Posts Tagged ‘carbohydrates’

USDA abandons food pyramid

Posted: June 2, 2011 in Fitness, Health, Obesity, Uncategorized, Weight Loss
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That’s right. The much-maligned food pyramid discussed in earlier posts is headed for the scrap heap, according to a great article in the Los Angeles Times:

“I call it foodless and useless,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “It was unteachable. You couldn’t explain what the colors stood for.”

Wonder if she’s any relation to the chocolate Nestle. At any rate, the article, written by Amina Khan, also explains how other countries have approached the problem of clearly representing the best dietary choices:

In China, a five-tiered pagoda has distinct levels for starches, produce, protein, dairy and oils. In Guatemala, a traditional ceramic cooking pot called an olla is filled with pictures of pineapple, fish and bags of maize.

Grenada, which calls itself the “Isle of Spice,” showcases its food circle inside a cracked-open nutmeg. The government of the Dominican Republic displays its nutrition advice inside a mortar and pestle filled with eggs, avocados and other foodstuffs that stand on a cutting board imprinted with images of a baby smiling, crawling and suckling a mysteriously detached breast.

In spite of this diversity, the food icons generally concur on what belongs in a daily diet: Lots of greens, easy on the sweets.

‎”No food pyramid? That was my favorite Egyptian mortuary-based nutritional diagram,”  says Stephen Colbert. So where is the USDA headed now?  The USDA is going to MyPlate? Wait, isn’t that already claimed by Livestrong’s food logging tool is MyPlate? Will the USDA be getting calls from Lance Armstrong’s lawyers?  Here’s the new deal:

Regardless of the USDA’s new pitch as the way of looking at food, there will be people to argue about it, whether because they can empirically prove the USDA wrong or they just don’t want to change their eating habits. (My only gripe: It’s really not that self-explanatory. The portions all look about the same and don’t distinguish between fatty protein and the lean stuff.) For instance, sayeth Marion Nestle (Marion Nestle again? She’s everywhere!) to Scientific American:

I don’t think it goes far enough, but it’s certainly headed in the right direction. I think it’s actually pretty great. You can show someone and say, “Your dinner plate should look like this.” And they’ll say you’re out of your mind. For most of us meat has made up most of the meal. This is a huge change, and I think it’s courageous. Nobody profits from fruits and vegetables — except for the growers, and they don’t make very much. All the money is in processing food and the intermediate steps.

And even more people, to paraphrase the now 75-year-old “Gone With the Wind,” frankly, my dear, won’t give a damn.*

*I re-read “Gone With the Wind” a few years back for the first time since I was a kid. Wow, is it racist. Great plot and characters, but, omigod, racist. Weird that the movie is noted for having earned Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, making her the first African-American to be awarded the little gold man. But if you want to understand white Southerners who still seem to be fighting the Civil War, read it. It’s how they’re conditioned to think about the Antebellum South, which is why when I was a kid, you’d still see signs like “Save your Dixie cups, the South will rise again.” And why some cling to the Stars and Bars (aka the Confederate flag). 

Feeding the machine: The Zone and Paleo

Posted: May 27, 2011 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health, Obesity, Uncategorized, Weight Loss
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Today’s post is the last in a a series of three.  Four main points to reiterate:

  • Think about it as giving your body what it needs, not about what you can’t have
  • Consider your particular needs, such as Vitamin D
  • Don’t be a food fascist
  • You need to eat sensibly from the three macronutrients: protein, fat and carbs, preferably carbs with low glycemic load.
For more specific guidance in sensible eating, CrossFit has recommended Barry Sears’s The Zone Diet and Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet.  Both are protein friendly diets that recommend eating fresh fruit and whole grains for your carbs (and apparently Chuck Norris is on the same page).
WebMD summarizes The Zone Diet so:
Like other popular diet books, Enter The Zone offers more than just weight-loss claims. By retooling your metabolism with a diet that is 30% protein, 30% fat, and 40% carbohydrates, The Zone diet contends that you can expect to turn back encroaching heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. Another much-touted advantage is better athletic performance. Sears doesn’t come right out and claim he has found the cure for heart disease or diabetes, or how to win athletic competitions, but instead he provides glowing anecdotes from people who have taken The Zone diet to heart.

WebMD reviewer Kathleen M. Zelman takes a stab at summarizing The Paleo Diet in a review:

The diet is based on the foods that could be hunted, fished, and gathered during the Paleolithic era — meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruits, and berries. But a true paleolithic diet is impossible to mimic because wild game is not readily available, most modern plant food is cultivated rather than wild, and meats are domesticated.

Each article points out the problems with each approach, but the truth is that neither diet appears to have been tested in a controlled study. Dr. Sears has published a couple of articles in medical journals about his diet, but no one else seems to have run a test on it. PubMed doesn’t have anything on Cordain’s Paleo Diet.

So as far as the merits of adhering to either specific program, there’s nothing scientific to go on; you’re basically left with what people who’ve tried it have to say. That doesn’t mean that either of them are wrong or bad for you; it just means that you need to evaluate it on your own. Even the one diet that has gotten the nod from science as a workable solution, Weight Watchers, isn’t 100% effective for 100% of the people on it. Like I’ve said in the earlier posts, everyone’s body chemistry is slightly different, so what works for me may not work for you … or even if it works in terms of building muscle or weight loss, you may not feel good on it.

I changed my eating habits, trying the Body for Life program during my 2nd degree [karate] training, and the Zone during 3rd degree. In my quest to provide the best start possible for my children, I began to buy organic fruits & vegetables, and to pay attention to “balancing” intake of protein, fat and carbohydrates. I started lifting weights (with my home gym machine) and running in the hills, but it seemed that no matter what I did, I couldn’t lose the extra 40 pounds of fat I had gained since my first pregnancy. I began to see my body as an adversary, and to feel frustrated because it wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do, namely losing fat and getting sleek and slim as I had been prior to the years of child-bearing.

During my third degree training, I discovered CrossFit, and thanks to 5 months of workouts with a private trainer, I made it through the rigorous testing without any injuries. My trainer at CrossFit Los Altos (aka. FIT) talked to me about nutrition because I was so frustrated with my flabby arms, thighs and stomach. She gave me information about how to eat better, and I adopted some of her recommendations, but I could not relate to the focus on eating for better performance. I did not see myself as an athlete, certainly not as an elite athlete, and I had no illusions about becoming a “firebreather” or “CrossFit badass.” Not only that, but with the demands of my home life, including the disintegration of my marriage and the beginning of 6 years of being married but separated, I just couldn’t find it within me to impose a rigid diet upon myself which would require lots of attention, energy, and deprivation. It was a stress I just wasn’t willing to add. I began to think that I was just going to have to get used to being fat, and that although I could increase my athletic capacity, I couldn’t actually effect a change in my physique…

Then came the FRAT Paleo Challenge … I was able to stay close to strict Paleo for the full 30 days, with the exception of heavy cream in my coffee and the occasional piece of dark chocolate. I lost about 10 pounds and began to see a few muscles. I followed the Challenge with Robb Wolf’s Paleolithic Solutions seminar about six months later, read “Lights Out”, started taking Fish Oil, Vitamin D, Natural Calm (magnesium) and my old pre-natal liquid vitamins (Floradix) regularly. I did Diane SanFilippo’s 21-Day Sugar Detox and discovered that sugar and fruit were not essential to my daily living. And for more than a year I stayed somewhere between 75 and 90 % Paleo. When I strayed from “goodness” I felt a bit guilty about it, knowing that the closer I could stay to 100%, the better it would be for my long-term health. I started to see my body and my nutrition as an investment in my future.

Cynthia’s got a good handle on looking for what works for her and has a good perspective. And, girlfriend, I can so relate. I’ve spent over a decade in the “Nothing will work; might as well get used to being fat” mindset.

As for me, I read The Zone Diet shortly after it came out, and found it far too complicated to work for me at that time. Now if I were to go ahead and spring for MyPlate Gold, it wouldn’t be as bad since I could then set my nutritional goals in line with the Zone’s 30/30/40 guidelines. Doing the math by hand just took too much time.

For some people, The Zone makes them focus on food to the point it becomes unhealthy. “From thin to fat,” an inspiring item from the CrossFit Games, tells of a former anorexic, Emma Moburg-Jones, who overcomes her eating disorder through CrossFit, but has a temporary relapse after a coach recommended The Zone to her:
The Zone Diet didn’t help Emma because it refocused her attention on quantities of food. Many people who have suffered from anorexia have obsessed about calories and quantities, and may find it hard to weigh and measure without returning to obsessive thinking, or over-control.

My guess is the difficulty of calculating the proper things to eat and the necessity of focusing so hard on your food to stay on The Zone is  part of what has made The Paleo Diet popular among CrossFitters, overtaking The Zone’s former dominance. Paleo isn’t about math or inflammatory disease, which is the focus of the Zone, but, as indicated by Zelman’s comments above, it’s about trying to recreate the diet of our ancestors.

That sounds plausible; we all know evolution takes a long time. But just how long to adapt from a hunter-gatherer culture to an industrialized agricultural milieu? I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. But the rules of The Paleo Diet are pretty simple, at least in the “hard-core” version as described by Julianne Taylor in her “Paleo & Zone Nutrition Blog”:

Hard Core Paleo– strictly cutting out all foods that do not fit with a hunters and gatherer / paleo diet: no grains (that’s all grains, includes corn), no legumes (includes soy and peanuts), no potatoes, no sugars or synthetic sweeteners, no processed food, no dairy, no alcohol, no omega-6 vegetable oils or chemically altered fats (margarine).

Not easy to do, but pretty simple to understand. Tom Ashby at “Smashby’s Training Blog” has a series on Paleo called “The Pursuit of Paleo,” which can give you a lot of great info on the program (as do the above bloggers), but I particularly liked his post “On being strict,”  in which he says:

Don’t approach your diet, or your nutritional choices as I prefer to call them (as “diet” just sounds too temporary), as a system based on punishment and limitations. My advice is to simply learn what foods are good to eat, and have every meal you eat consist of those foods as often as possible.

So there you have it. The particulars are up to you; use The Zone or Paleo diets to work for you. You’re the one in charge, and you can choose to be, to steal from an old diet’s name, fit or fat.

Feeding the machine: Protein, fat and carbs

Posted: May 25, 2011 in CrossFit, Fitness, Health, Obesity, Weight Loss
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Today’s post is a continuation from yesterday about nutrition, which CrossFit central emphasizes as foundational to fitness. Three main points to reiterate:

So now let’s talk about the specifics of what your body needs when exercising. First, since you’re trying to build muscle, you need protein. That’s real, not synthetic, protein, and it’s apparently easy to figure out just how much, if you really want to know, according to LiveScience:
When training, you need about a half gram of protein per pound of body weight. So a 180-pound male needs about 90 grams of protein a day. That’s the amount of protein in a cup of milk or yogurt with breakfast (8–12 grams), a can of tuna with lunch (40 grams), and a six-ounce steak with dinner (42 grams).

The emphasis on building muscle and supplying your body with enough protein is one of the reasons for the CrossFit recommendation that you “eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar.”  The other concern prompting this recommendation is avoidance of “hyperinsulinemia.” Before getting to the definition of “hyperinsulinemia,” let me have a flashback.

I’m old enough to remember when the Atkins Diet, the first of the “let’s eat more protien” diets, came out. Before that I’d been on a lot of fad diets, including the memorable grapefruit and egg diet and one that started with a two-day fast that I almost passed out on (those were both during my teenage years, when I really didn’t need to be concerned about weight loss; I should have been focusing on fitness back then. Ah, youth!). Atkins worked for me, but many doctors were concerned about the high cholesterol levels in the diet.

I’m now convinced that whether you have  problems with cholesterol start with your genetic makeup; a good family friend who was as trim as anyone could wish for had such high cholesterol that he had a heart attack while flying his A-10 fighter. If you’re lucky, like me, you have low cholesterol even though anyone looking at you would think you’re a heart attack waiting to happen; my fit and trim hubby has to watch his. So the best thing to do is to make sure you get your cholesterol levels checked by blood test no matter your fitness level.

Even so, we all have heard by now that fish oil, olive oil and other vegetable-based oils are better for you than dairy and other animal fats. But fat is a long-burning energy resource that helps you feel full, so don’t be too stingy with it.

At any rate, Atkins was pushed aside by Covert Bailey’s Fit or Fat. Oddly, it was recommended to me by a fat doctor who was advocating an Atkins-type diet, when Bailey’s book, full of sciencey sounding justifications, advocated a higher carbohydrate, lower protein diet. The one thing Bailey said that I still agree with is that the closer the food is to its natural state, the better it is for you.

The USDA jumped on the bandwagon, but  most experts don’t care for their “new, improved pyramid.” Interestingly, the Harvard School of Public Health has, on its own pyramid, placed daily exercise and weight control as the foundational level. They do put whole grains, fats and fruit on the next level, but that’s probably consistent with CrossFit’s concern for “hyperinsulinemia.”

Now diets have come full circle: Protein Power, the Zone Diet,  the South Beach Diet and the Paleo Diet are all protein friendly and very popular. Dr. Michael R. Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades, Dr. Barry Sears, Dr. Arthur Agatston and Dr. Loren Cordain all have explanations that also sound scientific. CrossFit started out recommending However, ever since reading Voodoo Science>, I’ve realized I don’t know enough science to evaluate them well.

If I recall correctly, the one thing that all the books have in common is that they are based on anecdotal evidence from the respective doctors’ practices. This is generally not considered the best way to establish something as a scientific fact, so I have a tendency to take what they say with a grain of salt; on the other hand, I feel better and control my weight better with protein diets, so I’m one of the people that these diets appear to be successful for. My feeling is that, as I said in the last post, not every diet will fit everyone any more than one drug fits all.

Flashback over now; we’ll continue with hyperinsulinemia and what the heck it has to do with diet.

Hyperinsulinemia “means the amount of insulin in your blood is higher than considered normal,” according tothe Mayo Clinic. I think the real problem isn’t hyperinsulinemia but its predecessor, insulin resistance.  Back to the Mayo Clinic’s experts:

Hyperinsulinemia may be caused by insulin resistance — a condition in which your body is resistant to the effects of insulin and your pancreas tries to compensate by making more insulin. Insulin resistance may also eventually lead to the development of type 2 diabetes — when your pancreas is no longer able to secrete the large amounts of insulin required to keep the blood sugar normal.

Medicine.net’s  Ruchi Mathur, MD, FRCP(C) and Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD have a great description of exactly what’s going in your body that makes insulin resistance an issue:

One of the actions of insulin is to cause the cells of the body, particularly the muscle and fat cells, to remove and use glucose from the blood. This is one way in which insulin controls the level of glucose in blood. Insulin has this effect on the cells by binding to insulin receptors on the surface of the cells. You can think of it as insulin “knocking” on the doors of muscle and fat cells. The cells hear the knock, open up, and let glucose in to be used by the cell. With insulin resistance, the muscles don’t hear the knock as well (they are resistant), and the pancreas is notified that it needs to make more insulin, which increases the level of insulin in the blood and causes a louder knock.

So your body can’t use the glucose it has well, and has to make more insulin, creating a cycle that just intensifies. The cycle is associated with all kinds of health problems: heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes (Type 2) and various cancers.

But what causes this cycle of insulin resistance to start? It seems from searching PubMed that the details of the how it happens is up in the air, but, just as the CrossFit article on the Glycemic Index relates, the condition can be helped by the right kind of diet. Guess what? It’s one in which protein has a starring role and the carbs you eat tend to be fruits and whole grains, both of which tend to be low on the glycemic index

Glycemic index? Here’s how the University of Sydney describes it:

Not all carbohydrate foods are created equal, in fact they behave quite differently in our bodies. The glycemic index or GI describes this difference by ranking carbohydrates according to their effect on our blood glucose levels. Choosing low GI carbs — the ones that produce only small fluctuations in our blood glucose and insulin levels — is the secret to long-term health reducing your risk of heart disease and diabetes and is the key to sustainable weight loss.

It sounds like in order to feed your body well, then, you should choose from low-glycemic carbohydrates. The Glycemic Index site has a searchable database (fourth down in the left side navigation menu) so you can evaluate whether you want to eat a particular carb or not. But the GI is not the end of the story, unfortunately. Back to the Harvard School of Public Health for more:

One thing that a food’s glycemic index does not tell us is how much digestible carbohydrate it delivers. Take watermelon as an example. The sweet-tasting fruit has a very high glycemic index. But a slice of watermelon has only a small amount of carbohydrate per serving (as the name suggests, watermelon is made up mostly of water). That’s why researchers developed a related way to classify foods that takes into account both the amount of carbohydrate in the food and the impact of that carbohydrate on blood sugar levels. This measure is called the glycemic load. A food’s glycemic load is determined by multiplying its glycemic index by the amount of carbohydrate it contains. In general, a glycemic load of 20 or more is high, 11 to 19 is medium, and 10 or under is low.

NOOOO! Not math! And how do you figure out what number to plug in for the “amount of carbohydrate”? I’m still not sure, even after reading an article that purports to tell me how: “Practical use of the glycemic index.” Luckily, the Harvard guys have made a list of low glycemic load foods at The Nutrition Source

Thankfully, at least one study says that just looking at the GI helps. MedPage reports that

Among participants who completed an eight-week, low-calorie weight loss phase and then entered a maintenance phase in which they consumed diets with variations in protein content and glycemic index, weight regain was 0.93 kg higher, a statistically significant difference, in those on low-protein diets compared with those on high-protein diets.

So it’s official; most people who stay on protein plus low glycemic index foods ended up keeping off the weight they lost. As someone who has lost and regained at least a couple of people’s worth of weight, that’s good news.

Up tomorrow: The Zone vs. The Paleo.

It’s a gas, man!

Posted: May 17, 2011 in CrossFit, Exercise, Health, Obesity, Uncategorized
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Flatulence seems an unlikely topic for a CrossFit blog, I suppose, given that fart discussions are generally reserved for middle-schoolers and movies aimed at them. And, for some reason, scientists looking for ways to measure pretty much anything. But it was very disconcerting to find out that gassy outbursts occur frequently during CrossFit workouts. For me, they seem to really get going during situps.

Gary assures me it happens to everyone. I don’t know that I find that comforting.

I know why I have trouble overall with controlling emissions. As pretty much any woman who has borne children will tell you, control becomes more difficult after that first kid pops out and throws all the works out of kilter. Add irritable bowel syndrome to the mix, and, well, you could audition for one of those silly fart movies.

But why during exercise?

LiveStrong suggests that it could be because of swallowing air when drinking (yeah, you’re trying to get hydrated at the same time you’re gasping for air; makes sense) and tells us that gas and diarrhea are common enough among marathon runners to have earned a nickname, the Runner’s Trot. The same problem even plagues walkers, although at least one study indicates that the amount of gastrointestinal symptoms during exercise is less than (and directly related to) those experienced by the same people during nonexercise periods.

According to a study published in Clinical Gastroenterology & Hepatology, “Exercise and gastorintestinal function and disease: an evidence-based review of risks and benefits,”

Light and moderate exercise is well tolerated and can benefit patients with inflammatory bowel disease and liver disease. Physical activity can also improve gastric emptying and lower the relative risk of colon cancer in most populations. Severe, exhaustive exercise, however, inhibits gastric emptying, interferes with gastrointestinal absorption, and causes many gastrointestinal symptoms, most notably gastrointestinal bleeding.

Hmm. Doesn’t say much about mere farting, but does explain the reason why competitive athletes would suffer from Runner’s Trot. For those of us who are just working within the parameters of normal humans, though, it sounds as though exercise is, overall a good thing for that pesky gas.

On a more positive note, EnduranceDoc.com says:

Although some may have concerns about increased flatulence during exercise, this is actually a good sign (although your neighbor or training partner may not agree with that statement).  Passing gas during exercise is a sign of good intestinal function – so feel free to let it out!

Umm, sorry, doc, but I’d really rather not. If you do let it out, though, apparently there is etiquette to be observed. And some exercises apparently do help reduce gas and other gastrointestinal problems.

For me, the most likely culprit for exercise gas is diet related: too many simple carbohydrates or eating foods I’m sensitive to. Both of these will cause bloating, pain, and gas for me. I can tell very quickly if I’ve been eating too many processed, simple carbs because I will be hungrier more frequently. If I reduce the amount of carbohydrates overall and increase the quality of those I do eat (fresh fruits and veggies), then I find that the gas level goes down (and I’m not starving all the time, either).

I also found out a couple of years ago that I have a couple of food sensitivities (not the same as a food allergy): corn and dairy. After avoiding them assiduously for two years, I now can have dairy in limited amounts without too many problems; corn still sends my digestive tract into a tailspin. One doctor helped me figure out what the problems were with a very simple test: stay off one of the following foods at a time for five days, then try it again after the five days are over. If you’re sensitive to the food, you’ll have a nasty episode of GI symptoms when you return to the food:

  1. Dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream)
  2. Citrus (lemons, limes, oranges, grapefruits — raw, cooked, or juice)
  3. Chocolate
  4. Tomato (and tomato products)
  5. Cola (any kind that is brown)
  6. Grains (wheat, corn, barley, oats, rice)
  7. Eggs
  8. Sugar (refined sugar in any significant amount)

I figured out the corn/cheese problem after going for Mexican food at one of our favorite places and, within 24 hours, was cramping and running to the toilet every few minutes. It takes a while to get through the list, but it’s worth it — although I can tell you know, avoiding corn in processed foods is a trick. Read all the food labels once you figure out what your particular enemy is — if it is a grain, you’ll want to go through each one individually. Tip for prioritizing: If you crave it, it’s probably a problem food for you.

The upside of finding out that I had sensitivity to dairy and corn was that I was pretty much forced to eat healthy so that I could control what was in my food. Until then, I had massive GI problems at least three times a week. Now I only have really serious reactions only when I go out to eat and either decide to ignore the ingredients or don’t know all that’s in something.

Of course, what worked for me may not work for you. Here’s a few links to some articles with suggestions for reducing bloating and its consequence, gas:

We all want to avoid farting because of the social consequences, but the really important thing is to eat healthy to be healthy.

And gas is getting expensive these days, anyway.