What we eat matters

Counting calories does not work.

We can see different foods, each labeled 100 calories. But what we extract, will depend on the food, even the same food if processed differently.

100 calories a portion of chips. If we double the portion size, we will obtain double the calories, but it may not be 200 calories.

If we eat sweetcorn as corn on the cob, or sweetcorn milled into cornflour, we will extract more calories from the 🌽 cornflour.

A steak turned into mince, we will extract more calories from the mince, than we would have from eating the steak.

Counting calories tells us nothing of the nutritional value of the food we are eating.

We have all been there. We finish our meal, not  a mouthful more, we push our plate to one side, we are full, we are satiated. Then the waiter shows us the desserts. Somehow we have room for more, after all.

Sadly I see this all the time, overweight customers in a food supermarket with bad, really bad food choices. Do they know they are bad food choices? Or McDonald’s or KFC, tucking into junk food, washed down with a can of Coke.

Or maybe even worse, picking what is labelled healthy and believed to be healthy, a flavoured low fat yoghurt instead of a Greek yoghurt, an ultra-processed food chosen instead of the natural healthy food.

Is it a lack of willpower? Ultra-processed People devotes an entire chapter to answering that question.

Sometimes I am tempted to ask, why that choice?  I wisely hold my counsel.

The government is to blame for these bad food choices, for the promotion of ultra-processed food.

Treat ultra-processed food as tobacco.

• no promotion
• health warnings
• upf tax

From Grain of Truth Bakery I buy

• sourdough bread – healthy
• almond croissants – not healthy

Draw a graph of obesity from 1950s to today. A steady increase in obesity. A kink in the graph in the mid-1970s.  This curve is the same for different age groups, for different ethnic groups. In the 1970s the increased consumption of ultra-processed foods. In the US and  UK, for adults 60% of the diet ultra-processed food. For young adults and children 100% of their diet ultra-processed food .

In Brazil, type 2 diabetes was of academic interest only. The traditional diet beans and rice. The country flooded with ultra-processed food. Within ten years, an obesity epidemic.

https://twitter.com/keithpp/status/1886083047323541595?t=Q_GbuzcYsm0rROCrVR8r2g&s=19

Why Calories Don’t Count by Giles Yeo is a must read.

Counting calories does not work

We are what we eat. What we eat has a direct impact on our health.

We regulate our temperature, why not our weight? What has gone wrong?

Something has modified our feedback mechanisms.

Diets do not work. We cannot fool our bodies. They will compensate. Short term weight loss, which then bounces back and often overshoots.

Eating saturated fat does not make us fat. It is unfortunate we use the same word for two different things.

Food labelled healthy is not. Low fat, zero fat yoghurt is not healthy. Look at the list of ingredients. Low fat Greek yoghurt is an oxymoron.

Eat quality, not calories.

Eat 30 plants a week.  Fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, legumes, spices, fungi.

Avoid ultra-processed food. Junk food a subset of ultra-processed food.  Food with a long list of ingredients, with added emulsifiers. Artificial food stuffs.

Ultra processed foods are highly profitable.

Avoid protein supplements and protein enhanced foods.  If eating a varied diet we consume more than sufficient protein. Excess protein is not stored, it passes through in our urine or is converted to sugars and fat. Beeare of spivs and snake oil salesmen peddling the high protein zero sugar scam.

Eat fermented foods. Yoghurt, kefir, kimchi, artisan cheese from raw milk, sauerkraut.

Eat bean to bar craft dark chocolate.

Drink speciality coffee.