Eating the right way

I find that in coaching people in fitness they will do absolutely anything I write on the whiteboard. Sometimes they think it looks lame and end up puking or cursing the day they were born because what looked so simple turned out to be a miserable punishment for some unknown sin in their past. Or something like that.

Diet?

Not so much.

The previous post was about sugar, fructose specifically. The first thing I tell people is to eat protein at every meal. I don’t mean now and then. I mean AT EVERY FLIPPING MEAL! It’s not really that hard in my mind but it causes a real struggle for people. If you can’t eat a little protein (eggs or meat… heck, have some milk) then ditching the high fructose corn syrup is not really going to happen.

I work with some skinny people who won’t give up the sugar. It’s hard to convince them that sugar is slowly killing them because they look good. They don’t carry any [obvious] body fat and they get attention from the opposite sex. The problem is getting today’s culture to look down the road and past the current sugar high to the fatty liver, type two diabetes, hypertension, lipid dysfunction, excess fat and eventually cardiovascular disease. Maybe it’s that I’m staring down the barrel of 40 years old but this stuff is real and I have seen the carnage. In fact, I fully expect to see some people I know and love to drop dead in the next decade. It is a horrible thought to me, but experience tells me it’s true. The following decade will be even worse that.

If you can watch the lecture on fructose and continue to follow the same old dietary habits you in all likelihood just don’t get it yet. I’ll keep working on you.

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

Watch and learn people!

Food Buyer Beware

“Cage Free Chickens”
I was at Trader Joe’s and needed to buy eggs. I grabbed a box and threw it in my cart, noticing that the eggs were from “cage free” hens. With visions of happy chickens running around a sunny field I wandered off to find some butter. It wasn’t until I opened the carton to make breakfast that I saw this:

“Did you know the eggs in this carton are Cage Free Eggs? That’s right. The hens that lay these eggs are raised on a family-owned farm here in the Pacific Northwest, where they are free to roam at will in environmentally controlled houses that protect them from both predators and the elements. These hens are fed a completely vegetarian diet and are never given steroids, hormones or stimulants of any kind. The hen’s diet and quality of life result in delicious, nutritious eggs you’ll find only at your neighborhood Trader Joe’s in the Pacific Northwest.”

This statement is a great example of why you need to be careful, maybe even more careful, when shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s than at the regular supermarket. These stores have spent a lot of marketing dollars fostering their image as sellers of healthy food, the problem is they are just as guilty of sloganeering, using buzzwords and marketing hype as any Kroger store.

Cage Free
As it did for me it took me to a happy field of flowers, sunshine juicy bugs to eat and safety. Not really. The fact that the cage is an “environmentally controlled house” means they are still in a cage, it’s just big enough to walk around in. That’s better, but it’s not the image they are marketing. When buying eggs or chickens the phrase you are looking for is pastured, I’ll explain why in a second.

Protect them from the elements
This could be a good or bad thing. In an environmentally controlled house-cage the hens are not outside where they would prefer to be breathing fresh air. I’m only guessing, but I doubt these are retractable roof house-cages so that the hens see the sunshine either.

Vegetarians?
That’s a great marketing ploy. What I have found is that marketing hens as vegetarians is a way of telling us that they weren’t fed animal by-products. That’s a good thing, except that chickens are not vegetarians and naturally eat insects, grubs and worms. That’s why pastured chickens are superior; they have not been denied the natural diet of that creates healthy, omnivore chickens. Eggs can’t be of better quality than the chicken that lays them.

Quality of life
This is important and why I might recommend these eggs over industrial farmed eggs. The quality of life of the animals we depend on for food is extremely important. The closer to a natural diet and environment our dinner comes from the healthier it will be.

I shop at TJ’s and will continue to do so, but I will keep in mind that marketing extends to even the healthiest foods. I have no problem with marketing; I just need to be an informed consumer so I know what I am really buying, not what they want me to think I’m buying.

Wheat

Inclusion of wheat products in the human diet in many (not all–I’d estimate 70% of people) yields devastating health effects. In a few, it shortens life. In the majority, it leads to a slow, miserable hell of inflammatory diseases like arthritis, coronary disease, and cancer.

and something I have been mentioning…

While some advocate the notion that only calories count and diet composition makes no difference, I offer this possibility: Whether or not weight is lost by diet, there can be enormous health effects independent of weight based on the composition of diet. Inclusion or exclusion of wheat is one such crucial factor.

This is from Wheat Hell by Dr. William Davis.  Please read the entire post as it is thought provoking.  Why not try eliminating wheat for a week or two and see if you have any health changes in the short term?

Dr. Davis is a cardiologist and is the author of the book, Track Your Plaque: The only heart disease prevention program that shows how the new CT heart scans can be used to detect, track, and control coronary plaque.  His writings at http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com are worth taking time for.

Protein for Weight loss

ARTICLE:  Some Diets May Be Better Than Others For Keeping Weight Off And Staying Healthy, Study Suggests

 

When you are making changes and adopting a healthier nutrition plan, the first thing we recommend is to quit the sugar habit.  The second thing we ask you to do is starting eating protein at every meal and snack.  There are good reasons we recommend this, besides it being a great excuse to grill a steak!

 

Simply put, your body cannot function without protein.  The body doesn’t store excess protein so it’s important that you continually send more down so the body can continue functioning.  For the avid CrossFitter, repairing the body after workouts is a continual process as you are forcing radical physical adaptations and building/repairing muscles is a major part of this.  Your body uses protein to make enzymes and hormones.  Protein is required if you want to have bones, muscles, cartilage, blood or skin.  Protein is also required in various functions such as digestion, immune responses, DNA replication and repair and metabolism.

  

Although both plans were equal in calories, half the group followed a moderate-protein diet (40% carbohydrates, 30% protein, 30% fat) while the other followed a diet based on USDA’s food-guide pyramid (55% carbohydrates, 15% protein, 15% fat).

 If you added those numbers you probably realized that 55%+15%+15%=85%.  I found that that the USDA/American Heart Association specs are closer to 60% carbs, 25% fats and 15% protein.  It’s questionable that this is enough protein for the average body and is certainly not enough for the active CrossFit practitioner.  The CrossFitter should experiment, but will probably find they perform better with a focus on fats, protein at every meal/snack and with as many veggies as they can tolerate.  Have an apple for dessert.

 

As we’ve seen.  There is an effort to say that paleo and zone based diets regard one nutrient over another, see the previous post.  Now a diet of only protein certainly wouldn’t be healthy or possible.  We recommend that you eat in a way that supports they way our body is designed to be fueled.  The Zone prescription of 40-30-30 is a balanced approach to calorie intake.  Remember that carbs should come from leafy and colorful vegetables and rarely, if ever, from high-glycemic carbohydrates such as potatoes, rice, pasta, bread and sweets.  If you do this and eat a moderate amount of protein and a reasonable amount of healthy, naturally occurring fats (mono, poly and saturated) you will have a successful maintenance diet.

 

Finally, when reading about health studies, make sure you look for compliance statistics.  If these important statistics are missing the review of the study is incomplete or the study data were not credible enough to share.  The more information a researcher shares about their methodology and the more data from their databases they release, the more you should trust their conclusions.

 

 

I’ll let the author have the last word:

 

Any diet will do? Not if you want to lose fat instead of muscle. Not if you want to lower your triglyceride levels so you’ll be less likely to develop diabetes and heart disease. Not if you want to avoid cravings that tempt you to cheat on your diet. And not if you want to keep the weight off long-term.

 

 

 

 

 

Calorie Equivalency

ARTICLE: Low-Carb? Low-Fat? Study Finds Calories Count More

In the linked article we are told that for losing weight it doesn’t matter what you eat as long as you eat very few calories. OK. I’ll buy that. If you really want an aggressive weight loss program commit to a 10-day fast. I promise you that you will shed pounds.

Does anyone take the position of this straw man? Who’s arguing that extreme calorie reduction won’t cause you to lose weight? I’ve seen any number of people basically starve themselves on shakes or cleansing diets. The weight comes off but where’s the health? I see weak people who are now skinny. If weight is your only goal then this plan should work just fine.

Let’s look at a few portions of the article:

“As the world grapples with rising obesity, millions have turned to popular diets like Atkins, Zone and Ornish that tout the benefits of one nutrient over another.”

I sure tout the benefits of eating lots of fresh vegetables, some fresh fruits and eating animals that were treated well and raised in their natural environments. I certainly will tell you to eliminate or at least vastly reduce your dependence on grain based food products. I eat very little grain based carbs and eat an uncalculateable (I made that up I think) number of calories from protein and fat sources. The implication here is that the quality of your calories plays no role. Maybe they were misquoted.

“The hidden secret is it doesn’t matter if you focus on low-fat or low-carb,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the research.

I guess we don’t argue about this to the extent that not eating fat or not eating carbs will have a weight reducing affect on your body. The Hidden Secret is that a nutritional equivalency is being set up where there is no equivalency exists. To imply that low-carb and low-fat are essentially the same is wrong.

Lead researcher Dr. Frank Sacks of Harvard said a restricted calorie diet gives people greater food choices, making the diet less monotonous.

With all due respect to Dr. Frank Sacks of Harvard, he should get out more, specifically with people who eat high fat, high protein, low carb diets. The feast you can put together while not including grains is substantial, beautiful, tasty and will help you lose weight. Did you just yell at me for not being scientific?

“Before Debbie Mayer, 52, enrolled in the study, she was a “stress eater” who would snack all day and had no sense of portion control. Mayer used to run marathons in her 30s, but health problems prevented her from doing much exercise in recent years.”

Mayer tinkered with different diets — Weight Watchers, Atkins, South Beach — with little success.
“I’ve been battling my weight all my life. I just needed more structure,” said Mayer, of Brockton, Mass., who works with the elderly.

That’s anecdotal. Here’s my anecdotal evidence…

I won’t bring up names but how about the guy I know who dropped 15 pounds in 3 weeks committed to the Paleo diet? He ate whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted he just made sure it was from the expansive paleo menu.

How about me? I was a Zone adherent for quite awhile and decided to go Paleo. I didn’t change anything but I dropped 95% of the grains from my diet. I didn’t sleep more or change my workout schedule. I leaned up to the tune of 10 pounds in about 6 weeks. I guarantee you that my calories increased. I increased my fat intake A LOT.

Enough is enough. Claiming that a low calorie diet is effective whether the calories come from fat or carbohydrates isn’t the same as saying they are both healthy ways to eat. What I find unacceptable is when the issue of weight is discussed as an end unto itself. I understand, for many, weight is all that matters. We are different around here. What you put into your body affects more than your body weight. For us, weight is a symptom, something that happens based on the nutrition and fitness choices we make. Eat real food, not food products, avoid grains, eat a paleo-style diet, and get some intense exercise. Because a bunch of MDs build some nutritional equivalency based on a result that has little relation to healthy eating, people will assume that the quality of their calories doesn’t matter. Maybe they were just misquoted.

Great Fats

I love fat. Chris at Zen-to-Fitness has post about his 5 favorite fats. If I was writing this Top-5 list it would read like this:

1. Nuts. Almond, Brazil, Hazel, Pecan, Cashew, Macadamia… That’s some good stuff! I eat nuts in small amounts (and some not small amounts) all day long. I grab a handful before I teach a CrossFit class and often grab a handful between classes. If you are what you eat then my large intake of nuts might explain a few things.
2. The Fat on my steak. Since switching to grass fed beef I have been enjoying the melt in your mouth goodness of the fat. That probably sends some of you to the puke bowl, but you just haven’t tasted it yet.
3. Avocados. My only issue with avocados is that I don’t like pealing them. The obvious solution is to cut one in half and dig it out with a spoon. Avocados are a great addition to breakfast and most other meals, especially when you eat a Primal Diet.
4. Butter. This is mostly because I have been really into sautéed mushrooms lately.
5. Olive oil. It’s just so darn useful.

 

That’s my list anyhow. Not very scientific, but it’s what I like.