

Jonathan: Further to what Carrie is saying, olive oil versus coconut oil or flaxseed oil … there are some other options such as macadamia nut oil, but they’re less common, less easy to get your hands on. As Carrie said, coconut oil is a wonderful oil to cook with if you have to use an oil while you cook. Carrie mentioned it has a very high smoke point. In terms of cooking, in terms of biology, this is very important because different oils when they’re heated will essentially change their chemical structure and they will turn into trans fats. They will become hydrogenated, and we’ve all heard about hydrogenated fats, and they’re terrible for us. So, for example, if you heat olive oil to above 400 degrees, it will essentially turn into a partial trans fat. So an oil which is otherwise healthy, when heated to very high temperatures becomes an unhealthy trans fat. So that’s why coking … coking? – DON’T COKE!

When COOKING, using something like a coconut oil is fantastic for the reason Carrie mentioned, and it stays as a healthy oil. But using things like olive oil or flaxseed oil on salads or if you’re cooking at a lower temperature, such as at around 300 or 350, is also okay.

Carrie: All right.

Jonathan: All right. So, that is satiety – and now, Carrie, we get to move on to the second factor, which is aggression. And Gary Taubes, who is just someone I love, and I know Carrie loves as well, author of the book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” as well as “Why We Get Fat (And What To Do About It)”, puts this really well. We talk about aggression, and he says, “The crucial factor is not how much is eaten, nor how much is expended, but how those calories are utilised and made available when needed”. And that’s really the key distinction we’re going to talk about when we talk about aggression herein. We’re after UNaggressive calories rather than aggressive calories. Shall we jump in, Carrie?

Carrie: Sounds good.

Jonathan: All right, so, think about – a calorie is not a calorie when it comes to how likely it is in our body to be stored as fat. I like to think about this in terms of a little analogy, Carrie. So, when we eat, imagine that we have a little traffic cop (I like to call her Samantha) – the metabolic traffic cop, and she tells calories where to go. And if the calories come down and they’re all aggressive with her, Samantha’s like, “All right, you know what? I’m not gonna deal with all of you. Just go to the fat cells”. Because they’re rushing her, she doesn’t have time …

Carrie: You are going to jail!

Jonathan: You are going to jail. I’m going to lock you up in the fat cells, because what the traffic cop wants to do, our metabolic traffic cop, is that when we eat it wants the calories to sort of slowly creep into our bloodstream so that it can have time to determine whether or not they should be sent to repair us if we’ve exercised and broken down our muscle tissue, to fuel us, or to fatten us – in that order. So if we consume aggressive calories or calories that our body readily converts into glucose, the primary fuel source for many of our bodies, it overwhelms this traffic cop and again she sends them ALL to our fat cells. So when we eat a plate of aggressive, dry, low fibre, low protein food such as maybe a plate of pasta and a breadstick, a massive wave of starch just aggressively starts screaming at Samantha, our metabolic traffic cop, and she’s like, “All right” …

Carrie: Go to jail!

Jonathan: Go to the fat cells.

Carrie: Do not pass GO!

Jonathan: Just like everyone else, our metabolism doesn’t deal well with a lot of aggressive requests or aggressive demands being place on it all at the same time. We want to slowly provide our body with nutrition. Our body is FINE with eating a lot of food – it’s AGGRESSIVE food that aggravates it.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan: So, again, 500 calm calories creeping into our bloodstream over many hours intuitively, right, is much less likely to be stored as body fat than 500 calories rushing into us all at once. Because, remember, we’re always storing or burning fat, and however much energy we have available to us RIGHT NOW determines whether or not we’re storing or burning fat. If we have 300 calories available to us right now, that’s too much – we don’t need 300 calories right now, so it gets stored as fat. If we get 300 calories over the course of two hours, well that’s not too many for any given point in time, so we don’t store it as fat. This is why things like the glycemic index or the glycemic load have become all the rage. They are simply handy measures of a calorie’s aggression. The glycemic index just tells us, for any given food, what is its aggression level – the higher the glycemic index, the more aggressive it is. Glycemic load is similar in the sense that it measures aggression, but it also factors in the quantity of calories in a typical serving of a food, so it combines aggression with the quantity of calories – it’s a bit more accurate of a measure in terms of if we’re going to overwhelm Samantha or not, right? If we eat something that has high aggression, a high glycemic index, but eat very little of it, again we’re probably not going to overwhelm her because it’s just a few calories. Does that make sense?

Carrie: Yep.

Jonathan: All right, Carrie. So, to understand why this matters, we have to think about how our body fuels itself. This is pretty basic – and forgive me if this is stupid – but we don’t run on food. I know that sounds silly, but we don’t eat a hamburger – hopefully we don’t eat a hamburger at all because we can do better than that; we don’t need any pink slime in our body and refined carbohydrate from the bun. When we eat a hamburger we don’t have little bits of hamburger floating around our body, right?

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: The hamburger gets turned into something. So the key is what it gets turned into and the rate that it gets turned into that. And let’s focus on glucose because that’s a sugar that, when we talk about blood glucose or are diabetics and the inability to handle glucose properly, we’re talking about what food is broken down into, the rate at which food is converted into glucose into our bloodstream. The reason this matters is that eating a lot of … saying eating a lot of food = gain body fat is FALSE. However, saying eating a lot of aggressive, glucose-spiking food causes us to gain body fat is true. Right? We can eat a high volume of food, but if it doesn’t overwhelm us with glucose all at once, we’re not going to gain body fat because at any given point in time we’re not going to have more glucose than we can handle. But if we eat a lot of aggressive food, we’re going to constantly overwhelm our body and Samantha’s going to lock all that up in the fat cells.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan: Does that make sense?

Carrie: Yep, absolutely.

Jonathan: So the distinction is between a lot of food and a lot of glucose right now. We want to eat more – smarter. We want to eat a lot of unaggressive food that will NEVER provide us with a lot of glucose right now. It will provide us with a lot of energy right now, it will provide us with a lot of nutrition right now, but not a lot of glucose. Now the good news, Carrie … you got something to say? I see you. You’re ready. Give it to me, Carrie!

Carrie: No, keep going, keep going.

Jonathan: I’m just rantin’ here …

Carrie: You rant so well!

Jonathan: I rant so well …

Carrie: You’re not waving your arms so much today though.

Jonathan: I’m not as much with the arm waving today …

So, Carrie, the good news though is that we don’t have to worry too much about glycemic index or glycemic load because, as fortune would have it, the same thing we do to eat satisfying calories is the same thing we do to eat unaggressive calories, because the same things really are a factor in both arenas. Water, fibre and protein-rich foods are unaggressive. Water, fibre and protein-rich foods are also highly satisfying. So as long as we focus on eating our water, fibre and protein-rich foods, we automatically eat low glycemic index food, we automatically ensure a low glycemic load, so we store less body fat because we’re not overwhelming Samantha with glucose at any point in time.

Carrie: That’s kind of cool because a lot of diet programs – not that this is a diet program – but a lot of the programs out there are overly complicated which, you know, remaining slim and healthy should not be. So there’s one more thing that shows me that what you’re teaching us is not complicated.

Jonathan: It is not complicated. Again, it’s about that water, fibre and protein and avoiding aggressive calories by consuming so many unaggressive calories. It also has a lot of additional benefits. Studies have shown that it lowers our risk of coronary heart disease, diabetes, unhealthy cholesterol levels as well as heart disease. So again, we don’t get heavy and sick by eating a lot of food, we get heavy and sick by eating a lot of low quality, aggressive food. So, Carrie, let’s quickly stack-rank foods in terms of their aggression, and I want to make one quick point as well, and that’s around fat.

So, fat is completely unaggressive. When we eat fat, it is not broken down into glucose. It is broken down into what’s called triglycerides and we’ll get into this in later podcasts. The reason I say this is that fat is completely unaggressive – completely.

Carrie: Okay.

Jonathan: In fact, diabetics – if you look in the early 1900’s, prior to medications being available for diabetics, the way that diabetes was treated was by feeding people essentially a high fat diet because it minimised the amount of glucose in the bloodstream. The reason I mention this is because the stack-ranked list of aggressive foods is a bit different than the stack-ranked list of satisfying foods because fat really has no impact – well, it has an impact, but the more fat in a food does not make it more aggressive because fat is completely unaggressive.

Carrie: Okay.

Jonathan: So, things like … butter is completely unaggressive, but that doesn’t mean, like, let’s eat as much butter as we want. But it also doesn’t mean that we necessarily need to be afraid of it.

Carrie: Okay. I am so not afraid of butter.

Jonathan: Good – you should not be afraid of butter because it’s really impossible to overeat unless we combine it with starches and sweets which we’ll steer away from.

So, when we talk about eating unaggressive foods – again, unaggressive, they’re going to be water, fibre and protein-rich. They’re also welcome to contain fat. So, non-starchy vegetables – five stars, top of the list. High quality protein – seafood, high quality meat and non-sugary dairy products, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, same as the satiety list. Nuts and seeds are going to be extremely high on this list because, again, they’re high in water, fibre and protein, plus also contain unaggressive fats. And oils are also completely unaggressive because they’re pure fat.

Really anything else starts to become a bit more aggressive. Obviously again, sweeteners and whole grain or any kind of starch is incredibly aggressive. This is why these foods are discouraged for diabetics, because they flood your system with glucose, they cause a bunch of insulin problems and they should be avoided. Whereas non-starchy vegetables, high quality protein and whole food natural fats – I like to say whole food because, again, eating coconut, eating flax seeds, eating almonds is always going to be better for us than eating the oil. Not that the oil is going to kill us, but by definition the oils have all the water, all of the fibre and all of the protein processed out. So it’s not as SANE by definition.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan: Make sense?

Carrie: I also just … on fruits here, because I’m looking at this chart and fruit is actually kind of down the bottom here. I think it’s worth mentioning because fruit, over the years, has generally been promoted as, you know, you can eat as much fruit as you want, fruit is awesome, fruit is good and drinking fruit juice is healthy. And that’s not exactly true.

Jonathan: It’s a critical point, Carrie, because – two things. One is that we’re generally told “eat more fruits and vegetables”.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: Okay, no – they’re not the same at all. So, vegetables, non-starchy vegetables – AWESOME. Awesome, awesome, awesome! CERTAIN fruits – also awesome. Not as awesome as non-starchy vegetables. And then other fruits – really not that good at all. For example, modern apples have been so genetically engineered that the percent of fructose they contain, which we all know about fructose – just not a good option. Apples, bananas, grapes – basically some of the most common fruits – not good options. Things like berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries), citrus fruits (oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits) – those are going to be the best fruits for us because, again, more water, fibre, protein … Carrie, you’re exactly right though. When we say eat more vegetables, like WAY more vegetables, and of course some berries and citrus fruits are fine, but bananas, apples, grapes – they don’t even belong in that same category.

Carrie: Yeah, and I point that out because I think a lot of people, particularly with apples and bananas – they’ve probably got to be the two most popular fruits and, you know, if there’s a bowl of fruit there the bananas are always the first to go. And it’s just … bananas have long been touted as the food that gives you energy for longer and so on and so forth, and I just think it’s important for people to know that that’s really not true.

Jonathan: You’re exactly right, Carrie, and the other important thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the reason we hear that is because, yes, if your choice is between a banana and a bag of Cheetos, you are certainly better off eating the banana. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should go out of your way to eat more bananas, especially when you could be eating an orange or blueberries or raspberries or some protein or some non-starchy vegetables. And let’s not even talk yet about fruit juice.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: Because fruit juice is just fruit with all of the fibre processed out. But here’s a little trick, Carrie – if you do enjoy fruit juice, here’s a way to make SANE fruit juice. Take berries or citrus fruit, put them in a blender, add some water, and blend it up for a minute. Now you have the WHOLE FOOD, just in liquid form, which is very different than extracting the sugar, basically, and juicing and taking away all the nutrients and just having sugar water which is what traditional juice is. That’s not a good call.

Carrie: Which is, essentially – you may as well drink pop. If you’re going to juice fruit or buy fruit juice, you may as well drink pop instead.

Jonathan: In terms of a metabolic … the amount of sugar you’re consuming – you’re exactly right. In fact, things like apple juice and grape juice, ounce for ounce, actually contain more sugar than Coca-Cola, for example. So, again folks, it’s about water, fibre and protein-rich (and moderate fat is just fine) WHOLE foods. It’s about NATURAL foods, non-starchy vegetables, high quality protein, natural fats from whole foods. It’s about avoiding dry, fibre-free and relatively protein-poor processed foods, starches, sweets, all that kind of stuff. It’s about staying on the exterior of your grocery store rather than the interior, because these satisfying and unaggressive foods generally need to be refrigerated or frozen because they’re FOOD, they’re not food-like products that have been processed heavily.

And with that, Carrie, I think we’re ready to talk about the “N” in SANE which is nutrition, and efficiency which is the “E”, in our upcoming podcasts. But I think we’ve covered a lot today.

Carrie: We have. We’ve done good.

Jonathan: We’ve done good. Well folks, thank you so much for being with us. Carrie Brown, Jonathan Bailor – eat smarter, exercise smarter, live better. See you next week.