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Doesn’t the “Law of Thermodynamics” Prove Eating Less Burns Body Fat?
UncategorizedWe know the traditional approach to fat loss fails 95% of the time, yet common sense seems to tell us: “If you eat less and exercise more, you must burn body fat. Anything else violates the law of thermodynamics.”
There are four laws of thermodynamics. The two that apply to burning body fat do not prove that reducing the number of calories eaten makes the body burn fat. They tell us energy cannot be created nor destroyed; energy can only change forms. When people eat less, the body must do something. That’s it. The laws of thermodynamics prove nothingabout what the fat metabolism system must do.
Remember how it is easier for your body to slow down than to burn fat? And remember how it makes more sense to burn calorie-hungry muscle than it does to burn protective body fat? Put those two facts together, and instead of proving that eating less equals long-term fat loss, the applicable laws of thermodynamics prove that eating less makes the body slow down and burn muscle, which leads to long-term fat gain—not fat loss.
Q&A: Is SANE Eating the Same for Children and Adults?
UncategorizedSANE Eating the Same for Children and Adults?
Yes and no. Yes, in that the same foods are SANE and inSANE for children and adults. No, in that SANE eating is more important for children because:
Children require more nutrition than adults
Most expectant mothers are especially careful about what they put into their bodies while they are pregnant. Why? Because they know optimal nutrition is critical for a developing fetus. Similarly, optimal nutrition is critical for a developing child.
SANE foods contain more nutrition per calorie than any other foods (The “N” in SANE stands for “Nutrition.”) When a child eats a SANE diet, that child is eating the most nutritious diet possible.
Children are more susceptible to food-related behavior problems
InSANE foods such as starches and sweets are dramatically more Aggressive (the “A” in SANE) than SANE foods. They release a significant and short burst of energy into the body. This causes a short energy high followed by longer-lasting lethargy. Still developing mentally and emotionally, children are doubly impacted by these “highs” and “lows,” which is why children start “bouncing off of the walls” and have a hard time concentrating after eating inSANE starches and sweets. It is also why children then become sluggish and have a hard time concentrating. SANE eating has long been “prescribed” to aid children said to be suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).
A SANE diet ensures a slow and steady supply of energy to the body and enables optimal mood and behavior.
Fat cells never go away
A SANE diet has been proven to enable the body to burn rather than to store fat. Once fat cells are made, we cannot get rid of them; we can only shrink them. This is why helping our children avoid excess body fat is so important and why childhood obesity is so heartbreaking. Once a child develops new fat cells, that youngster will have a harder time staying slim for the rest of his or her life because those fat cells will never go away. At best, they will shrink, but still predispose that child to storing excess body fat.
The habits children form affect them for the rest of their lives
The habits we learn as children stick with us. When we teach our children SANE habits, we make it dramatically easier for them to keep themselves fit and healthy for the rest of their lives.
In summary, if it’s SANE or inSANE for an adult, it’s even more SANE or inSANE for a child. Everything that makes SANE eating important for adults makes it even more important for children.
Exercising More Does Not Equal Long-Term Fat Loss
UncategorizedIn the same way that people drink more fluids when they exercise more, they also eat more when they exercise more. Researcher Hugo R. Rony found: “Consistently high or low energy expenditures result in consistently high or low levels of appetite. Thus men doing heavy physical work spontaneously eat more than men engaged in sedentary occupations.” J.M. Friedman at Rockefeller University makes a similar point: “Exercise by itself has not been shown to be highly effective in treating obesity because the increased energy use from exercise is generally offset by increased caloric intake.”
Compounding the problem, many people who exercise more do not eat high-quality food. The majority of people get most of their calories from low-quality starches and sweeteners.Therefore, exercising more triggers the consumption of more low-quality food. More low-quality food means less need to burn body fat, more clogging, and a higher set-point. Far from burning body fat, we burn time and build-up clogs.
Here is one scenario for exercising more: Michelle goes for a 30-minute jog and burns 170 more calories than she would have burned by sitting at home and reading this book. She is trying hard to cut calories, so she does not drink any sugary sports drinks and fights through the hunger pangs after her jog. At dinner Michelle unconsciously drinks an extra glass of reduced-fat milk thanks to her increased thirst and hunger. The net result of her jog is thirteen more calories than if she had not exercised.
Much more commonly, people will have sweetened “power juice” while pounding it out on the treadmill. Afterward, they overeat low-quality food. The net result is more low-quality food and more clogging.
The food industry is very well aware that exercising more encourages eating more low-quality food. That’s why the following corporations serve on the executive board of the American Council on Fitness and Nutrition:
Are we told to exercise more because it is good for fat loss or because it is good for business? The National Soft Drink Association advises us to “consume at least eight glasses of fluids daily, even more when you exercise. A variety of beverages, including soft drinks, can contribute to proper hydration.”
But wait. If you exercise less, won’t you gain body fat? As you’ll see in future posts that depends on the type of exercise you do. In the next two posts we’ll cover how exercising less doesnot cause long-term fat gain and eating more doesnot cause long-term fat gain.
Exercising Less Does Not Cause Long-Term Fat Gain
UncategorizedThe idea that we have an obesity epidemic because people are not exercising enough is a myth. Saffron A. Whitehead at St. George’s University of London reported: “Most studies show that the obese do about the same physical activity as [the] lean.”
Common sense tells us that if exercising less is the cause of our collective weight issues, we must be collectively exercising less. Are we?
Not even close.
The idea of aerobic exercise did not even exist in the mainstream until the 1968 publication of the book Aerobics by Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper. Dr. Entin, with the department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University, explains the common view before then: “In the 1930’s and 40’s…high volume endurance training was thought to be bad for the heart. Through the ‘50’s and even ‘60’s, exercise was not thought to be useful…and endurance exercise was thought to be harmful to women.” During that same period the percent of obese Americans was dramatically lower than today. Nowadays, Americans exercise more than anyone else in the world and are the sixth heaviest population in the world. How could doing too little of something that we did even less of before the problem existed cause the problem?
Some people claim that we are getting heavier because we are using labor-saving devices. Yet that doesn’t make sense. The vast majority of labor-saving devices became common in households decades before obesity shot up. Use of dishwashers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and all the major labor-saving devices increased most between 1945 and 1965. However, obesity increased little during that time period. Use of these devices increased very little between 1978 and 1998 while obesity rates shot up. So how could labor-saving devices be the cause of weight problems?
Reread the quote from the American Heart Association at the start of this chapter. Digging into the data and abandoning assumptions about our activity levels, researchers like New York University’s Marion Nestle tell us, “…the activity levels of Americans appear to have changed little, if at all, from the 1970s to the 1990s.”
What about all the TV watching? That’s got to be the cause, right? That too does not correspond with the facts. Tsinghua University professor Seth Roberts determined: “Time spent watching TV increased by 45% from 1965 to 1975, yet obesity increased little over that time; from 1975 to 1995, when obesity shot up, TV watching increased only a little.”
Eating lower–quality food creates the clog that causes chronic weight gain. People can be plenty active, and exercise for hours, but if they eat low-quality food, they will get clogged and gain body fat. Long-term weight gain is determined by food and exercise quality, not quantity.
eat less, weigh more…for 118,801 folks, at least
UncategorizedHalf of going SANE is about eating more, smarter (the other half is exercising less, smarter).
This seems odd since we’ve all been told the more we eat the more we weigh. However, a quick stroll through the studies shows “more food = more fat” is a myth.
For example, Harvard researchers looked at a massive sample of 67,272 women and divided them into fifths according to the quantity of calories they ate. The general trend was the less ladies ate, the more they weighed.
The researchers then divided the women into fifths according to the quality of calories they ate. The lower the quality of their calories the more they weighed.
The cause of weight gain is too little quality, not too much quantity. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the studies showing yo-yo dieting—the inevitable result of trying to eat less—increasing our risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, immune system failure, eating disorders, impaired cognitive function, chronic fatigue, and depression. The results are in…studies show blindly eating less doesn’t make us thin. It makes us stocky, sick, and sad.
More surprising science.
The Harvard folks then took 51,529 men and divided them into fifths according to the quantity of calories they ate. The more folks ate the less they weighed.
Practical and permanent fat loss isn’t about cutting calories. It’s about intelligently increasing the quantity of high quality calories we eat. In the same Harvard study researchers divided the 51,529 guys into fifths according to the quality of calories they ate. The higher the quality of their calories the less they weighed.
The calorie quantity theory is fiction and fails because cutting calorie quantity fights against our basic biology. Our bodies don’t like starving. Crazy…I know. Studies show the only way to drop fat forever is to work with our bodies rather than to fight them. We do that by eating more–higher quality–calories. We eat more, smarter. And that works because a calorie isn’t a calorie…but more on that later.
Sampling of sources
Want to Improve Your Cholesterol? Don’t Lower It. There’s a Smarter Approach.
UncategorizedIn the last post we showed how Eating Fat Does Not Hurt Cholesterol & It’s Not About Lowering Cholesterol Anyway. Here’s where the confusion about cholesterol comes from in the first place. There are different types of cholesterol, and most of them are helpful or neutral. The two most commonly discussed are LDL (low-density lipoprotein) and HDL (high-density lipoprotein). They are required to produce new cells and hormones. Because of this critical role, even if we never ate any cholesterol, our liver or intestines would produce it.
What Are Healthy Cholesterol Numbers?
Table of Contents
When it comes to predicting heart health, the American Heart Association, International Diabetes Federation, and World Health Organization agree that low HDL cholesterol—not high LDL cholesterol—is what matters. And that low HDL is bad. Looking at disease and death rates at various levels of LDL and HDL cholesterol, researchers have found that people with low HDL run a much greater risk of heart disease.
Relative Risk of Heart Disease Given Total Cholesterol
(Total Cholesterol in Parenthesis)
There are two things to note about this graphic. First, total cholesterol is irrelevant. If someone tells you their total cholesterol is 185, what is their risk of heart disease? Looking at the preceding table, it is either very low or high, depending on how much of that 185 consists of HDL cholesterol. Similarly, if someone tells you their total cholesterol is 245, they either have a herculean heart or a hemorrhaging heart, depending on their HDL levels.
Second, note how increasing HDL cholesterol is more important for heart health than decreasing LDL cholesterol. High HDL cholesterol protects us from heart problems more than dropping our LDL levels ever could. Heart-healthy diets are not about lowering total cholesterol. They are about raising HDL cholesterol.
How to Raise HDL Cholesterol
The most effective way to raise our HDL levels is to eat more natural fat and less unnatural starch. Fat raises HDL. Starch lowers HDL.
The Impact of Fat and Starch on HDL and LDL Cholesterol and Health
A Smarter Science of Heart Healthy Foods
Since lower HDL does more harm than lower LDL does good, any diet which tells us to replace SANE sources of fat with inSANE starch worsens our cholesterol. This is why D. Mozaffarian at Harvard University wrote: “[Focusing] on effects of total and saturated fat on…total and low-density lipoprotein [LDL] cholesterol may have failed to reduce coronary heart disease risk and inadvertently worsened…insulin resistance, and weight gain.” Researcher A. Garg wrote the following in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “High-carbohydrate diets…caused persistent deterioration of glycemic control and accentuation of hyperinsulinemia [caused clogs], as well as increased…very-low-density lipoprotein [bad] cholesterol levels.”
Regrettably, under the government’s guidelines, we are supposed to replace natural foods containing fat with low-fat-high-starch products to lower our total cholesterol. Why? Lower total cholesterol is meaningless, and lower HDL cholesterol is terrible for us. Researchers have demonstrated this for decades.
For example, the February 1989 issue of the Diabetes Care journal put out by the American Diabetes Association contained a study comparing the government’s diet with a more SANE way of eating. The study concluded: “VLDL [bad] cholesterol was significantly increased…High-density lipoprotein [good] cholesterol concentrations were significantly decreased after consumption of the 60% carbohydrate diet.”
Comparable results were found with the equally imbalanced U.K. dietary guidelines. In the words of University of Glasgow researcher S.R. Arefhosseini: “Following the U.K. dietary guidelines resulted in changes…more likely to favor an increased risk of coronary heart disease.”
What About Saturated Fat and Cholesterol?
Even saturated fats are not cholesterol criminals. The American Heart Association found:
Bottom Line: Ways to Improve Cholesterol
What is the bottom line? Studies show that any diet telling you to replace SANE sources of fat with inSANE starches is unhealthy and fattening. M.L. McCullough at Harvard University made this point: “Limiting unsaturated fats, which is usually done by increasing carbohydrates…is detrimental…. Low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets provide a higher glycemic load, aggravate hyperinsulinemia [clogging], and may thus increase the risk of diabetes and coronary artery disease.”
Want to improve your cholesterol naturally? Eat more, but smarter.
Sadly, the government’s diet tells us to do exactly what science says we should avoid.
If you think this is troubling, wait until you see what happened when big business jumped on the government bandwagon. We’ll cover that next week.