So What if Processed Foods Have Slightly Fewer Calories?

[Demi]

From The Huffington Post
15 January, 2014

So What if Processed Foods Have Slightly Fewer Calories?

Lindsay Hill

Media outlets and various experts in the health field are cheering a report released Thursday (http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/newsroom-content/2014/01/major-food--beverage-companies-remove-6-4-trillion-calories--fro.html) by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation stating that 16 of the top food and beverage manufacturers in the United States cut 6.4 trillion calories from their products over the past five years.

Well, there could be worse news, but cutting a few calories from processed foods and calling this a coup is like celebrating a 10 percent discount on shoes that were originally marked up 300 percent. Slightly marked down designer shoes are still overpriced, and lower-calorie junk food is still junk food.

With new research strongly suggesting not all calories are created equal (like the recent report (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/269206.php) in the New England Journal of Medicine that people who eat a lot of high-calorie, high-fat nuts tend to be thinner than people who don't eat nuts), this news may be inconsequential.

People who continue to eat a diet heavy in processed foods and beverages from the companies listed in the RWJF report (ConAgra, Kraft Foods and Coca-Cola among them) might just eat a higher volume of the lower-calorie versions or seek the missing calories from another poor source.

We should have learned by now that food companies rarely cut calories or fat without replacing what's missing with something potentially more damaging to the consumer. We now know that margarine is far worse for us than real butter and most fat-free products contain extra sugars and artificial ingredients to add the texture and flavor lost from cutting the fat. "Free" foods can have serious hidden costs, and most low-fat and low-calorie processed foods aren't much better from a nutrition standpoint.

Processed foods, most of which are high in sugars and starches (which convert quickly to sugar in the bloodstream), disrupt natural hunger and satiety cues, causing people to overeat. Whether a packaged food in which the first two ingredients are white flour (or rice, corn or potato) and sugar is 300 calories or 280 calories makes no difference. Eating junk food doesn't satisfy cravings; it stimulates more cravings.

My overweight clients often complain of being "addicted to carbs," and they may very well be, as sweets and other high glycemic foods like bread, crackers, chips and cereal (even the ones marketed as "whole grain") put the body on a glucose roller coaster, causing more cravings for sugar and carbohydrates as blood sugar crashes from its last high.

Research has even shown that the brain circuitry patterns of people who eat too much junk food mirrors that of drug addicts, meaning junk food may be as addictive as cocaine (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-02/fatty-foods-addictive-as-cocaine-in-growing-body-of-science.html). Would we be celebrating if a drug addict consumed slightly less cocaine than he did five years ago?

Even as books like Wheat Belly and Grain Brain (which recommend gluten-free, low-grain diets) dominate the bestseller lists and nutrition experts from science writer Michael Pollan to Dr. Oz warn consumers about the dangers of processed foods (including low-fat and low-calorie products), authorities in the health and food industries are still preoccupied with lowering consumers' fat and calorie intake with little regard to the overall quality of their diets. This makes no sense to those of us who have cut low-fat and fat-free processed foods from our diets, replaced them with high-calorie and/or high-fat whole foods like eggs, avocados and nuts and lost weight.

Weight Watchers made significant improvements over the past five years by incentivizing people to eat high quality foods rather than just count calories (points were previously based on calorie content, so an apple and an Oreo had the same points under the old system), but the majority of weight loss plans are still based solely on calorie-counting, and the majority still fail consumers in the long-run.

Weight loss and health improvements will only occur when people eliminate junk food and replace it with whole, satisfying and nutrient-dense foods, some of which may (gasp!) have slightly more calories than processed foods.



Lindsay Hill is a board-certified health coach and the author of The Get Real Diet published in 2013.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lindsay-hill/processed-foods_b_4597401.html#

[WereBear]

Article - Weight Watchers made significant improvements over the past five years by incentivizing people to eat high quality foods rather than just count calories (points were previously based on calorie content, so an apple and an Oreo had the same points under the old system), but the majority of weight loss plans are still based solely on calorie-counting, and the majority still fail consumers in the long-run.


I didn't know that. Good for them.

Ironic, too, because WW started out as a low carb diet :lol:

[rightnow]

I remember when I heard about lowcarb. Seemed too good to be true. A friend who was a captain in the fire dept. did it with his men, he was the station cook, and they lived on things like steak and green onions dipped in blue cheese dressing. They were a rowdy bunch of very happy men, they loved the food, who got much leaner surprisingly fast. That was a testimonial. Still it didn't seem like it'd work for me.

Then I met this guy who was my boss for awhile who had lost 70# on lowcarb and he took an hour one day after work to explain it to me very simply. It was the most convincing discussion I ever had. Like a children's story version, but it was great: He said:

Aside from things like vitamins, enzymes and minerals, there are three major elements in your food: protein, fats, and carbohydrates. Protein is used to build your muscles and bones and firm tissues. Fats are used to build your skin and brain and soft tissues. This is a vast oversimplification, but just go with it. Carbs don't actually build your body, what they're for is to give it energy. This energy is so your body has the strength and gumption to go hunt down protein and fats, your food.

Now, all sugars are carbohydrates and so are all forms of starch and fiber, although fiber just washes out of you. That's why when kids eat sugar they're bouncing off the walls, it's energy. That's why eating pasta or fast-food can make you up-up-up but then tired or hungry later. All food is built on these three things. If it's not proteins or fats, it's carbs.

Some things have very little of any of those, like green leafy vegetables. Some produce has a lot of carbs, like fruits which are sugars or potatoes which are starch; or a lot of fiber, like some vegetables. You can eat as much of basic salad stuff as you want, as long as your dressing is low-carb, like vinegar and oil, or a homemade blue-cheese, because basic stuff like lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, they have some carbs but not very many. You can't eat grains as those are almost entirely carbs. You can eat most dairy but not milk as it has a lot of natural sugar in it. The harder the dairy, like hard cheddar cheese, the fewer carbs. The softer the dairy, like cottage cheese, the more.

When you have extra energy, it stores in fat cells to be used later. So if you are fat, it means your body is storing energy for later but the 'later' never comes. When you want to lose weight, you eat less energy, and just stick to the actual foods of protein and fats. Your body needs energy, so it will empty your fat cells to use that stored energy.

The body is used to getting energy so when you first do this, for several days it will "wait" for it and make you miserable, make you crave energy foods. But after several days, if you're giving it protein and fats so it knows it isn't starving, it will realize no energy is incoming from food, and it will shift to start using your own stored energy instead.

When this first happens you may feel really bad, because the body stores bad stuff in fat cells too to protect you from it, and it gets rid of bad stuff first, so you may feel like you have the flu. Stick with it and that passes. From then on, you eat your protein and fats, your food, and you let your body use its own energy instead of eating the carbs.

You can have some carbs, but keep it under about 35 a day in order to make your body use your own energy. You can get a little book that tells you how many carbs things have. But mostly if you just eat all kinds of meats, eggs, hard cheeses, salad veggies, stuff you make at home mostly, not stuff you buy, you'll be fine.

Simple story right? I could pick it apart for details now, but on the whole it's ok and it was very convincing to me, as I knew nothing of nutrition and really just didn't get the whole calories-carbs argument until then. Like why did what matter when again??

*

One of the things I learned over time is that if you give someone who has a lifetime of eating crappy food ANY diet that is based on numbers, they will eat crappy food to fit the numbers.

I think it is more valuable to tell people they must eat REAL food, and by the way, that real food can't exceed these numbers. So it would never, NEVER be a question of whether you could have a 100-calorie-pak Oreo cookie snack versus an apple. Only the apple is 'real food' so the only question is how much of the apple could you eat and stay within the 1-meal allottment of carbs for your plan?

This forum, over the years, you see people learning and changing and trying different things and it's ironic because in the end, eventually, no matter what people do, did, no matter their variant, in the end, what everybody learns is EAT REAL FOOD.

All the other details are just the details, mostly.

PJ

[Katfishy]

Now that I try to only buy "real" food, my reaction to something that advertises "low calories!" is along the lines of "soooo... you want me to pay the same amount of money and get less food? yeah right!"

[*Caz*]

I like your post PJ - a lot! Real food rules