Which of these makes you fatter?
The Independent Friday March 30th 2012
Counting the calories has become a default mental habit for generations of women as we have been told it is a necessary feat to keep tabs on the flab. A pound of flesh contains 3500 calories so in order to lose one pound a week you should cut back by about 500 calories per day as it is widely accepted that in order to lose weight one must expend more calories than one consumes.
The calorie control system was invented to help us eat enough. Working out how far a man can cycle on an egg was one of the tests carried out by the American chemist Wilbur Atwater. As well as the egg test, Atwater locked students in a chamber and measured the energy fluctuation while they ate and carried out various tasks. He also burnt foods and measured the heat they gave off to determine how much energy they contained.
The government often urges us to eat fewer calories to tackle obesity but in the early days, calories had the opposite political use, as big employers and the army wanted to discover the cheapest foodstuffs that would provide their men with sufficient energy to do the job, and the answer to this was carbohydrates. This formed the backbone of the calorie system which has been recognised and accepted internationally as the most straightforward way to access the energy in food ever since.
In recent years the idea that we must eat fewer calories than we burn to lose weight still holds, but the calorie content of the individual foods no longer provides the full picture. Atwater’s findings were not completely wrong, but he did not account for the energy our bodies use up to digest and process different foods. The true calorie content- the bit that remains stuck to our hips or is available for that bike ride, is the energy left in the body once we have digested the food. Foods that are rich in protein and fibre actually take more calories to digest than fat and carbohydrates also enabling you to stay fuller for longer. The Atkins and Dukan diets are famously effective for the same reasons. Protein fills us up for longer and our bodies have to work harder to digest it. Although kilojoules appear more threatening than calories as they are higher in number, scientists prefer to use them as they are more accurate in measuring energy, but this can then start to confuse the consumer as calories are very much on the agenda on supermarket wrapping, along with the fat and carb content. Dr Ian Campbell from the national obesity forum believes that, “It is important to keep it simple”. A better understanding of how our bodies process different foods could be helpful rather than confusing. Stepping away from punishing numbers and towards a fuller understanding of food is a welcome development that might end our tiresome and stressful reliance on calorie counting.
Gerry Gajadharsingh writes:
In Metabolic Balance we encourage patients to eat a good quality protein with each meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner. But not to mix your proteins during each meal and have 3 different sources of protein each day for example poultry, fish, meat, vegetable protein and dairy (yoghurt and cheese but limited cows produce). Proteins are critical for the 8 essential amino acids that they body cannot produce itself and are essential for the repair and replacement processes that the body needs, building tissue, production of enzymes and hormones.
