Looking at Nutrition per calorie (see previous post) is important because:

1. It gives us a more accurate view of which foods are nutritious.
2. It helps us burn body fat instead of slowing down or burning muscle.

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:

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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.

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“Efficiency…is dependent on…the nature of the fuel and the processes enlisted by the organism. A simple example is the inefficiency of low-test gasoline…If a ‘calorie is a calorie’…were true, [then gasoline is gasoline and] nobody would pay extra for high test gasoline.” – R.D. Feinman, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center

A 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.

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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.

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It’s great to see articles like this that reinforce how a healthy body/mind automatically balances calories in and calories out…and how food quality is key to keeping the brain balancing us out automatically.

“Responsibility for monitoring calorie input and energy output falls to the brain. And the job is not easy, says endocrinologist Michael Schwartz, director of the University of Washington’s Diabetes and Obesity Center of Excellence in Seattle.

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To maintain a constant weight, a 160-pound man would need to consume “about 1 million calories over the course of a year,” Schwartz explains — “and expend almost exactly that same million calories.” Only by integrating hosts of chemical signals day and night can the brain manage this energy-budgeting feat, which it has done quite well for most people throughout most of history.
…
Together, these findings suggest that the brain, a longtime master at tracking caloric intake, can be fooled. And when that happens, Swithers observes, weight management suddenly becomes challenging. “Now we have to start counting calories, reading food labels and tracking how many steps we took today,” she says.”

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/345277/title/Tricks_Foods_Play

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“[Governmental] dietary guidelines necessarily are political compromises between what science tells us about nutrition and health and what is good for the food industry.” – M. Nestle, New York University

As our knowledge of the human body becomes ever more exact, scientists have made remarkable leaps forward in many fields. We have completed the study of the human genome. We can combat horrible diseases such as childhood leukemia with terrific success rates. Yet for one question that many of us would like answered—what foods boost health and help burn fat long-term?—we find all sorts of confusing claims. Since we know so much about how our body works, can’t science tell us the answer?

As it turns out, science already has, and it is surprisingly simple:

1. Eat a lot of water, fiber, and protein rich (SANE) foods slowly
2. Do a little safe, low-impact, and forceful (eccentric) exercise slowly
3. Drink so much water (and green tea) that your urine is clear, you are never thirsty, and you are too “full” to drink sweetened beverages (soda, etc.)

The scientifically proven facts of fat loss are intuitive and simple. The confusion comes from bureaucrats acting like biologists and marketers imitating MDs.

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Let’s clear up this unnecessary confusion by looking at the history of eating using a scale of one day. Say 12:00am last night was the dawn of our first ancestors, and right now it’s one second before midnight. For 23 hours and 57 minutes (up until 11:57pm) our ancestors stayed healthy and fit, eating vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, and seeds. At 11:57pm, people started farming, became “civilized,” and began eating starch and a small amount of sweets. Two seconds ago, people started eating processed starches and sweets. Only right now—one second before midnight—did people start getting most of their calories from manufactured starch- and sweetener-based food products. That means the diet recommended by the government’s Dietary Guidelines was not possiblefor 99.8% of our history.

It is an unarguable anthropological fact that for the vast majority of their existence, our ancestors did not consume much starch and did not consume any added sweeteners. They did not eat whole grains. They ate no grains. They did not cut back on added sweeteners. They did not know what added sweeteners are. Emory University researcher S.B. Eaton tells us:

“During the late Paleolithic [the vast majority of human history], the great majority of carbohydrates was derived from vegetables and fruit, very little from cereal grains and none from refined flours.”

This idea is interesting to think about when it comes to our health. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease are called “diseases of civilization.” They did not become issues until agriculture enabled production of starches and sweets about 12,000 years ago. And they did not reach epidemic status until starches and sweets made up 43% of our diet.

Some people might object: “Back then, people did not live as long as we do now.” That is an excellent point. I felt the same way until I read research revealing three facts about our hunter-gatherer ancestors:

• Fact: They are few and far between today, but hunter-gatherer tribes are still around, and scientists have studied them intensively. The studies show that they are free from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease.

• Fact: While their average age of death is lower than ours, many ancient hunter-gatherers lived beyond the age of sixty. Emory University researcher S.B. Eaton tells us: “Occasionally one hears the claim that primitive people all died too young to get degenerative diseases. This claim is simply false—many lived well into and through the age of vulnerability for such disorders, yet didn’t get them.”

• Fact: Let’s take old age out of the equation entirely. Obese and type 2 diabetic “civilized” children are running around all over the place. The children of hunter-gatherers were obesity and diabetes free.

The lowering in the quality of our diet and the lowering in the quality of our health are not coincidences. Could it be possible that we are not designed to digest the food that makes up the majority of our diet?

The Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health states unequivocally: “The USDA Pyramid is wrong. It was built on shaky scientific ground…[and] has been steadily eroded by new research from all parts of the globe…. At best, [it] offers wishy-washy, scientifically unfounded advice.” Here’s what the Journal of the American College of Cardiovascular Exerciselogy has to say: “The low-fat-high-carbohydrate diet, promulgated [publicized] vigorously by the…food pyramid, may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity…diabetes, and metabolic syndromes.” The Co-Founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest chimes in: “Good advice about nutrition conflicts with the interests of many big industries, each of which has more lobbying power than all the public-interest groups combined.”

We are not getting bigger and sicker because we are eating a lot of food. We are becoming hormonally “clogged” and losing our natural ability to burn fat from eating the wrong quality of food. The further the quality of our calories has gotten from the high-quality SANE food we ate for 99.8% of our evolutionary history, the bigger and sicker we have become.

Decades of advanced dietary research have taken place alongside spiking obesity and disease rates. This research recommends a diet much different than any version of the government’s Dietary Guidelines. For example, Dr. Marion Nestle at New York University notes how the scientific community has long criticized the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid’s failure to “recognize the biochemical equivalency of sugars and starches in the body.” More simply, starch has the same impact on our body as sugar. Why don’t the government’s guidelines reflect this research? Who needs science when a constant barrage of food, fitness, and pharmaceutical industry marketing bullies us into believing that the government’s recommendations are healthy?

“The USDA-sponsored Dietary Guidelines for Americans and its Food Guide Pyramid are nutritionally and biochemically unsound…They radically changed the food habits of tens of millions of Americans in a massive human experiment that has gone awry…. Today, there is little doubt that there is a clear temporal association between the ‘heart healthy’ diet and the current, growing epidemics of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type-2 diabetes.” – A. Ottoboni, in the Journal of the American Physicians and Surgeons

A great deal of money is being made from our nutritional confusion. Even worse, the government created these guidelines in much the same way it creates laws: by listening to lobbyists and by making compromises. The history of the USDA guidelines and graphics is nothing short of shocking. We’ll dig into the details starting in the next post.

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES