Nutritious!

[yagol]

I've moved on to the nutrition class, in which we are learning that no, you should not eat equal parts Meat / Dairy & Egg / Bread & Cereal / Fruits & Veggies (the four food groups) and no, we are not supposed to avoid fats & oils at all cost and fill up on grains (The Food Pyramid v1) ... when we tried that everybody got fat because they ate non-

Comments

[roaming]

A very interesting book that discounts all the current "facts" and wisdom about how to eat is Good Calories, Bad Calories by Times science writer Gary Taubes. It's a bit dense for me, citing 7 years of research in scientific papers: I wish he'd have summarized each chapter, because less than halfway through my head was spinning with more facts than I could store in my overloaded memory banks. Long story short: fat and cholesterol don't make us fat: insulin reaction to "white" carbs=sugar does.

The theory is summarized in an NYTime Article from 2002 that got him started on more research.

This is fun: watch Dr. Andrew Weill diss Mehmet Oz on Larry King live while agreeing with most of Taube's book (except for focusing mainly on meat -- that's right, Taube's says Atkins was right).

[yagol]

White carbs probably means empty calorie high availability (easily digested) carbs - white potatoes, white rice, white flour, refined sugar. Atkins promoted a carb-free diet that forces the body into ketosis where it starts to run off of proteins instead of carbs for regular energy, which is biologically abnormal, and tends to result in low sugar levels. Unfortunately, the muscles and the brain only operate on sugar (glucose), so the body spends all that time turning proteins into glucose. Normally the proteins you eat have other purposes... so an Atkins-diet tends to leave you weak and fuzzy-headed. Any-way, calories cause weight gain, lack of calories causes weight loss. (because the atkins foods are so rich, people actually feel fuller and eat less calories, which is why it works as a diet.) It doesn't really matter where they come from, the body can turn fat into sugar and sugar into fat, &c.

Ref "The Diet Wars" ... uhm... episode of some PBS show or other.

[roaming]

The body can turn fat into sugar? Really? Strange. Where do you get that "fact" from?

I'm not advocating Atkins: I'd die on such a thing, not being big on meat. But I have a friend who does it periodically to drop loads of weight, and she's never had the side-effects you mention. She actually reports having more energy, clearer thinking, less hunger.

[yagol]

Err... most recently, my nutrition class and text... and it's not that strange. Cells require glucose as their energy source. Ultimately, all the carbon chains we consume (simple sugars, complex carbohydrates, fats/oils) are broken down into glucose if they are to be used. Excess energy is chained together to form body fat... and then converted back to glucose when the body needs it.
Hmmm. It's sort of obliquely hinted at in the wikipedia glucose and blood glucose entries. I dunno a good online summary of human metabolism offhand.

[roaming]

So if I understand this, literally everything we eat becomes glucose for the body to convert to "energy units" in order to use it?

whodathunkit.

[yagol]

Not -everything- we eat. Just the calorie bits that we use for energy (that is, fat/starch/sugar). Other bits, proteins, vitamins, minerals, are used for building the body and making it work correctly. The 'Calorie' parts of food are energy. Well, and proteins are weird in that they can be either energy or building blocks. If they are used for energy, they turn into glucose and then can't be used as cell walls, etc. And we count them as having calories, even though the body may not use them for energy.