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SANE SuperfoodTop 3 Tips for a SANE Approach to Nutrition Labels
UncategorizedIf you have ever looked at a nutrition label, you have seen these percentages:
Many people give these percentages a quick glance and decide whether the food is nutritious or not. Double digit percentages equal “nutritious.” Single digits are not as impressive. Here are three quick questions that help with this evaluation:
1. How many calories does it take to get that nutrition?
As you know from SANE, maximizing nutrition per calorie is key for long-term fat loss and robust health. The nutrition label above does not represent a food that maximizes nutrition per calorie. While it seems logical to assume that the food labeled above is a “good source” of Vitamin A since 10% is provided, note that takes 200 calories to provide that Vitamin A. Compare that to carrots which give us about 1,700% of our Daily Value of Vitamin A in 200 calories. It’s not about nutrition per serving, especially since serving sizes are arbitrary for most foods. It’s about nutrition per calorie.
2. What is my goal?
The percentages on nutrition labels are percentages of “Daily Values.” These Daily Values were developed during World War II to help prevent malnutrition in soldiers. Avoiding malnutrition is a much different goal than long-term fat loss and robust health. Unless you are satisfied with avoiding malnutrition, then the % Daily Value isn’t particularly useful.
3. Do I really need to read this?
Channeling author Michael Pollan, people kept themselves fit and healthy for thousands of years before we had nutrition labels. Why do we need them now, especially once we know that nutrition labels do not tell us what really matters—nutrition per calorie—and do tell us information which has little to do with our goals (long-term fat loss and robust health vs. avoiding malnutrition)?
In fact, I often wonder if focusing on nutrition labels can be counterproductive. For example, taking a nutrition label at face value, it’s easy to be lead to believe that a “low-calorie” serving of sugar-saturated and metabolism-clogging cereal is “healthy” because it provides 25% of the of Vitamin C necessary to avoid malnutrition. That’s incorrect and overly complex.
You may find it simpler and more SANE to forget about percentages and counting calories and to focus on enjoying as many non-starchy vegetables, lean sources of protein, berries, citrus fruits, nuts, and seeds, as you want, whenever you want. By focusing simply on eating more—but smarter—we can:
Most importantly, we can stop doing math and start enjoying food again.
Eating More Does Not Cause Long-Term Fat Gain
UncategorizedEating more low-quality food causes us to gain body fat. But that does not mean eating more food produces the same result. Interestingly enough, eating more high-quality food has been clinically proven to cause body fat to be burned. The research on this topic comes from all over:
How are these results possible? Research reveals two main reasons: First, a calorie is not a calorie. Second, an unclogged fat metabolism system burns excess calories instead of storing them. The next section will cover why a calorie isnot a calorie, so let’s turn first to how unclogging enables our body to burn—instead of store—excess calories.
In a Mayo Clinic study, researchers fed people 1,000 extra calories per day for eight weeks. A thousand extra calories per day for eight weeks totals 56,000 extra calories. Everyone gained sixteen pounds—56,000 calories worth—of body fat, right?
Nope.
Nobody gained sixteen pounds. The most anyone gained was a little over half that. The least anyone gained was basically nothing—less than a pound. How could that be true? People are eating 56,000 extra calories and gaining basically no body fat? How can 56,000 extra calories add up to nothing?
That’s because extra calories don’t have to turn into body fat. They could turn into heat. They could be burned off automatically. Researcher D.M. Lyon in the medical journal QJM reported: “Food in excess of immediate requirements…can easily be disposed of, being burnt up and dissipated as heat. Did this capacity not exist, obesity would be almost universal.”
Eating more and gaining less is possible because an unclogged metabolism has all sorts of underappreciated ways to process excess calories other than storing them as body fat. In the Mayo Clinic study, researchers measured three of them:
So how did some people ate 56,000 extra calories and gain essentially nothing? Instead of storing the excess calories as body fat, their unclogged metabolisms automatically increased the base amount of calories they burned.
On the surface this study seems shocking, but we have all seen examples of “eat more, burn more” in our day-to-day lives. Think about naturally thin people you know who eat a lot, exercise a little, and stay slim. They eat more and burn more. Just as eating less causes the fat metabolism system to slow down, eating more causes an unclogged metabolism to speed up.
The key to long-term fat loss isn’t eating less or exercising more. It’s getting our metabolism to burn rather than to store excess calories.
Study Shows Losing Weight via the Traditional Approach is Harder than Quitting Smoking
UncategorizedSome people are able to lose weight and keep it off by eating less and exercising more. A lot more people are not. The last forty years of fat-loss data reveal that the traditional approach can work—just not very often. Studies show that eating less and exercising more does not keep body fat off long-term 95% of the time. To put this 95% failure rate into perspective, quitting smoking cold turkey has a 94.5% failure rate. In other words, more people are able to quit smoking cold turkey than are able to keep body fat off using the traditional approach.
If eating less and exercising more works for you long-term, excellent. If not, science shows there is another—more effective—approach: Eat more. Exercise Less. Smarter.
Even better, research shows that this alternative approach is more effective at facilitating long-term fat loss and robust health. For example, researchers at Skidmore College compared a traditional “eat less, exercise more—harder” program against an “eat more, exercise less—smarter” program. Let’s call the groups in the study the Harder Group and the Smarter Group.
The Harder Group ate the traditional diet of 60% carbohydrates, 15% protein, and 25% fat while doing low-quality cardiovascular exercise for forty minutes per day, six days per week. Low-quality cardiovascular exercise refers to exercises like walking, biking, and jogging, which must be done for hours to impact our health and weight. The Smarter Group ate a higher-quality diet* of 40% carbohydrate, 40% protein, and 20% fat while exercising only 60% as much, but with higher-quality**. The study lasted for 12 weeks and included 34 women and 29 men between the ages of 20 and 60.
At the end of the study, the Harder Group “successfully” ate less and exercised eighteen hours more than the Smarter Group. After examining the results though, the researchers concluded:
Less academically speaking, eating more and exercising less—smarter—was more effective than the traditional approach. Here’s the data:
Combine the increased effectiveness of eating more and exercising less—smarter—with avoiding hunger or spending hours in the gym, and this smarter scientific approach may be just what the doctor ordered for the other 95% of us.
Next week we’ll start to explore the science of why eating less and exercising more fails to burn fat long term 95% of the time.