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Calorie Quality Factor 3: Nutrition Part 1 (The “N” in SANE)
UncategorizedTwo hundred and fifty calories of Twinkies are not the same as 250 calories of broccoli. Clearly a calorie is not a calorie when we are discussing the Nutrition we need to burn body fat and be healthy. So what is nutritious? Like everything else, the key to Nutrition is quality, but all we are ever told about is quantity—aka the Nutrition facts labels on food.
The information found on food labels tells us half of what determines Nutrition: the quantity of nutrients in the food. The other half is the quality of the calories we are getting along with those nutrients.
Talking merely about the quantity of nutrients in food leads to a very fattening view of Nutrition. Consider the American Heart Association’s endorsement logos on boxes of sugar-stuffed cereal because the cereal was “enriched.” A high quantity of nutrients combined with low-quality calories is not nutritious.
Most people already know that thinking about the quantity of nutrients in food is not sufficient. We know that ten doughnuts are not ten times as nutritious as one doughnut. We have to consider nutrients relative to calories, or Nutrition quality.
Determining Nutrition quality is simple. We take the nutrient quantity information provided on Nutrition labels and divide it by the number of calories in a serving of the food. This provides the food’s Nutrition per calorie. Many nutrients per calorie—provided by non-starchy vegetables, seafood, lean meats, select dairy, and fruits—means high Nutrition. Few nutrients per calorie—see starches and sweets—means low Nutrition.
For example, here’s how one cup of enriched wheat flour compares to one cup of spinach in terms of nutrient quantity. I’ve shaded the cell of the food with more of the given nutrient when we measure by the cup.
Looking at quantity, enriched wheat flour seems more nutritious than spinach. Here’s why that’s misleading:
Looking at quality—nutrients per calorie—we see something much different—and more useful.
When we make a fair comparison—comparing 250 calories of enriched wheat flour against 250 calories of spinach, instead of comparing 495 calories of enriched wheat flour against 7 calories of spinach—we see that spinach is dramatically more nutritious than enriched wheat flour.
Looking at Nutrition this way is useful for two reasons we’ll cover in the next post.
So Many Veggies and Protein That You Are Too Full for Starches and Sweets
UncategorizedIf it is a non-starchy vegetable, overeat it. I am talking ten or more servings of non-starchy vegetables per day.
While it is absolutely not required, eating ten or more servings of non-starchy vegetables per day is dramatically easier if you use a blender to make vegetable and fruit smoothies (recipes, recommended blender). Don’t use a juicer. It removes filling fiber and healthy nutrients. Use a blender and mix a lot of any green vegetable with a little bit of strawberries or oranges. Add some vanilla-flavored whey protein powder, cinnamon, and vanilla extract, and the smoothie is quite tasty.
If fresh non-starchy vegetables are not available, frozen ones are fine. Wheat grass and other powdered green “super foods” are convenient but taste bad.
Avoid canned vegetables and canned fruits if at all possible. Focus on fresh or frozen, deeply colored, non-starchy vegetables that grow above ground. When it comes to fruits, focus on berries and citrus. They are the most SANE options.
When it comes to protein, divide your protein intake into evenly throughout the day (What about intermittent fasting?). Fortunately, this is easy. Here is one way to do it.
Total Prep Time = Fifteen minutes
Total Positive Impact = Dramatic
If you enjoy the convenience of protein powders I’ve recommended a couple good options here. Other inexpensive and convenient forms of protein are canned tuna, canned salmon, egg whites, frozen salmon burgers, frozen turkey burgers, fat-free or low-fat cottage cheese, fat-free or low-fat plain Greek yogurt (Why low-fat?), and canned chicken (Going SANE on a budget). When it comes to seafood and meat, canned is fine. I am not a fan of what canning does to the taste of the food, but it is less expensive and more convenient.
Putting these recommendations all together, the first step to eating more—smarter—is as simple as doubling the amount of seafood, nutritious meat, eggs or egg whites (depending on your goals), fat-free or low-fat cottage cheese, or fat-free or low-fat plain Greek yogurt, and tripling the amount of non-starchy vegetables that you would typically eat at each meal. This guarantees you will be too full for starch or sweets while never leaving the table feeling deprived.
When eating a double serving of protein and a triple serving of non-starchy vegetables is not practical, mix a scoop or two of protein powder and some milled flax seeds or chia seeds with water and drink it before the meal. Blend it with some ice if it is convenient.
Of course nobody can to do this all the time, but the more non-starchy vegetables and protein that you eat in place of starches and sweets, the healthier you will be and the more body fat you will burn.
Calorie Quality Factor 3: Nutrition (Part 2)
UncategorizedLooking at Nutrition per calorie (see previous post) is important because:
Like Satiety and Aggression, a food’s Nutrition depends on water, fiber, and protein. Water and fiber have no calories, and protein calories do not “count” as much as carbohydrate or fat calories (more on this in future posts…the short version is that the body burns a significant amount of calories from protein during digestion). Since a food’s Nutrition is found by dividing the number of nutrients by the number of calories, more water, fiber, and protein reduce the relative number of calories in the food and therefore increase its Nutrition.
Viewing Nutrition in terms of water, fiber, and protein gives us a dramatically different view of which foods are nutritious. Consider cereal, bread, or “healthy” whole grain starches. They are all dry and contain little protein, so they are starting out zero for two. Fiber is their only hope.
The companies selling starchy products say we get a great deal of fiber from their whole-grain products, but is that actually true? Well, the four grams of fiber in 250 calories of whole-grain cereal is 100% more fiber than the two grams of fiber in 250 calories of refined-grain cereal, but that is only comparing grains. You have to ask if grains are a good source of Nutrition relative to more water and protein-packed foods we could be eating. So are whole grains good sources of Nutrition relative to non-starches?
Not even close.
Sure, whole grains are better than processed grains, but that is like saying one broken leg is better than two. It does not make either option good. Look at the fiber per calorie in whole grains compared to more water and protein-packed foods:
Fiber Per Calorie in Whole Grains Compared to SANE Foods
Whole grains do have six times more fiber than doughnuts, but non-starchy vegetables have nearly fifty times more fiber. Whole grain toast is better than a doughnut, but that is not saying much considering the other foods we could be eating. For example, if we eat 250 calories worth of non-starchy vegetables, we will get about forty-six grams of fiber. To get the same amount of fiber from whole grains, we would have to eat a whopping 1,917 calories worth of whole grains.
Calories Needed to Get 46 Grams of Clog-Clearing Fiber
Starch is an excellent example of how careful you have to be when trying to judge Nutrition—comparing nutrients per calorie. We could be eating all sorts of whole-grain starches thinking we are at the top of the Nutrition mountain, while we are actually sitting at the bottom getting buried with low-quality calories. A little Nutrition plus a lot of unSatisfying and Aggressive calories is not a happy combination.
Fortunately for us, we do not need to do all sorts of math with Nutrition labels to maximize the Nutrition of our diets. Researchers at Colorado State University did the math for us. They analyzed the Nutrition quality of the most common foods and found that if we maximize the Satiety and minimize the Aggression of our diet—by eating more water-, fiber-, and protein-packed foods—we will get the most Nutrition per calorie automatically.
Nutrition quality also affects the need to burn body fat instead of the need to slow down and burn muscle. When we eat more water-, fiber-, and protein-packed food, we get more Nutrition while avoiding overeating—or overwhelming the body with glucose. Combine more nutrients with less glucose, and we burn body fat without the negative side effects of eating less. After all, our fat metabolism system has more Nutrition than ever before. A surplus of Nutrition is the opposite of starvation.
It’s All About Results – A Pragmatism Primer
UncategorizedBefore we get into the solution to the pressing health issues facing us today, I’d like to share some simple philosophy I find useful to keep in mind. The philosophy of pragmatism.
Pragmatists are results-oriented—they believe something is right or wrong based on its results. People can try anything they want and the true worth of the program is revealed by its results. If it works, it is right. If it fails, it is wrong. Consider Communism, for example. A pragmatist asks how Communism worked out in the real world and lets that settle the argument about its merits.
When it comes to fat loss, the pragmatic view is: “Does the fat-loss program cause you to lose body fat and keep it off forever without compromising the rest of your life? If so, then it is right. If not, then it is wrong.” Unfortunately, this commonsense approach is not common practice. Despite the decades of data and tens of millions of heavy diabetic people that prove traditional weight-loss programs wrong, those people have been brainwashed into thinking that they failed because they didn’t lose any weight, not that the traditional weight-loss programs failed them.
If a program fails, it is the program’s fault. Programs are designed to deliver results. If it failed to deliver results, the program failed, not the person.
Think about software programs. If you cannot figure out how to use a software program, it is not because you failed. It is because the software program failed. Good software is easy to use. That is what makes it good software. It delivers excellent results for you. What good is any software program if it does not serve you?
Similarly, if you cannot stick to a fat-loss program forever, it is not because you are a failure. Good fat-loss programs are easy to use. That is what makes them good. They deliver excellent results for you.
Consider Oprah. She is one of the strongest and smartest women ever. Now look at Oprah’s weight-loss efforts. Thinking pragmatically, thinking about results, what do we know about the weight-loss programs Oprah tried? If they were right, Oprah would be thinner and spend less time and money trying to burn body fat. She is far from a failure at anything. The programs failed her.
If Oprah hires someone to design her house and the house collapses, we would not blame Oprah. And if Oprah hires someone to design a piece of software and she cannot figure it out, the software designer is at fault. So, if Oprah hires someone to design a weight-loss program and she does not lose weight, the program failed—Oprah did not.
Results are all that matter. People do not fail fat-loss programs. Fat-loss programs fail people.
Calorie Quality Factor 4: Efficiency (The “E” in SANE)
UncategorizedA calorie is not a calorie when it comes to how Efficiently our fat metabolism system converts it into body fat. The more inEfficient calories are at being stored as body fat, the better. Keeping the science of SANE eating simple, fiber and protein are entirelyinEfficient.
Explaining the inEfficiency of fiber is easy. Fiber is not digested, and therefore can never be stored as body fat. The body tries and tries to digest fiber, but then after burning a bunch of calories trying to break down and absorb fiber, it gives up and passes fiber through the digestive system. That is why fiber helps keep us regular.
Explaining the inEfficiency of protein is a bit more involved. To start with let’s talk about the calories we burn digesting food. Our body digests fat and carbohydrate Efficiently. However, it takes our body five to ten times more energy to digest protein. In fact, about 30% of the calories we get from protein are burned digesting it. Protein’s inEfficiency doesn’t stop there.
Even after we burn 30% of protein calories during initial digestion, the road from chicken breast to love handles is far from over. Correction: there is no road from chicken breast to love handles. Protein cannot be stored as body fat. However, there is a super-highway shuttling glucose to our fat cells. So when we have excess protein lying around, excess protein is sent to the liver to be converted into glucose.
The process of converting protein into glucose is called gluconeogenesis (gluco = sugar, neo = new, genesis = creation). This processburns another 33% of the original protein calories eaten. Combine the third of protein calories burned during digestion with the third of those remaining calories burned during gluconeogenesis, and you and I are left with a measly 47% of the original protein calories. What started off as 300 calories of juicy protein is reduced to 140 calories of glucose in the bloodstream. But wait, there’s more.
Converting that newly formed glucose into body fat consumes another 25% of the glucose calories. So when everything is said and done, even if we never move a muscle, only 35% of the calories we get from protein can be stored as body fat. You read that correctly. Over two-thirds of calories from protein are burned converting protein into a compound which can be stored as body fat.
If we followed the same digestion process for starch, we would find that 70% of calories from starch can be stored as body fat. In other words, calories from starch are twice as Efficient at becoming body fat as calories from protein.
This does not mean we should eat 100% protein. Yet we can eat more and burn more by eating more protein-packed (and fiber-packed) food. And keeping long-term fat loss simple, the same techniques we are using to increase Satiety, decrease Aggression, and increase Nutrition, also decrease the Efficiency of our calories.
Scientific Fact: Eating Less Is Harmful and Doesn’t Lead To Lasting Fat Loss
UncategorizedWhile researching weight loss, University of Wisconsin researchers R.E. Keesey and M.D. Hirvonen discovered that “metabolism declines by an amount significantly in excess of that expected from the loss in metabolically active tissue. We have observed a drop of 24.6% in daily resting energy expenditure when the body weight of rats was reduced (by caloric restriction) by 14.9%.”
If we want to burn fat and keep it off, the last thing we want to do is disproportionately slow down our body. If we want to improve our health, the last thing we want to do is deprive our body of nutrition. Therefore, if we want to be slimmer and healthier for the rest of our life–very different from merely weighing less in the short term–the last thing we want to do is eat less of our existing diet. We will be better served by eating more–but higher-quality–food, and doing less–but higher-quality (more forceful)–exercise. This protects our metabolism, prevent overeating, provide abundant nutrition, and produce a hormonal environment perfect for burning body fat.
The science is clear. The confusion comes from diet and exercise industry funded marketing and myths. It is a scientific fact that lasting fat loss and improved health is not about eating less of the diet that caused the problem in the first place. It’s about eating more, but of different types of foods. It’s about eating more–but smarter.