What’s the Deal with Calories In/Calories Out?
Calories In/Calories Out (CICO) aka “The Calorie Theory” may be the most repeated and most accepted phrase in diet studies and theory. It’s also sure to spark a huge debate any time you wish to challenge it, or maybe even press people for details on what it really means.
The truth about it is-it’s crap. Calories In/Calories Out is basically garbage in/garbage out. The phrase/theory or whatever it is has been so misunderstood and abused that I’m not sure if it is even salvageable. It could be that the whole idea just needs to go into the recycle bin.
(Teach a parrot to say Calories In/Calories Out, and you have a diet “expert!”)
CICO Means What?
The above is a simple representation of what diet folks have been telling people for decades. It basically states that body weight is changed when calories change by a specific ratio of 3,600 or 3,500, depending on what the source is.
This gets repeated over, and over, and over.
I picked one example from The Mayo Clinic-
…Your weight is a balancing act, but the equation is simple: If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight.
Because 3,500 calories equals about 1 pound (0.45 kilogram) of fat, you need to burn 3,500 calories more than you take in to lose 1 pound. So if you cut 500 calories from your typical diet each day, you’d lose about 1 pound a week (500 calories x 7 days = 3,500 calories).
Cutting calories doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, it can be as simple as:
- Skipping one extra high-calorie indulgence a day
- Swapping high-calorie foods for lower calorie options
- Reducing portion sizes…
So, What’s the Problem?
It simply does not work that way. The Mayo Clinic author that wrote that is an idiot.
Weight is far, far more complicated than a simple equation with calories as the only inputs. It neglects types of calories, hormones (which actually manage weight), and it is a mis-application of the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy).
As other researchers have pointed out, the animal world does not and could not work this way. Animals that hibernate do not simply pig out before the winter by instinct to prepare for the winter. It’s done with hormones. Fat storage and weight maintenance in humans is mostly hormonal too. It’s not some linear day-by-day addition or subtraction of calories.
A Video You Really Should Listen To if You Want to Understand It-
I was googling around for a better explanation, and the best single page I found has a video by Zoe Harcombe called “Thermodynamics and Weight Loss.” It’s just under 7 minutes and well worth the time.
A short summary of what Harcombe is saying is that CICO is fundamentally flawed because it attempts to use the first law of thermodynamics (which applies to a closed system) to humans, which are not closed systems. You can listen to the rest and make your own conclusions. I’m not sure this video completely explains everything we are interested in, but it more than does the job as far as putting CICO to bed.
You can also listen to Zoe Harcombe discuss this with Jimmy Moore in this podcast…
The Problem When Everyone Has Their Own Definition-
Before writing this blog entry, I thought I would drop the question on the smart folks over at Marksdailyapple Forum and see where it goes. As of this writing, the topic ran on to 14 pages, and my conclusion is that even people that are pretty good at staying on top of diet topics get completely scattered and confused when CICO comes up.
Part of the problem is the lack of a specific definition, and part of it is that the concept is so stupid to begin with, that people make up what they want it to mean for themselves and just dig in. When that happens, I wonder if the concept has any use at all, because everyone is on a different page anyway and no one will ever sort it out.
Some examples-
Here are just a few observations from the CICO question from Mark’s forum:
- CICO really just means the more you eat, the more you gain. That should be obvious. Why even bring it up? People who don’t want to believe CICO are just lazy and want to eat all they want and not gain.
- CICO works under normal conditions, it just doesn’t always apply, so what’s the problem? So what if there are exceptions?
- CICO says if you eat more you gain, but the concept is useless because it does not explain why.
- CICO is not specific enough, a better equation is Energy In (corrected for digestion) = (BMR/RMR + TEF + TEA + SPA/NEAT) + Change in Body Stores (click this link for a source and definitions.)
- CICO works and the hormone thing is accounted for in calories out. (But, it isn’t, if you read the Mayo Clinic nonsense or even look at the calorie theory formula above, CICO uses calories differences only.)
This is just off of one discussion. Obviously what people think it means is scattered all over the place, hence the whole concept is useless.
A Simple Thought Experiment-
I put this on the discussion on Mark’s forum to illustrate how it is impossible to account for what happens with weight by calories alone-
Say you have a large number of identical twins, and they are selected because their weight matches, and their health is pretty much the same.
Now for each of the identical twins, one eats Primal (healthy, pretty much low carb), and the other eats crap every day, but they eat the same number of calories. The one that eats crap drinks a lot of sugar soda, twinkies, pasta, bread, and stops at McDonald’s every day. They do exactly the same amount of activity as pairs, running, sports, whatever.
Continue this for years.
At the end, will they weigh the same?
Of course not! They ate the same number of calories, expended the same energy, but no way in hell will their weight be identical. It’s impossible.
That to me proves calories in/calories out is false.
Why will their weight not match? Because all calories are not the same. Borrowing the explanation in Taubes’ “Why We Get Fat,” the higher-carb twin that gets calories from sugar and junk food will produce more insulin, and insulin is the fat storage hormone. It’s not a calorie calculation, it’s hormones.
CICO pretends hormones do not exist. It can’t work.
Share on FacebookBest and Worst Reading from the Past Week
I thought it might be fun to write a quick summary of the best and worst stuff I have seen about health and nutrition online in the past week or so. These are not necessarily new articles, just stuff that I ran across, or someone else mentioned-
Best:
Mark Sisson takes a shot at higher carb diets and people that are against Primal (his word for Paleo).
A Metabolic Paradigm Shift, or Why Fat is the Preferred Fuel for Human Metabolism
…It boggles my mind that such a large segment of the so-called health and fitness community would continue to defend high carbohydrate diets with such tenacity…
Worst:
Here’s one of those sites where the writer has a pic of his muscles so you are supposed to think he knows what he is talking about. Plus, the references at the end are typical “professional” associations, the last people you want to believe. Groups like this are too political and its where most of the bad and damaging advice comes from. (To be fair, this guy also makes the “Best” list below because I happen to kind-of agree with another one of his rants.)
“Insulin Resistance? Stop the Nonsense”
…Most promoters of low carbs to no carbs diet, or no starches want you to believe two things. The first is they want you to believe that insulin resistance is ‘an absolute’ and a modern probability of genetic predisposition. Secondly, they want you to believe that ‘man in nature’ ate primarily a carbs-free diet. Well neither of these two assumptions is true…
This guy gets completely in over his head, and he’s making a strawman argument anyway. Low carbers do low carb because it works. They are typically basing everything on insulin resistance. Some hardly talk about it, some do, but not like this guy says-hence-it’s a strawman argument.
Best:
“Saturated Fat and Heart Disease”
…The bottom line is that there is no connection between the intake of saturated fat and heart disease or stroke. But there is a connection between the currently recommended high carbohydrate diet and heart disease and stroke.
So enjoy bacon and eggs and forgo the oatmeal and bagels, your LDL will come down your HDL will go up, your weight will go down and your satisfaction with your diet will go up. The low fat diet is the worst dietary advice in the last 50 years and it is the proximate cause of our epidemics of heart disease, diabetes and obesity…
Worst:
There is so much wrong with this one I couldn’t finish it. This is basically some idiot spending way too much time trying to nit-pit everything they can about the Primal/Paleo approach, and it makes weak or false arguments.
“THE PALEO DIET: FAD, RELIGION, OR SOLUTION?”
…The true defining hate in the Paleo Diet is that of grains (as well as beans, legumes, and some starch vegetables) we are told to avoid. This isn’t the only place where we find this. Over and over again we find a writer after writer demonizing the grain, sugar, and starch carbohydrates. Their technical data for this is actually remarkably small. In fact, the data that exists against the use of grains or starch vegetables is limited to a very small set of studies and always in large epidemiology research (which has too many variables to take without a grain of salt). The majority of it uses small or special populations to make invalid points…
Remind me to not believe anything this moron writes!
Best:
This one is from the blowhard that wrote about insulin resistance (see above), but this one I think deserves to make the “Best” list.
“The Calories Myth”
…Calories-in, Calories-out: Stop the Nonsense
I’ve known competitors who became so calories-balanced-obsessed that they cut broccoli spears or green beans in half so it measures “right” on the scale. This is what the myth of the calories-in, calories-out logic leads to. And it’s too bad because it’s much ado about nothing. It’s a lot of mental stress over an illusion of control that simply does not exist. But the calorie balance emphasis “seems” like it exists because the industry uses it with a focus entirely in the “immediate” realm of time. But there are three realms of time the body adjusts for: the immediate, the residual, and the cumulative. And if you look at the calories-in and calories-out, calories-balance logic, over the long term, the cumulative term, it all breaks down, and it all makes little sense…
Overall, good job. I’d like to see more like this one. He goes on to plug his book, which I don’t care to read, but I think this one is good.
Share on FacebookRecipe: Upside Down Pizza-Omlette
Upside Down Pizza-Omlette
Here’s a simple thing you can do with eggs if you are bored-
You need:
2 eggs
Butter or olive oil
Link-type sausage (I used Bilinski’s Cajun-Style Andouille Chicken Sausage)
Romano or Mozzarella
1/4 avocado
Whatever else you like in omlettes
This is really just an omlette that you don’t fold over. The trick is in the order in which you make it. I’ll write how I made this one, but it’s easy to customize.
Slice up the sausage into thin circles, and warm up in a small frying pan in a little butter. Shred Romano cheese, enough to fill the gaps between the circles.
Fry that carefully until the cheese melts and starts to brown a little.
Scramble the eggs and pour that on top, then cut up the avocado into little bits and put that on top.
For this one, I waited until the egg was nearly cooked, and flipped it over. You could also just wait until eggs are cooked and not flip it.
Serve it upside-down. (See above pic)
This is another all-Earth Fare recipe. I got everything at the local Earth Fare.
Share on FacebookWhat’s the Deal with Intermittent Fasting (IF) vs Calorie Restriction?
Low-carb web forums and sites talk a lot about the benefits of intermittent fasting (IF). Some of the proponents are very passionate about it, but at the same time, some are short on facts or awareness of IF vs calorie restriction. When it crosses the line to excessive calorie restriction, which can kick in your body’s natural mechanism to slow metabolism, it’s gone too far.
The best approach gets hard to pin down, because IF is not defined in terms of the optimum interval and frequency, and neither is calorie restriction.
This entry will survey some of the on-line reading on it, point to some sites that are very pro-IF, and discuss the natural mechanism that kicks in when one goes into starvation mode. I don’t know of any sites that are dedicated to not doing IF, because if people don’t care to do it, they won’t write that much about it. It would be like starting a website about not collecting stamps. 
“Fast way to better health,” 2006
Dr Michael Eades, author of “Protein Power” and a respected name in low-carb circles, may have kicked off the trend, or at least introduced the concept of IF to a lot of the low-carb folks in 2006.
Dr Eades wrote an entry in his blog that noted that calorie restriction has been well-researched and has many benefits (as long as it doesn’t get excessive-which we will get to below). Eades in 2006-
…There is a way to reduce blood sugar, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce blood pressure, increase HDL levels, get rid of diabetes, live a lot longer, and still be able to lose a little weight. All without giving up the foods you love. And without having to eat those foods in tiny amounts. Sounds like a late-night infomercial gimmick, but it isn’t.
Before I get to the real nitty gritty of how such a thing can be done, let’s look at a method that has been proven in countless research institutions to bring about all the above-mentioned good things. It’s called caloric restriction…
In other words, we eat too much and we can get by on less. No big controversy.
Eades then goes on to discuss IF as another way to do calorie restriction to get the same benefits. So, instead of eating less than everyone you know at each meal, do IF.
…Caloric restriction is a terrific way to lose weight and get healthy; problem is, it’s not much fun. When rats live out their little ratty lives calorically restricted in their cages they seem to show signs of depression and irritability. Primates do for sure. If primates don’t get enough cholesterol, they can actually become violent. But, if you’re willing to put up with a little irritability, hostility and depression, it might be worth cutting your calories by 30 percent for the rest of your long, healthy miserable life.
Doesn’t sound so cheery? You’re not ready to sign up yet?
Well, there is a better way.
A number of different research teams have studied a method by which rodents can get all the health and longevity benefits of caloric restriction without calorically restricting. And the method has been studied in humans and seems to achieve the same health benefits and, if an old Spanish study can be believed, maybe even an increase in lifespan.
What is this magic method?
Intermittent fasting…
Dr Eades goes on to discuss his own experimenting with IF, which had about a 24-hr interval. Here’s the link to the above and the rest of his entry…
But, it seems that in 2008, he backs off.
Eades in 2008-
This appeared on another blog in 2008, which ran the above entry and a follow up from Eades that reported what happened after the first entry came out-
…I then wrote a blog post about IF that became the most commented post on my blog. It seems that the idea of IF had struck a chord with a lot of people, many of whom took up the torch and started IFing…
…Like many of my readers, the research community had jumped on the IF bandwagon as well. And, in a similar fashion, the results were not all positive. Papers appeared showing that subjects IFing, or even regularly skipping a couple of meals per day, were developing insulin resistance, impaired glucose tolerance, elevated blood pressure, and decreased thermogenesis. Even Mark Mattson published a couple of human studies, including a randomized crossover designed experiment that showing the above disorders in women who ate the same number of calories in one meal per day as opposed to three meals per day…
…It’s looking like the intermittent fast is another of those ideas in science that looks good in animal studies then not so good in human studies, proving once again that rats and mice aren’t simply furry little humans. And it appears – for humans, at least – that the intermittent fast is indeed beginning to look like the reality of a late-night gimmicky infomercial: long on promises, short on delivery. I suspect that it is also a cautionary tale about the applicability of caloric restriction studies to humans…
The last comment is a reference to how he got the idea in the beginning from studies on rodents.
But wait, there’s more..
Even though Dr Eades is clearly retracting what he wrote that started a trend in 2006, that’s not the end of it. People are still doing IF and claiming the benefits, and they even say the benefits go beyond calorie restriction for numerous reasons. They are claiming the benefits of calorie restriction are really due to the on-off eating, and not reducing calories in general-which contradicts what Dr Eades wrote about in the 2006 entry. So which is it?
Possibly the best IF site-Leangains.com-Let’s see what it says-
Just about everyone that I see promoting IF links to this site- www.leangains.com. This is done by a bodybuilder that claims IF is the thing to do, and if you don’t think so…well how can you not think so, look at his muscles. That must be due to IF!
I went there to look up the benefits of IF according to them, and guess what? They cite increased insulin sensitivity, less weight, and increased metabolism. This looks a lot like what Dr Eades says about calorie restriction. So, what is it about IF that makes it different?
I looked around leangains and didn’t really find a specific answer, and I didn’t want to read the whole site to find it. I did like reading the “Ten Fasting Myths Debunked” page, which gives you a really good summary of what it’s all about.
To finish the leangains side of the story, you want to read this primer. It links to the wiki page on IF and discusses the specifics of different IF approaches, plus it specifies 16/8 (16 hours without eating, 8 hrs where you can eat) as the leangains approach.
Moving on, the Three-Part Primer on Marksdailyapple.com Forum-
One of the sites where you will get shouted down if you are bold enough to question IF is the forum on marksdailyapple.com. There is some very good reading there, but I got a lot of people mad at me when I questioned all this IF in regards to excessive calorie restriction (more on this later).
The best reading is a three-part primer by pklopp.
Links: IF Part 1, IF Part 2, IF Part 3.
From the opening post in Part 1, we again see IF folks claiming the same benefits as calorie restriction-
Why would you fast intermittently? The Scientific / Metabolic Answer.
One interesting aspect of fasting during Ramadan is that people tend to compress their eating schedule as the same quantitiy of food is ingested, but this is done in what amounts to one large meal in the evening. So, an interesting question to ask would be whether a greater interval between meals had any metabolic effect. It turns out that if you fast during Ramadan, you can expect:
A decrease in LDL cholesterol, and a concomittant increase in HDL (as found in this study, as well as this one).
A decrease in serum triglycerides ( same source as above. )
No change in your plasma cortisol concentration.
A pronounced lowering of insulin during the daily fast portion “favor[ing] a predominant lipolytic state.”
No change in thyroid hormone levels (T3, T4).
Lowered levels of homocysteine and C-reactive protein ( indicators of inflamation ).
You may experience some changes in body composition, but the studies are contradictory, although you are unlikely to gain weight…
So what’s going on? I asked this on the forum, and pklopp, who is working on Part 4, explains (I think)-
This is actually preempting part IV of the primer, but, …. there is a vast difference between calorie restriction and intermittent fasting. This is inherent in the fact that calorie restriction focuses on how much you are eating whereas intermittent fasting focuses on how often you eat. The principal difference here is that every meal will cause an insulin response which will take about 5 – 6 hours to return to baseline (pre-meal) levels. While insulin levels are above baseline, adipose tissue release of non-esterified fatty acids ( ie fatty acids that are not part of a triglyceride and can be used as an energy substrate by tissues ) is suppressed. So, if you eat three calorie restricted meals roughly 5 hours apart, you are very effectively suppressing NEFA release throughout the day. Eating the exact same amount of calories in one single meal will also suppress NEFA, but only for 6 hours. This is not magic, it is just metabolism. Very interesting things happen when you work with your metabolism rather than against it.
That’s an impressive answer, but it still doesn’t account for the fact, if we go back to the very beginning, of these things also attributed to calorie restriction-and this is well-researched. It could very well be that both IF and calorie restriction work and have these benefits, and they may not match exactly. But, to claim that IF is the only way to do it seems quite a stretch. The IF proponents have a lot of passion for IF, and it is understandable that they see IF as the reason for the benefits, and nothing else.
If I find some info that shows IF to work better than calorie restriction, I’ll write another entry or add it to this one… It’s time to move on to what happens if you overdo it-
The problems with overdoing it-
What concerns me about the near-religious fanaticism that people promoting IF have is that they either completely dismiss the possibilities of wrecking your metabolism by overdoing it, or they are just ignorant and get angry if you ask. The same applies to excessive calorie restriction, but no one talks about that-it’s not trendy enough.
A second concern is that anyone can say “IF,” but since there is no accepted specification, it can mean different things to different people. Someone may be into the leangains 16/8 interval, but I have seen people talking about 40-72 hours or even a week at a time. I haven’t seen one single forum where someone in the IF camp actually responded to these longer intervals and said “whoa, too much of a good thing, don’t go there.”
Similarly, we know there are problems with excessive calorie restriction, but just like with IF, we don’t know exactly what defines “excessive.”
How “going too far” actually works-
Our bodies have a natural mechanism for survival in times of famine. I wrote about this in March. That mechanism is reverse T3 (rT3). It’s a lot easier to find articles online about IF than it is to find details on rT3.
We don’t know for sure what a safe IF interval is to keep your starvation mode from kicking in (rT3 goes up), and we also don’t know for sure what “excessive” means on calorie restriction. We don’t know if what defines “safe” is much different for, say, a bodybuilder, or someone whose hormones are whack and they are huge and just trying to lose weight. I guess if you did these things and a blood test shows high rT3, then you know you overdid it!
I brought this up on the IF threads on a couple forums and never found any IF proponents that knew anything about it. They did get busy with google trying to prove that it didn’t matter, and there wasn’t much conclusive. After going back and forth with them on this and reading what was uncovered, I can only guess that a safe limit is something close to 24 hrs.
Leangains, which promotes 16/8 just laughs it off. They write-
Efficient adaptation to famine was important for survival during rough times in our evolution. Lowering metabolic rate during starvation allowed us to live longer, increasing the possibility that we might come across something to eat. Starvation literally means starvation. It doesn’t mean skipping a meal not eating for 24 hours. Or not eating for three days even. The belief that meal skipping or short-term fasting causes “starvation mode” is so completely ridiculous and absurd that it makes me want to jump out the window…
Oh really? Prove it. I can see that leangains is laughing this off because they stick to less than 24 hrs, but since IF can be anything, there are people going crazy with it. There has to be a limit. The IF folks just don’t know what it is. They don’t want to know, and that is what concerns me the most about them. It just makes me want to jump out the window…
It should also be noted that leangains is a bodybuilder’s site, written for bodybuilders and people that want to do what they do. They are not going to be that informed on the details of potential problems like a doctor would. Doctors see people that have problems, and it’s their job to understand problems.
I found a good discussion of rT3 that quotes the doctor that started the clinic I go to, Dr Kent Holtorf. It’s on Mary Shomon’s About.com thyroid page in a discussion about thyroid hormones and weigh loss-
Mary Shomon: Why do you feel reverse T3 plays a role in making it difficult for some thyroid patients to lose weight?
Kent Holtorf, MD: The reverse T3 is produced in times of stress or starvation to reduce metabolism, and with chronic stress or dieting, RT3 can remain elevated, suppressing tissue thyroid activity and metabolism. People on chronic diets — or those who lose significant amounts of weight — will have a lower metabolism than a person with the same weight and muscle mass who had not had not lost significant weight or drastically dieted in the past. This was demonstrated in a study by Leibel published in the journal Metabolism, titled “Diminished Energy Requirements in Reduced-Obese Patients.” This study compared the basal metabolic rate in individuals who had lost significant weight to those of the same weight who had not lost significant weight in the past. The authors found that those who had dieted and lost weight in the past had, on average, a 25% lower metabolism than the control patients who had not lost significant weight.
All those trainers and health gurus that never had a weight problem who tell you to do just as they do don’t realize what a disadvantage it is for people who have had a long-term weight problem. Of course, even these trainers would not even be able to maintain their weight with a metabolism that is 20 to 40% below normal…
It’s interesting to me that a doctor that deals with this every day knows about and talks about reverse T3, while IF proponents (some of them trainers or gurus) know zilch about it, and/or never mention it. It’s not on their radar at all. Note that Dr Holtorf says, “reverse T3 is produced in times of stress or starvation to reduce metabolism, and with chronic stress or dieting, RT3 can remain elevated, suppressing tissue thyroid activity and metabolism.”
So, a doctor that sees people that have been overdoing it on the diets sees elevated rT3 all the time. It’s not like it never happens like leangains says. They just don’t know what they don’t know.
It’s not like everyone has bought into IF, even though sometimes it seems like it. Jimmy Moore has a low-carb site where this came up too. Moore organizes a “Low Carb cruise” each year that features fun and expert speakers. He wrote this on his forum the other day-
…ALL of the low-carb experts on this year’s Low-Carb Cruise universally condemned intermittent fasting.
Summary-
I don’t think it makes sense to tell people IF doesn’t work. I think it’s roughly equivalent to calorie restriction.
People promoting IF are mostly amateurs that are resisting discussion of what it means to go too far, so beware. If you do it, try not to go crazy and go past 24 hrs.
It’s very interesting that IF is strongly embraced by the low-carb crowd, while calorie restriction is not! They are roughly the same thing. Why is this?
I think it is because low-carbers are sick of the “low fat” and “calories in/calories out” conventional dogma, so much so that we just don’t want to hear this calorie restriction stuff. We are sick of it. We like to think that it doesn’t apply to us, because hey, we do low-carb, we don’t have to count like everyone else.
Then when it doesn’t work, instead of just saying “I think I will eat less,” we say “I’m cool, I don’t have to eat less, I eat less often!”
Share on FacebookDukan Diet – “The French Atkins?”
A couple of months ago news of a diet from France coming to America had the websites buzzing. It’s here, and (unless I missed something) it didn’t make much of a big splash. The “Dukan Diet” was tagged “The French Atkins” for it’s low carb, high-protein, multi-step approach. Dukan’s has some differences from Atkins, so lets see what they are, and what people are saying.
Disclaimer-I didn’t read the book. I’m basing this off of what I’m reading from the Dukan website, and from news accounts and reviews. I’m not going to say for sure that the program is great or terrible just based on what I’m seeing online.
In general, the Dukan Diet is low carb, low fat, and has 4 phases to work through. Dukan says you can eat what you want as long as you stick to his list. Here’s an unofficial copy of Dukan’s 100 foods list. (It’s interesting to read the comments too.) This diet is basically a high protein diet that has some ways to lower calories and help keep people feeling full (like oat bran).
From the New York Times-
…For years, critics have dismissed the Dukan diet as a warmed-over version of early Atkins: a simple protein-centric method that divides foods into good and bad categories and relies on the claims of a medical doctor who is long on enthusiasm and short on scientific research.
Asked about Atkins, Dr. Dukan acknowledged that it was a source of inspiration. “I am built on the shoulders of Weight Watchers and Atkins diets,” he said. But he criticized Weight Watchers for its emphasis on quantity sizes and calorie counting, and Atkins for allowing unlimited consumption of fat. “I have a lot of respect for Atkins,” Dr. Dukan said. “He was a legend in his time.” But now, he added, “Atkins is dead.”
His own diet’s high-protein, low-fat approach is organized into four phases: attack, cruise, consolidation and stabilization…
Four Phases, and something missing:
What’s the deal with all these phases? Getting the right food in the right amounts shouldn’t be a phase. Your body doesn’t know what phase you are in, your mind does. These phases seem like ways to encourage behavior changes, but I don’t like them. I would rather know what works long term and not have the pressure to fit some plan. To be fair, phases are nothing new. There is something to them when you are talking low carb, but you only need two-very low carb, and minimal carb.
The main thing I see missing, and it’s an issue for Atkins as well, is some clarity on healthy vs unhealthy for a specific food item. For example, in the above food list, it has pre-cooked ham, chicken, and turkey slices-very popular in Europe-just go there and look at any breakfast at the hotel. Ever try to read the ingredients on the package of that stuff? They look like a syllabus for an organic chemistry class. Beware. Lean, fresh protein is far more healthy that deli slices, even if protein and calories are the same. This diet doesn’t seem to even pay attention.
Paleo/Primal diets will tell you right away about getting healthy lean protein. It does matter. Dukan just seems to be helping to step through bad food choices to find the least bad.
Oat Bran?
What’s the deal with oat bran? Dukan’s site has a graphic to show how it can help you feel full. Eat some oat bran, and drink a lot of water. The other benefits are questionable. Leave oats for the horses. Diets need to support the right blood chemistry, and should not have to be modified to add expanding goo in your gut to help you feel full so you eat less!
Atkins vs “French Atkins”
Low carbers that are Atkins fans won’t like Dukan because Dukan is a bit more low fat. In this view, it’s fat that helps you feel full, and fat doesn’t make you fat-carbs do. This approach can have issues too, because you have to know your fats. Piling on the bacon simply does not work for everyone, no matter what the proponents tell you.
I didn’t see any references to the glycemic index on what I read about Dukan so far. Dukan seems to just have a list of what is OK to eat, and phases to tell you when. It makes you wonder if any research at all went into this diet, or is it all just herding people into a structured high protein plan-which anyone could do really.
A Stupid Critic:
Dukan’s plan may be just a simple way to get people to eat low carb, and high protein (which will get results), but I’ll take it over the stupid ideas that come from Kathleen M. Zelman, writing about Dukan for WebMD.com.
From WebMD-
…You’ll certainly lose weight on The Dukan Diet because it cuts calories drastically. The lack of carbs also helps keep hunger at bay. But the bottom line, experts say, is that this eating plan does not include all the nutrients you need for good health…
…Protein is an essential part of a healthy diet, but it cannot stand alone. A truly healthy diet includes all the food groups — vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and low-fat dairy and healthy fats along with lean protein. Your body needs the nutrients these foods provide…
Another asshole repeating the food group thing! Please! Whole (or processed) grains are not food. The food groups are a lie. You don’t really need dairy either-which Dukan has a lot of!
Summary:
The Dukan Diet is a variation of Atkins. A high-protein, low carb diet, in general, will work. Do you need this plan to tell you that? No. Does it have the technical detail to really help you develop a new way of eating that is the most healthy? No. Can you lose weight on it? Yes.
Links:
Dukan Diet (Official US Site)
Dukan Diet 100 Foods List (Unofficial)
Message Board Discussion on it (This is where I read about it first)
Typical stupid review from a CW (Conventional Wisdom) site
Good Explanation of What is Wrong with Conventional “Wisdom” on Diet
The fact that doctors, public health organizations, dietitians, and nutritionalists have made a gigantic mistake in the previous decades that has resulted in widespread obesity and health problems is a bold claim, but it’s true. No one has done a better job of dropping a bomb in so-called “conventional wisdom” (CW) than Gary Taubes.
Taubes has published important articles and 2 books about this, and the public and health folks are still arguing about it, and trying to digest it. It’s heavy duty stuff, and takes some getting used to since it’s going against what just about everyone is saying.
Dr Michael Eades, of www.proteinpower.com has written an excellent explanation-
Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious—obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth—is what makes it so alluring. But it’s misleading and misconceived on so many levels that it’s hard to imagine how it survived unscathed and virtually unchallenged for the last fifty years.
It has done incalculable harm. Not only is this thinking at least partly responsible for the ever-growing numbers of obese and overweight in the world—while directing attention away from the real reasons we get fat—but it has served to reinforce the perception that those who are fat have no one to blame but themselves…
The thing in a nutshell is this:
-Fat doesn’t make you fat.
-Calories in/calories out is the wrong explanation for obesity, because it fails to take into account how bodies actually store energy. (duh!)
-The correct explanation is metabolism, and it’s driven by insulin, aka “the storage hormone,” not calories from fat.
-Carbohydrate drives insulin, and that drives fat.
Simple. If you want to store less fat, take in less carbohydrate.
Skipping to the important part in Eades review-
So, why do people get fat? Let’s look at it as Gary does and start from the beginning.
When we talk about obesity, we’re talking about the excess accumulation of fat. The excess fat is stored in the fat cells (adipose cells), which, collectively make up the adipose tissue. With that as our starting point, where do we go?
If we ask how the fat gets into the fat cells, we will discover that all the pathways of fat storage were worked out years ago and are so uncontroversial that they’re described in detail in every biochemistry and physiology textbook currently in use. It’s well known that the metabolic hormone insulin stimulates an enzyme on the surface of the fat cell that moves the fat into the cell.
So if insulin moves fat into the fat cells, it would seem that a lot of insulin would move a lot of fat into the fat cells. And indeed it does. Given this, the rational person trying to figure out the previous step in our progression would ask What causes a lot of insulin? Or the rational person, should he/she have been steeped for a lifetime in the marinade of ‘fat is bad’ might ask, What about fat? If there is a lot of fat in the blood as a result of fat in the diet, wouldn’t that fat get into the fat cell? If so, then doesn’t dietary fat lead to fat?
A good question, but the answer is no. Type I diabetics can have a lot of fat in their diets and in their blood, but if they have no insulin, they can’t store that fat. In fact, most pre-diagnosis type I diabetics lose enormous amounts of weight despite eating ravenously because without insulin they can’t store the fat. So dietary fat itself – even large amounts of it – won’t find its way into the fat cell without the help of insulin.
When you hack through the thicket of all the biochemical pathways involved in the metabolic process, you find that insulin is the primary force involved in the storage of nutrients. Insulin is the body’s storage hormone: it puts fat in the fat cells, protein into muscle cells and glucose into it’s storage form, glycogen. Insulin, along with its counter-regulatory hormone glucagon (the Yin and Yang of metabolism), are involved in nutrient partitioning – the process of stashing nutrients away in different parts of the body and/or harvesting them for the body to use as energy…
One should read the whole thing.
One point that is worth noting- It’s true that eating carbs raises insulin. Insulin stores fat. Critics have also noted that eating protein raises insulin, but Eades answers that this way-
Share on FacebookSome people with a little learning may be quick to point out that protein drives insulin up as well. This is true, but with a catch. Protein drives both insulin and glucagon up, so you don’t have the pure insulin effect. Only carbs will give you that. With carbs, insulin goes up while glucagon goes down. With meat and other proteins, the effects of the elevated insulin are muted by the concomitant rise in glucagon. (Glucagon isn’t called insulin’s counter-regulatory hormone for nothing.)
Recipe: Sweet Pepperdogs
I guess it’s time to start a recipe category.
I like to go to the local Earth Fare (Huntsville) and just look for things to invent a new recipe. Here’s one from some stuff I found yesterday-
This one is quick and simple, and you can modify it easily. It’s really just a sausage dog with a long grilled sweet pepper for a bun.
Sweet Pepperdogs:
For this one, I used-
Bilinski’s Cajun-Style Andouille Chicken Sausage (or use anything similar really)
Sunset “Ancient Sweets” long sweet peppers
Grated gouda-style goat cheese
Spices, turmeric, basil, black pepper, curry, and a bit of salt (add or subtract spices for preference)
Double-sided grill (a cheap George Foreman works fine)
Pre grill the sausage a bit to warm it up (it’s pre-cooked, this is just to warm it
Slice the peppers and clean out the seeds
Mix spices in the grated cheese
Put the cheese and the pre-warmed sausage in the pepper (like making a hot dog), and grill just long enough to heat up the peppers.
That’s it! Easy.
Share on FacebookVitamin D- Yeah, You Need a Lot, and It’s Not Just a Fad
If you have been reading all the buzz about getting more vitamin D and haven’t done it yet, what are you waiting for? More are more experts are getting on board, and it works.
It seems like vitamin advice goes in cycles. There was a time when people would say vitamin C does miracles. Then it was vitamin E. Then, whatever. In recent years, more experts have been noticing the benefits of vitamin D, noting that most people are low, and the recommended supplement is increasing. Going out to get some sun just doesn’t cut it.
Even when the evidence for getting vitamin D levels up is getting stronger, we still have “head in the sand” experts that go out of their way to give bad advice. Here’s a good blog entry that disputes the Institute of Medicine’s Food and Nutrition Board report saying “that taking more than 800 IU of supplemental vitamin D was unnecessary and could even be harmful.”
From Naturalhealthsherpa.com-
Should you ignore this report? Simply put, yes. It lacks any basis in the latest scientific research, ignores the “real world” findings of medical practitioners who routinely prescribe higher doses of vitamin D and see dramatic results in their patients, and it fails the common sense “sniff” test. Let me explain.
The Smart Nutrient…
The committee only looked at the amount of vitamin D known to be needed for strong bones. That’s like evaluating an iPhone based solely on the ability of its built-in calculator to add and subtract. The calculator is one tiny feature of the iPhone, but it’s hardly a complete picture of what a good smartphone can do.
Similarly, vitamin D is important for strengthening bones, but that’s only one of the many important things this miraculous “smart” nutrient does.
Vitamin D expert William Grant, PhD, puts it this way:
“The health benefits of vitamin D extend to at least 100 types of disease, with the strongest evidence for many types of cancer (breast, colon, ovarian, pancreatic, prostate, and rectal), cardiovascular disease, diabetes types 1 and 2, respiratory infections such as type A influenza and pneumonia, other infections such as sepsis, and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.”
Vitamin D is not just a vitamin. It’s a hormone that does a lot of important things.
The preferred approach would be to know what your vitamin D levels are from blood tests, and take a supplement based on that. Not everyone is going to run out and do that, so a good rule of thumb is to take about 2,000 IU a day, and next time you are at the doctor for something and they do a blood test, ask that vitamin D is included so you can work from there.
Share on FacebookEuro Study Finds Higher Protein/Lower GI to be Best Combination
If you have been trying to sort through the eat carbs/don’t eat carbs, eat fat, don’t eat fat, eat more protein/don’t eat more protein nonsense lately, don’t feel alone. It seems like everyone has an opinion, and they are all different. This blog seeks to figure out who to believe, and one recent study this blog agrees with says the answer is, for losing weight, more protein, less carbs.
A 26-week study in Europe took some dieters that were restricting calories and lost weight to start with, and then put them on 4 different diets and didn’t restrict calories. The intent was to see which combination of high/low protein and high/low glycemic (carbs) worked the best at keeping weight down.
I saw a summary on Dr Jonny Bowden’s blog about it, and he summed it up-
Researchers looked at four different diets in an attempt to identify which program would have the best chance of keeping weight off.
The clear winner: a low-glycemic, higher protein diet.
This approach isn’t that hard to do. Just eat a bit more protein, and learn the GI index and work the foods high on the list out of your life.
Bowden again-
Share on FacebookOne of the most encouraging pieces of information to come from this study is that it doesn’t take an “extreme” diet to produce benefits. This “high-protein” diet really wasn’t so high, and the glycemic load really wasn’t all that low. But merely moving in the direction of more protein and less sugar appears to have benefits even if you don’t take it to the extreme.
Recent Comments