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Calorie Quality Factor 2: Aggression (The “A” in SANE)

“The crucial factor is not how much is eaten…or how much is expended, but how…those calories are utilized and made available when needed.” – Gary Taubes, in Good Calories, Bad Calories A calorie is not a calorie when it comes to how likely it is to be stored as body fat. We can think about […]

2018-02-18/0 Comments/by SANE

Calorie Quality Factor 3: Nutrition Part 1 (The “N” in SANE)

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“Low energy density [high Nutrition] is not an inevitable characteristic of low-fat diets; as many of the low-fat foods presently being promoted in our commercial food supply are based on sugar or highly refined carbohydrates.” – W.C. Willett, Harvard University Two hundred and fifty calories of Twinkies are not the same as 250 calories of […]

2018-02-18/0 Comments/by SANE

Calorie Quality Factor 2: Aggression (The “A” in SANE)

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2018-02-18/0 Comments/by SANE

Calorie Quality Factor 3: Nutrition Part 1 (The “N” in SANE)

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2018-02-18/0 Comments/by SANE

Calorie Quality Factor 2: Aggression (The “A” in SANE)

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“The crucial factor is not how much is eaten…or how much is expended, but how…those calories are utilized and made available when needed.” – Gary Taubes, in Good Calories, Bad Calories

A calorie is not a calorie when it comes to how likely it is to be stored as body fat. We can think about human biology like this: When we eat, a traffic cop tells calories where to go. How Aggressively calories approach this traffic cop determines their chances of being stored as body fat.

The traffic cop directs calories to repair, fuel, or fatten us—in that order. It first makes sure we have enough fuel to rebuild anything that has broken down. Next, it keeps us doing whatever we are doing. Last, it seeks to protect us from starving. As long as we have a calm and consistent flow of calories coming into our system, the cop does a great job directing them.

However, when calories approach the traffic cop Aggressively, it gets angry, throws its clipboard down, and sends those calories to fat cells. Our body is fine with a lot of food. It is Aggressive food that aggravates it. Five hundred calm calories creeping into the bloodstream over many hours are less likely to be stored as body fat than five hundred Aggressive calories rushing in all at once. Like the rest of us, our body does not do its best work when dealing with a bunch of Aggressive requests all at once.

To best understand calories’ Aggression we first need to understand how our body fuels itself. It does not run on the food we eat. It runs primarily on glucose, a sugar our body creates from the food we eat. That may seem like a meaningless distinction, but it is not.

Storing body fat is not caused by eating a lot of food. Storing body fat is about a response to eating food that causes us to have more glucose in our bloodstream than we can use at one time. That is why calories’ Aggression matters so much. The more Aggressive calories are, the faster they increase the levels of glucose in our bloodstream. The faster calories increase our glucose levels, the more likely we are to have more glucose than the body can deal with at one time. That’s when it shuttles the excess into our fat cells.

The distinction between “a lot of food” and “a lot of glucose right now” is important. We can eat all the food we want and never gain body fat if the glucose the food generates does not exceed the glucose level we can deal with right then. Fortunately, SANE foods prevent excess glucose from getting into our bloodstream. If we simply focus on increasing the amount of water-, fiber-, and protein-packed high-Satiety foods we are eating, we will automatically avoid Aggressive calories and store less body fat.

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2018-02-18/0 Comments/by SANE

Calorie Quality Factor 3: Nutrition Part 1 (The “N” in SANE)

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“Low energy density [high Nutrition] is not an inevitable characteristic of low-fat diets; as many of the low-fat foods presently being promoted in our commercial food supply are based on sugar or highly refined carbohydrates.” – W.C. Willett, Harvard University

Two 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:

One cup of enriched wheat flour contains 495 calories. One cup of spinach contains 7 calories.

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.

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Nestle, Marion. What to Eat. 1 ed. New York: North Point Press, 2007. Print.
USDA SR-21

2018-02-18/0 Comments/by SANE

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