All posts tagged protein

The Food Reward Hypothesis: A Rule Of Thumb For All Successful Diets

Readers, I’m not an expert on anything (except for maybe shoestring travel in Europe).  But every now and then, I hit the nail on the head without thinking.

Literally, after just posting this comment on another fitness blogger’s post on Food Logging–

Food diaries are the absolute best tool for facilitating weight loss. Statistical fact.
When I first woke up from my junk-food induced coma and realized I was (again) way too fat, I bought a book on diet and weight loss, written by a business man.

Key point was to treat calories like money. Create a daily deficit, and you will lose weight and go broke.

Easy. I lost 40 pounds in three months.

But I am totally OVER food logging. As long as I don’t eat over-stimulating food, my body, which has thankfully repaired its hunger/satiety gauges through clean whole foods eating, tells me when to quit.

I eat a lot. 3,000-4,000 calories a day, on average, and no—I’m not working out.  Just living. I try to eat as much variety as possible, and tracking ALL THAT FOOD is a pain.

–I began to read an article I’d left open yesterday in my browser, on the food reward hypothesis.

From the article,

The food reward hypothesis of obesity states that the reward and palatability value of food influence body fatness, and excess reward/palatability can promote body fat accumulation.

In other words, when food is yummy, we eat more of it.  Too much eating eventually leads to overweight/fat accumulation, and/or possibly brain damage (i.e. damage in the hypothalamus, where appetite is regulated) and obesity.

Now, this might sound like a no-brainer, right?

Wrong, if you’re a low-carber.  If you’re like Gary Taubes (the “journalist” to which the fabulous article was written as a response piece), or a no-cash-crop-Paleo promoter, you probably want us to think that it is the type of calorie, not how tasty it is.  In other words, carbs, by virtue of their caloric type, cause fatness, and fats and proteins do not.

The author of the paper, Stephan Guyenet, explains the backwardation of this “no brainer” as follows,

I thought it would be more productive to discuss one of the core elements of [Taubes'] position, which has arguably been one of his greatest influences on the public.  This is the “paradigm shift” he promotes, away from thinking about obesity as a problem of energy imbalance (energy in vs. out), and toward thinking about it as a “disorder of excess fat accumulation” where energy imbalance is the result rather than the cause of fat tissue expansion (36)…He uses this argument to brush aside much of the last 60 years of obesity research, and the opinions of many seasoned researchers, arguing that they are largely irrelevant because they operate under the wrong paradigm (logical framework).

And the pages of Good Calories, Bad Calories came screaming back to me!  As well as the feelings I’d had after reading it, which led me to compose my longest article to date, which is little more than my amateur attempt to piece together the words of other experts and my own knowledge–a blunder, out of focus, but there, nonetheless, and I hope not far off the mark.

All I have to say is Taubes is reaching with his new paradigm.

Back to my little blog comment, though: “As long as I don’t eat over-stimulating food.”  Over-stimulating, aka, highly palatable food.

It did not take my subsequent years of voracious consumption (pun intended) of nutritional information to learn this.  It just seemed sensible.  I knew that if I bit into a cookie, I’d Tasmanian Devil the whole box.  Most women know this.

Me, especially after a workout.

I knew that if I wanted a slice a bread, I certainly wasn’t going to eat it as-is.  It would have been a vessel for delivering fat and/or sugar into my mouth!

Fat! Sugar! Married in a sandwich! NOM NOM.

I knew that some foods (like corn chips) are “like crack,” and other foods (like carrots) have a very rapid diminishing return on pleasure–and yet, both are high carb foods.

You’d never ask your waiter to bring over another basket of carrots.

So if you don’t blow your brains out with fat, salt, and sugar, or any combination thereof, you’ll probably be on your way to weight loss until you’ve “kicked the habit.”

Yeah… the habit.  We can be addicted to food.  We can also be overly-habituated to certain food presentations (i.e., “I can’t eat Thanksgiving turkey without cranberry sauce!”).

I hate to strip food of its beauty–of its aroma, flavor, and interplay with our olfactory and visual senses.  I hate to strip away its relationship to culture: food as a gift, food as a gesture, food as religion, food as identity–but if we take a moment and identify food solely as fuel, and treat it as such, we begin to lose our psychological dependence on it, and allow it to guide our health in more appropriate directions.

Guyenet states is beautifully in this other article,

Diet trials have shown that a ‘simple’ diet, low in palatability and reward value, reduces hunger and causes fat loss in obese humans and animals, apparently by lowering the ‘defended’ level of fat mass (30, 31, 32, 33). This may be a reason why virtually any diet in which food choices are restricted (e.g., Paleo, vegan, fruitarian), including diametrically opposed approaches like low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets, can reduce food intake and body fatness in clinical trials.

I said it on my Nutrition Page, “Whether you follow a meat-centered, vegetarian, vegan, macrobiotic, or raw food diet, there is one common denominator for success: that the foods are of high quality and unadulterated.“

So here’s the rule of thumb, if you’re trying to eat less.  Eat whole foods, or process them in your own kitchen.

3 Comments
by demogirl06 on February 7, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by demogirl06 on February 7, 2013

http://mariamaestevens.com/2013/02/07/the-food-reward-hypothesis-a-rule-of-thumb-for-all-successful-diets/

Plant-Based vs. Low-Carb Paleo: In Search of the Optimal Diet

After responding to a comment left by a Crossfit-Paleo enthusiast on my critique of Crossfit, and beginning to delve into the new video series by Plant Positive, and  reading a most interesting book called Everybody Eats: Understanding Food and Culture, by E.N. Anderson, I couldn’t help but lash out a few more thoughts on the plant/starch-centric diet vs. the paleo/meat-centric diet debate.

In case anyone falls into the pit of hyper focus on the plant vs. animal debate, and foolishly thinks that humans actually evolved as herbivores or carnivores, I’ll state it here: humans evolved, most likely, as specialized omnivores.

Humans are highly adaptable creatures, and given these high levels of adaptability, it doesn’t make sense from the point of view of natural selection to be able to persist on any single foodstuff.  In other words, we are not Koalas that eat eucalyptus; we are not horses, subsisting on grass; we are not lions, eating the flesh of other animals.  We fail to synthesize many vitamins the way other animal species can; hence, we must find them through diet.  We must have a variety-rich diet.

Our nutritional requirements can be met fairly well through animal-source dominance, as well as through plant-source dominance.  The debate, however, often hinges on the question: which source causes more collateral damage?  The ridiculous long-winded arguments in favor of predominantly plant-eating diets over predominately animal-eating diets, and vice verse, are the sad result of a narrow attention span spawned by the pressures of media and marketing.  Sell an idea to the exclusion of all others!

To market an idea (from a food company, or a diet book, or a supplement center) one must first create a perceived need in the would-be consumer.  Once the consumer feels he has a need, or a problem, or even the long-term possibility of a problem (heart disease, for example) he is psychologically more prepared to accept your idea or product.  If this idea or product sells well enough, the contents of it are eventually assumed to be conventional wisdom.

Dr. Loren Cordain, for example, is one of the most widely-cited Paleo nutrition experts, and yet a casual look at his book tells us everything we need to know.  It reads like a diet book, not like a comprehensive work of nutritional science.  His words are loaded and emotional, selected in order to make his readers enthusiastic about biased ideas.  Science is not supposed to do that.

The very same can be said about T. Colin Campbell, whose China Study should not be taken as a rigorous meta-analysis of nutritional studies.  If it were, you wouldn’t see it for sale at Barnes and Noble.  It is a public health warning.  T. Colin Campbell has received an avalanch of criticism from the hugely unscientific community of Paleo pushers whose arguments generally rest on the shoulders of amateur bloggers, lobby groups, and cherry-picked studies from journalists.  Their arguments also typically stem from the nature fallacy; “natural,” a most vapid term, is clearly better than modern, in their eyes; by that logic, death at childbirth, death by infectious disease, and death by a hazardous environment are preferable to deaths from heart disease, kidney failure, and breast cancer.  But death is still death, and based on humanity’s utterly ridiculous psychology of risk assessment, and our inconsistent prioritization of some types of life over others, we glibly go with the flow of conventional wisdom as defined by good PR and marketing.

Here’s a cheerful comment recently left on my blog:

No disrespect but youre an idiot!!…And if you actually read anything and did you reaearch PALEO makes total sense. Its not supose to be an all meat diet or even a high protien diet, its supposed to be a non processed natural diet. You think nomadic herding tribes were planting farms and rows of grains??? HUNTER GATHERER is how most rolled. That didnt mean fruits and veggies, they didnt have fridges or coolers back then, veggies and fruit both rot quickly making it inpossible to maintain. But you can dry meat and fat and fish and keep it all winter. You want to find out how humans are supoosed to eat, go live in the woods for a few months, and see if you can survive on a “Vegan” or “Vegitarian” diet.

The nature fallacy reminds me of out-dated religious dogma which reminds us daily that it isn’t acceptable to be a homosexual, and yet conveniently forgets that it is also still acceptable to stone your wife if she commits adultery.  Clearly, the dogma hasn’t “evolved” with culture, and the changing priorities.

Furthermore, dropping some guy in the woods is not the same as equating him with hunter-gatherers as a group (an extremely broad one).

“Modern hunter gatherers vary enormously in their diet… There is a clear trend, long known in anthropology, from almost entirely animal foods in high latitudes down to overwhelming dependence on plant foods in low latitudes, especially in dry areas where animals are few,” (Anderson, E.N., 2005)

But the debate continues in search of the optimal diet, nonetheless.

Optimal for what?  For which circumstances?  Longevity?  Athletic performance?  Disease management?  Gene expression?  Re-production?  Environmental stewardship?

Once we define the goal, the diet becomes much hazier.

Social and environmental circumstances change.  Given the high levels of human metabolic and digestive adaptability, we should seek out dietary regimes which are not only physiologically viable, but viable in other ways.  This is T. Colin Campbell’s core message; meat-centric/low-carb/Paleo cult critics label it as vegan propaganda.

Citing the Inuit Eskimos as healthy viable examples of Paleo nutrition is just as extreme as promoting a 100% vegan diet as the future of human health.  The difference, though, is that the 100% vegan diet is possible on a global scale, now.

But no.  After all the re-packaged low-carb diet books from the paleo movement (really, just a new, healthier spin on Atkins), in steps my new favorite questionable journalist, Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, who is nothing short of another author making a living exploiting conventional wisdom and confusing his lay-readers first into insecurity, and later into believing the low-carb gospel.

His claims are outrageous, his list of references formidably long, and his stamina for hypothesis-debunking is impressive!  By the end, the reader is dizzy and breathless from reading such an astounding body of evidence to demonstrate without a doubt that gravity has no pull on us anymore–that is to say, that everything we’ve been told is a lie propagated by a few self-serving scientists.  Oh yeah, and that processed food is bad for you, and that carbs are carbs are carbs and they’re all bad, too.

Thanks, Mr. Taubes.

And I hate myself just a little bit for buying into his crap at first–that is, until I began to question his assertion that energy balance was irrelevant to weight gain.  As I wrote out my thoughts, studied his words, they unraveled before my eyes, and I could see his convenient little omissions and understatements of things that didn’t support his agenda.  A quick Google search does not reveal hordes of dissenters like myself, but there are a few, and they say it much better than I do.  I only wish my own articles were as cogent and cleanly presented, and not the bitter mutterings of a disgruntled endurance athlete.

Yes, I can get pretty amped up over the nutrition debate.  Just remember this: anthropology has done a great job of unveiling the habits of pre-historic humans, but a lot of it is stuff guess-work, heavily influenced by the human ego which wants very much to be higher on the food chain.  What we do know, is that a lot of diets have worked for lots of people, under lots of circumstances.  Gatorade is junk food, and yet athletes find it an extremely beneficial energy source.

Never remove your diet from its context.

4 Comments
by demogirl06 on February 6, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by demogirl06 on February 6, 2013

http://mariamaestevens.com/2013/02/06/plant-based-vs-low-carb-paleo-in-search-of-the-optimal-diet/

Denise Minger vs. T. Colin Campbell — The China Study debate and take-home lessons.

Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. – Michael Pollan

I just spent the last several days reading the critique of T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study, written by Denise Minger.

Earlier this week, I decided to revisit The China Study book for its references–in search of the “holy grail” of significant argument in science: peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals.   As I am more fond of works of journalism (due in large part to the inaccessibility of prohibitively expensive scientific journals), I have amassed many books on a variety of nutritional subjects–written by people who have aggregated available data, on all sides of the nutritional debate.  I did this in an effort to get a broad “macro” understanding of good nutrition.

But when faced with an extremely arrogant unhealthy fellow quite opposed to organic-pushing-yuppies, and refusing to read anything but peer-reviewed journals, I had no choice but to re-open The China Study and start looking through its references.

That’s when I wondered if anyone had finally criticized the book, as it had been years since I’d last wondered.

Many have suggested that I become a registered dietitian.  Every time this is suggested, I think how that might be nice, but ultimately balk at the notion of studying the effects of isolated nutrients.  Frankly, I don’t have the science background and wouldn’t want to go back to school just to go back to school.

And besides… I’m a fitness trainer–plain and simple.  And while I could devote my attention to a PhD in kinesiology or something of the sort, it wouldn’t contribute very much to the job that I love, which has only a part to do with hard science, and the rest to do with lifestyle modification, motivation, behavioral psychology, nutrition, and goal-setting.

Thus, with a complete and utter lack of any scientific qualifications, I brave the field of nutrition, which is just about the most hotly debated subject ever.  More than politics, more than religion.  Criticizing what and how people eat is bold, because it tends to put to make people very defensive.    After all, you are what you eat.  Criticize how someone eats–you criticize what they are and what works for them (or at least what they think works for them).

That being said, my safest approach is broad in scope.  First, eat.  And read.  And eat.  And read some more.  And eat.  And read and read and read and eat and eat and eat.  And after all of this, I still can’t be sure what an optimal diet will be.

Like any amateur blogger on nutrition, I’ve done it all: vegetarian, vegan, raw food, paleo, macrobiotic, Atkins, high protein, and more.  Most fitness trainers experiment with diet as obsessively as diet-zealots.  I’ll spare the back story.  Suffice it to say, I’m like the rest of them.

I’ve read a lot of books.  I’ve done a lot of research.  My leg-work pales in comparison to Denise Minger (despite my own enthusiasm for the subject, and handful of years over her) and most definitely to T. Colin Campbell.  But allow me to speak about them both.

Enter Denise Minger – A twenty-something, passionate, zealous independent researcher with no formal education in nutrition, statistics, and other relevant sciences.  But I will be the last person to disregard her on such grounds, because I do not believe that knowledge and understanding is limited to formal credentials.  She is clearly a bright and diligent person, and I know I will very much enjoy the rest of her blog’s content.

My first impressions of her were awe and curiosity, as she was making some compelling claims that I could not superficially dismiss with the knowledge I had.  As I continued to read her blog, her About page, and finally, her bashing of The China Study, I was more turned off by her tone, her arrogance, and frenetic writing style.  But that didn’t mean what she was saying was worthless.  I was compelled by her arguments, like her many readers and fans.  Like the majority of them (I can only assume), I lack the raw data of the China Study, as well as the tools to interpret it correctly.  But even so, something felt wrong with her hard-line criticism.

My favorite books in nutrition happen to be Weston A. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study, and Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition, by Paul Pritchford.  It’s an eclectic mix of kind-of science, conventional science, and non-science.  I’m a huge fan of the concept of not messing up food by hyper-processing it.  All these books are in agreement there.

The discord in recent debate around nutrition comes from animal vs. plant-sourced food, and each of my favorite books has something different to say.  Price is all for animal foods so long as they are nutrient-dense and indigenous.  Campbell is highly suspect of animal foods, especially as a large percentage of diet, and prefers to abstain, but does not tell his readers to be vegan.  And Pritchford has a strong preference towards plant-foods, with quite minimal levels of animal foods.

Having done it all, and always modifying my diet due to my very erratic lifestyle of travel and re-location and volunteering, I eat what I can get, and I’m a stickler for quality.  I don’t tell my clients to be vegan.  But I make gosh-darn sure to emphasize that animal foods should be kept at a minimum.  It feels right.  The conglomerate opinion of the material I’ve covered states the same thing.  The common denominators are pretty consistent.

And this, I think, is the crux of T. Colin Campbell’s book, and was stated with great diplomacy in his response to her China Study bashing.  He has many decades in the field and has read untold studies in nutrition, conferred with untold scientists, nutritionists, doctors, and more.  Honestly, if I had to bank on anyone’s wealth of knowledge (irrespective of academic credentials), I’d bank on him.  Frankly, if 23-year old Denise spent the next couple of years working 40 hours a week on the subject of nutrition, she still would only have scratched the surface of Campbell’s experience.  Nothing teaches better than experience, with credentials or without.

The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know, and you can read T. Colin Campbell’s admission that The China Study is the most comprehensive in its design, but its data alone do not provide all the answers.

I argue that causality in nutrition, as it relates to disease, will be impossible to prove except in the rarest of cases, which I cannot even imagine.  Why?

Well… from a training standpoint, we don’t merely eat.  We move, we live, we inundate ourselves in chemicals, we pollute our environments, we meditate, we do things.  We do so many things–eat so many things–and do so many things to the things that we eat…

I know that some people respond to exercise differently than others.  There are hard-gainers and easy-gainers.  Stubborn fat, and elusive muscle.  In my case, muscle that comes too readily, and fat that just stays put–vegan, raw, or not.  It is amazing.

If people don’t respond uniformly to exercise, why should I expect them to respond uniformly to a diet?  Some people take more, and some people take less.

Same with diet.

So I ask, what is the point, Ms. Minger, of your relentless efforts against T. Colin Campbell, when your diet closely resembles his “plant-based” recommendation?  Campbell is a spokesperson for veganism, but neither his foundation nor his book go beyond “whole-food plant-based,” I think in order to differentiate from out-of-proportion (often poorly implemented) vegan dogma and idealism.

Ms. Minger can reference studies that demonstrate effects contrary to what Campbell is conveying.  I can show you examples of fat people who don’t get skinny with lots of energy expenditure.  That doesn’t mean cardio should be chucked out of the approach.  It merely demonstrates the complexity of the subjects at hand.

The comments one her blog speak volumes.  She’s created a community of semi-raw/paleo/Weston A. Pricers vehemently opposed to veganism, with scores of anecdotes stating how veganism made them sick, this and that and this.

Any diet can be applied poorly.

What I’ve learned in my time as a “tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist” is that a smart enough person can draw enough arrows to make a compelling case for anything.  And Ms. Minger is a very smart chick.  It’s clear.  Campbell is also pretty smart.

If you look hard enough, you will find what you’re looking for.

Now, if you consider the sheer number of arrows pointing in favor of Campbell’s conclusions which are, namely, that even moderate consumption of animal-sourced foods and refined foods promote poor health in our time, there are a lot.  I mean, a lot of them.  He has quite a bit of science to back up his claims (although, considering the amount of data out there, much of it inevitably conflicts with itself), but more importantly, he has modern human populations and controlled clinic trials to reference as well.

Minger also has done her due diligence (again, not on the order of magnitude of Campbell and his associates–she’ll be nipping at their heels for years to come), especially with the raw data of the China Study itself.  She, too, has been able to draw some compelling arrows in favor of her own conclusion which is… umm… that’s the thing.  After spending days reading her blog and the comments and the counter arguments, and so forth, I wasn’t quite sure what she was trying to accomplish.

Was it that milk doesn’t kill people?  That refined carbohydrates are equally guilty for poor health?  That people who consume more animal-based foods also consume more refined foods, and it’s unfair to hyper-focus on animal protein?  That Campbell should have controlled for other factors in his years-long analysis of the China Study data performed by himself and his assistants?  She modifies her original post by stating that she wants to “highlight potential weaknesses” in the China Study.

She takes a list of statements made by Campbell and attempts to dissect them with the raw China Study data and supporting studies.  In doing so, she draws a bunch of new arrows that point in an opposite direction.

But did she accomplish anything beyond giving animal-food-obsessed fans some reassurance that  their foods won’t necessarily kill them?  I don’t think so.

Let’s say that Minger got it right–that Campbell’s evidence is self-contradictory.  The conclusions may not follow, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.  After all, Minger herself eats the diet recommended by Campbell in The China Study.

Show me the clinical evidence of group of people following his dietary recommendations and dying from diseases of affluence.  Show me.  Do that, and I’ll be impressed.

T. Colin Campbell is a scientist.  He is a lot of other things now, too.  He’s a vegan spokesperson.  He’s a marketer.  He’s a teacher.  He’s an author.  His behavior in each of these roles must be taken in stride.  But by no means should Ms. Minger smear his work to such an extent that she’s led many of her readers into thinking that he should be kicked out of the scientific community and that his recommendations are garbage.  Some of the comments left on her blog were startling, to say the least.

The release of The China Study book was business and marketing.  Authors are beholden to publishers. Publishers need to market books.  Films need spokespeople.  Messages get conveyed, re-conveyed, re-worded, and so on until the public can digest it in sound bytes.

The paleo movement so defensive of animal foods is currently what’s hot.  I remember when raw was the headlining diet.  I can’t help but feel like Ms. Minger’s aggressive criticism is more a product of her zealous defense of her own diet (inclusive of animal foods in limited amounts) than anything else.  We can interpret data over and over again, control for that, omit this, include too much.  But the bottom line is that a whole-foods plant-based (who said vegan?) diet, applied intelligently, works for a lot of people.  This does not mean that paleo doesn’t work.

I will concede that Campbell pays a great deal of attention to the effects of animal-sourced food, and too little to the effects of refined carbohydrates and oils.  Again, it does not make his recommendations wrong.  We’re not talking about cause.  We’re talking about association.  If the ingestion of animal-sourced foods leads to the displacement of plant foods–if the chemical high we get from animal foods leads to an extra-chemical high from combining them with refined foods–his recommendations still hold.

And what do I think of Ms. Minger’s “raw food, plant-based, paleo-ish, Weston-A-Price style fusion?”  I think it’s great.  I mean, I don’t think it gets much better than that, especially if you are young and healthy and don’t have contraindications.  But you cannot remove anything from its context.  Would I eat that diet if I had cancer or kidney disease?  Probably not.

T. Colin Campbell and company are addressing a nation of sick people in a polluted environment with a plant-based strategy demonstrated in risk–not causality.  I believe their recommendations are safe and effective when applied intelligently.  I believe, furthermore, that their recommendations are excellent in the context of industrial agriculture, environmental constraints, and negative externalities–as well as in the context of changing farm policy, swiftly reversing an obesity epidemic, and empowering consumers.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees, trying too hard to be right.

3 Comments
by demogirl06 on October 3, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by demogirl06 on October 3, 2012

http://mariamaestevens.com/2012/10/03/denise-minger-vs-t-colin-campbell-the-china-study-debate-and-take-home-lessons/

6-Pack Abs Are Expensive

…unless you’re a teenage boy, or a hard-gainer.

The guy on the cover of Men’s Health Magazine is a professional model.  His job is to look good, and he doesn’t look that good by cutting back on carbs and doing crunches.

That guy probably pays money to look that good.  A lot of money.

I work in a body building gym in San Francisco.  It also just so happens to be San Francisco’s “gay gym.”  Sure, straight people are allowed in, but the member base is predominantly male.  You’re either a body builder, gay, or both.

It seems to me that body image is as important to this particular member base as it is for women!  Everywhere you look, there are tight, hard bodies pumping iron.  There’s the core group: the members who arrive every day, without fail, and work out for 2-3 hours.  Lift-pause-lift-pause-lift-pause.

…and then some “cardio:” slow, deliberate steps on the stair mill–forever.

I don’t know enough about body building to give an in-depth analysis, but what I can tell you is that these guys have the most expensive bodies of anyone I’ve ever known in a neighborhood gym.

  • $200 a month for supplements: protein powder, meal replacement, BCAAS, and more.
  • $100 a month for extra food: shakes, smoothies, and chicken.  Lots of chicken.  Insane amounts of chicken.
  • $0-$400 a month for personal training and accountability.
  • $80-$200 a month for body work, including stretching, massage, hair removal, and tanning.
  • $$$ = Time.  Tons of time exercising and eating.  Time planning meals.  Time commuting to and from the gym.  Time waiting between sets.  Having a solid body is one of the most time-intensive exercise goals of them all.  It’s like playing a sport, only your “practice” is 2-3x longer every day, and you have to invest 2-3x more time fretting about your food, and 2-3x more time recovering (every workout aims to demolish muscles; every workout aims to leave them twitching, dying, and torn at a microscopic level, in order to repair and grow bigger and stronger).  What is an hour of your time worth?

Don’t get me wrong.  I have tremendous respect for body builders.  It is a sport that requires insane precision and dedication.

But I’m weary on their behalf.  I’m weary for the time they spend fretting about whether one shoulder looks bigger than the other, about whether their kidneys are okay, whether they are coping with their body dysmorphia constructively.

Hey!  That’s just for body builders!  I don’t want to be a big massive guy.  I just want that 6-pack!

Take a ticket.  You and everyone else who doesn’t want an ounce of fat on them.  And there are two ways to get rid of every ounce of fat:

1) Just don’t eat.  Ever.  Give up food.

2) Don’t eat carbs.  Hyper-dose yourself on protein.  Stick with natural, unprocessed fats when needed, and lean protein the rest of the time.  Oh, and when you’re ready for your photo shoot, dehydrate yourself.

The body is designed to have a healthy layer of fat on it.  Your brain is wired to seek out fat and sugar.  When it ingests fat, it thinks, “Awesome!  Let’s eat more of that!”  When it finds sugar, it says, “Whoa! Cheap, delicious energy!”  When the two are combined, “Holy shit!  The is the most amazing food stuff I’ve ever encountered!”  It’s fat and carbs that the body wants.

Fat keeps the body feeling full longer than anything else, and it keeps the body running slowly.  Carbs are the body’s preferred energy source, and they allow for fast, rapid movement; they also make you feel happy.

The body does not have the same hard-wiring for protein.  Of course, protein is an essential macro-nutrient, but after you eat a sufficient amount, the brain says, “Boy, I don’t want another bite of chicken.  I’ll throw up.  I’m warning you…  No more!”

Eating massive amounts of protein is hard work.  And it’s hard work to digest as well.  You’re net energy decreases, and your organs work over-time.  It also requires a lot of water to digest.  If you aren’t getting sufficient fiber and vegetable intake, you run the short-term risk of constipation (uncomfortable) and the long-term risk of colon cancer (life threatening) and other types of cancer (if your protein is predominantly animal-sourced).

On the plus side: you will have very healthy hair and nails, and big muscles.

If you have a good ethic of regular exercise, including a variety of exercise activities, and you are fretting about your abs, know that for most people, 6-pack abs take an extreme level of dedication that may not be lifestyle friendly.

1 Comment
by demogirl06 on June 21, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Fitness & Lifestyle, Nutrition
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Posted by demogirl06 on June 21, 2012

http://mariamaestevens.com/2012/06/21/6-pack-abs-are-expensive/

Against The Grain: Effects From Starch In The Diet

The human digestive tract is a subject of great controversy.  Those professing that humans are innately carnivorous, herbivorous, or omnivorous argue at length about the differences in cheeks, teeth, stomach acids, length of intestines, etc.  My readers already know that I lean toward the herbivorous side of things, but do agree that small amounts of animal-based foods are beneficial.  Everything in moderation, after all.

The subject of carbohydrates is also highly controversial.  Everyone agrees that sugar (a carbohydrate) is harmful in our modern amounts–especially fructose when it doesn’t come directly from a fruit.  For non-fruit-and-vegetable carbohydrates, such as beans and grains, the jury is still out.

Gluten, a protein found in high quantities in wheat, is getting the spotlight as everyone’s new favorite fad diet.  ”Gluten free” is a popular labeling tool to make consumers feel all warm as fuzzy about their purchase.  My co-worker reported not too long ago that his shampoo bottle said “gluten free.” “It’s not like I’m going to drink the stuff!” he exclaimed.  So what’s all the hype about gluten, starch, and carbs in general?  Are they good for us?  Bad for us? Do they make us fat?

Before we go into it, let’s take a look at digestion…

The digestive process can be divided into two main categories: mechanical and chemical.  Mechanical is simple: processing a food, and chewing it.  Chemical digestion, however, is a little more complicated.  It occurs in the mouth, the stomach, and the small intestine.  Digestive action is dependent on receptors that send messages to the brain, which responds sequentially by sending water, digestive enzymes (from the pancreas), enzyme precursors, coenzymes, electrolytes, acids, bases, buffer salts, hormones, and more.

Chemical digestion begins in the mouth with the secretion of amylase, an enzyme that breaks down starch.  Stomach acid, however, neautralizes amylase and effectively stops starch digestion, until it is resumed again in the small intestine (considering that carbohydrates are quick to leave the stomach, this makes sense).    Protein digestion is mechanical in the mouth (not chemical); protein is broken from long to short chains of amino acids in the stomach’s hydrochloric acid.

When starches are consumed without proteins, the acidity of the stomach approaches neutral and it will not hinder starch digestion.  When proteins are consumed without starches, stomach acid becomes strong.  But when starches and proteins are consumed at the same time (a hamburger, chicken and rice?), the body must provide two opposing digestive mediums, and it cannot.  The result is impaired or partial starch digestion and impaired or partial protein digestion.

Partial grain digestion can have adverse health effects.  ”Undigested particles of grain get stuck in the microvilli of our intestinal walls, building up with time, ultimately undermining our ability to properly digest other foods because of this interference. If the interference becomes extreme, a host of intestinal and auto-immune disorders can result including leaky gut syndrome, gluten intolerance, celiac disease, and irritable bowel syndrome,” (Kristen M., from foodrenegade.com).

Partial animal protein digestion also causes problems.  Animal proteins contain no fiber and so they pass through the digestive tract more slowly.  In the words of Dr. Douglas N. Graham, a leading spokesman for raw foods, “At one hundred degrees, in a dark, wet environment, undigested meat will go bad (rot) rather rapidly.  The partial digestion of meat that occurs when it is eaten with grains very often accounts for the putrefication so obvious when feces are expelled.”

Grains don’t putrefy.  But they do ferment, producing some ethanol (alcohol) and gas.  While there is nothing inherently harmful about gas, alcohol does not belong in the body, as it is a poison that kills cells with which it comes into contact.  Alcohol is also an addictive substance.

Chemists have also discovered over a dozen separate opiates in wheat (opium is a narcotic known for its addictive and sedating qualities), which explains the “brain fog” people often report from too much gluten.  Turning to a high energy food that leaves you feeling drugged and addicted is not advisable.

Gluten in most starchy foods is mucous-forming, leading to congestion and impaired breathing.  Due to this, as well as their digestive speed, starches (particularly wheat) are ill-advised for athletes.  Starches are recommended due to their slow release of energy, but from an athlete’s point of view (athletes demand rapid energy release), this makes little sense.  Eating a complex carbohydrate after a training sessions has the athlete waiting for hours before he obtains any benefit, and by then, the receptors for glycogen storage are less sensitive, leading to delayed glycogen repletion.

Slow digestion requires much more digestive energy, when compared to the rapid digestion of fruits, resulting in lower “net” energy.  Simple sugar is the body’s preferred source of energy: glucose and fructose.  The two behave very differently in the body.  Glucose goes right to the blood stream to fuel muscles and cells.  Fructose gets metabolized into the liver and is converted into fat (roughly 30%–an evolutionary survival strategy, I’m sure) and glycogen (the fuel reserve for the muscles and brain).

Sugar and starch (which breaks down into sugar) are highly addictive–sugar, primarily, because we are hard-wired to seek sweet foods as naturally bioavailable sources of energy; and both sugar and starch (high-glycemic starch, really… like flour products and processed grains), due to their direct influence on serotonin (the happy neurotransmitter) levels.  Once released, serotonin elevates the mood, having a powerful effect on our demeanor.  Cravings for sugary and starchy foods are typically your brain’s attempt to make you feel better.

If that weren’t enough, there are the acid-forming properties of grain that should be considered.  Grains (and beans, nuts, and seeds) contain phytic acid (phytic acid is tightly bound in the phosphorus content of grains and legumes, especially the bran portion of grain or the outer layer of legumes. It is considered the “principle storage form of phoshorus.”).  The human body is more alkaline, and a diet high in acid-forming foods leads to blood acidification, de-mineralization (and alkaline minerals are pulled from the body’s reserves in order to neutralize acid), and inflammation.

Grains only entered the human diet about 10,000 years ago–a mere blink in evolutionary time.  Traditional human societies all found ways of coping with phytic acid.  According to Kimi Harris, author of thenourishinggourmet.com, “Phytase is the enzyme generally present in phytic containing grains and legumes that neutralizes phytic acid. Sprouting, soaking and fermenting raw grains allows phytase to become activated, which then reduces the phytic acid. We as humans do produce some phytase in our bodies, which explains why some can eat a high, unsoaked whole grain diet without negative impact. Since lactobacilli and other digestive microflora can also produce phytase, those of us with a robust intestinal health will have a much easier time digesting grains, soaked or unsoaked.  But regardless, all of us can benefit from less phytic acid in our grains.”

  • Sprouting — This is when the whole grain kernel is sprouted.
  • Soaking — This is when the already milled whole grain flour is soaked in an acidic medium like buttermilk, whey, yogurt, lemon juice, or vinegar before being cooked.
  • Fermenting — This is when the grain is naturally fermented with wild yeast, as is the case with all sourdough breads.

More recently, due to the Industrial Revolution and the hyper-mechanization of grain milling, the advent of processing techniques to increase shelf life, the saturation of refined carbohydrate products into supermarkets, and the subsidization of grain production, never have grains been so negatively influential in the human diet.  We have abandoned most of our traditional processing methods.

So what to do?  Should we stop eating grain?

No.  But consider the following tips:

1) Grain should not dominate the diet.  The majority of carbohydrates should be sourced some whole fruits and vegetables.  Too often we see individuals who consume scarce amounts of fresh produce and subsist off cheap, easy-to-eat grain products.  Grain should be an accompaniment, not a centerpiece of the dinner plate.

2) Avoid as much as possible (consider the true social impact of eschewing all of it) hyper-processed grain products like most store-bought bread, cakes, cookies, pastas, pita chips, crackers, pancakes, etc.

3) Eat a variety of whole grains, and consider soaking, sprouting, or fermenting them before consumption if you suspect you have impaired digestion.

4) Abandon the old starch-and-protein paradigm, to improve digestion.  Whole grains are a great morning recommendation, as they do give slow-releasing energy for daily activity and concentration.  They are fiber-rich and increase satiety.  Save your protein for later in the day, especially after your training sessions, in order to give your body the building blocks it needs when it shifts into repair mode (rest and sleep); or, eat protein separately as a small snack.

1 Comment
by demogirl06 on January 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Nutrition
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by demogirl06 on January 13, 2012

http://mariamaestevens.com/2012/01/13/against-the-grain-effects-from-starch-in-the-diet/

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