Remarks on beans and cereals
I realize that up to this point I haven’t said anything directly in this
recent slew of entries about why I would need to give some thought to how
to incorporate beans and cereals into my diet if I wanted them there. The
answer is that, as with any foods, there are pros and cons to beans and
cereals. The pro of beans is that they are relatively high in protein and
carbs, while having pretty much no fat to speak of. Similarly, the pro of
cereals is that they are high in carbs with pretty much no fat to speak
of. At the same time there are some issues that must be kept in mind with
these food groups. The first is nutrient absorption and the second is
blood sugar.
The nutrient absorption issue is reasonably well established. Basically, beans and cereals are essentially seeds. As a result they have various chemicals in them that are common to seeds. And one of the effects these chemicals have on humans is that they make it harder for people to digest certain other nutrients, like iron, when they are eaten at the same time. As a result, to continue with the iron example, the iron passes right through the person, instead of being absorbed into the blood stream (you can do a search on my blog using the terms ‘iron’ and ‘phytate’ to get some nitty gritty details on this. There are several entries scattered about.). The absorption rate can be as low as 2% of the iron available in the food itself. Fortunately, you can balance this situation out by eating a good amount of vitamin C at the same time, because vitamin C enhances the absorption of iron. The two chemicals basically balance the situation out. But it’s important to keep this in mind. Otherwise, your cream of wheat iron boost could well be letting you down.
The second issue is a bit more controversial. Basically, some scientists measured what happened to the blood sugar levels of people eating various foods. They found that, for some individuals, eating foods like potatoes resulted in a large and immediate release of sugar into the blood. Basically, most of the available carb in the food was being quickly converted to sugar and dumped into the blood stream.
So- what does this mean, exactly? Well, it means that if you are one of these individuals, and you are about to run a marathon, then potatoes might be awesome! It also means that if you are one of these individuals and you have diabetes, then maybe you really shouldn’t eat potatoes. What it means beyond this, however, is all a bit murky. First of all, it seems hard to say how likely you are to be one of these individuals, or, put more precisely, what the general variability is in the population in terms of their glycemic response, and I haven’t been able to find any hard data on this.This conference abstract gives a good overview of the issues, without providing any particular answers about the situation. It’s also the case that the preparation of the food in question also very much changes its effects, as this page discusses. And lastly, it isn’t entirely clear what the implications of having a spike in blood sugar actually are. We know it causes the body to release a bunch of insulin, to compensate (which is why it’s a problem for diabetics, who don’t have enough insulin to compensate), but beyond that, it isn’t clear. People are doing a lot of research about this at the moment, because it is a real hot potato (no pun intended) in the nutrition world right now, and people are making a lot of heated claims in one direction or the other, but the bottom line is that the jury is still out.
At the moment, my own position on what we know is this: We know that for some people, certain foods, like potato, pasta, and rice, cause a rapid rise in blood sugar. My opinion is that the body usually only needs to change rapidly *internally* in response to a rapidly changing, or somewhat out of the ordinary *external* situation. If it’s changing rapidly internally (blood sugar spiking), but there’s no external change (I’m still sitting at my desk), then there’s a bit of a mis-match going on. So, that makes me think- if, on a day to day basis, it is possible to still get the nutrients required without eating mainly or exclusively these foods, then- why not? Why not avoid eating bowls of only pasta (which I have been know to do), and instead eat lots of veggies, with a (small?) side of pasta? Why not eat the soup with cubes of potato in it for lunch rather than eating the baked potato (which I have also been known to do)? It’s a bit of a Pascal’s wager situation.
On the other hand, if I’m canoeing for five hours straight, pass the rice.
posted at: 14:03 |
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Food super geek
The thing about food is that it can never really stay a theoretical
debate. We have to eat. And if we have a choice about what to eat, we have
to make that choice. My most recent step in an effort to figure out what
to eat has involved something I need no great urging to get into- an excel
spreadsheet program. Basically, there’s all this talk about x% carbs, and
y% protein and so on, but what does that really mean when you are eating
food? I mean, if we’re eating anything remotely close to whole foods, we
can’t really just eat ‘Carb’ and ‘Protein’ (although, we can come pretty
close to just eating fat, come to think of it), because what we eat is
food.
To tackle this problem, and get a general feel for the situation, I used the awesome nutrient data site, and went through foods from various food groups. Then I very roughly ballparked the average amount of carbs, protein and fats in foods in each group. Now, perhaps obviously, this is a bit of hack because there’s a wide variability in the food within a food group, but still, there’s a reason they are in the same food group to begin with, and it means that it is at least possible to come up with some numbers that differentiate somewhat accurately between, say, meat and vegetable. Here are the numbers I came up with, for 100g of the food in question:
—DISCLAIMER: These numbers are a ballpark hack, meant to illustrate what I’m up to. Do not use them to plan your diet!!!
| protein | carbs | total fat | (sat. fat) | |
| meat | 50 | 0 | 5 | 3 |
| veg | 0 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| tuber | 0 | 20 | 0 | 0 |
| fruit | 0 | 15 | 0 | 0 |
| nuts | 20 | 20 | 50 | 5 |
| milk | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 |
| butter | 1 | 0 | 81 | 51 |
| eggs | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| bread | 10 | 46 | 4 | 1 |
| olive oil | 0 | 0 | 100 | 14 |
| beans | 8.5 | 23 | 0.5 | 0 |
Once I had these numbers, I also entered some additional data like the proportion of protein, carbs and fat I wanted in my diet (I was able to change these numbers to see what the effect would be, since no one can seem to come to a consensus about this) and set it up so that I could enter the amount of each food type that I was eating (in grams) and it would calculate the total protein, carbs and fat, and compare this with the recommended amounts, based on the percentage numbers I had entered. And yes- I am a geek. Actually, to (again) quote Stanley Goodspeed from “The Rock”, I’m not a geek. I’m a super geek.
Anyway, what I quickly discovered is that it is pretty hard to get the numbers to work out. Actually, I briefly considered writing a genetic algorithm to come up with the numbers, but even I wasn’t geeky enough to do that. After further experimenting with the numbers, what I discovered is that if you want to solve the ‘carbohydrate mystery’ that I discussed earlier (which was- how did people meet their macronutrient needs before they had access to agriculture) you really need to eat lean meat. Otherwise, there is no way to even get enough protein (let alone carbs) without blowing way, way over your fat requirements. Consequently, the number up there is for lean meats, like turkey, rather than for meats like corn fed cattle factory raised beef, which is high in both total fats and saturated fats.
At
the moment, I’m still playing around with the numbers. However, I have
been observing my eating likes and dislikes since I started this, and
experimenting and I’ve figured out a couple of things. First of all, (I
realize this sounds obvious), even for whole foods that I like, I don’t
really like eating them by themselves, or in large amounts. So, for
example, although (I admit) I really like beef, I don’t really like
eating, by itself, a huge lump of beef. And the same with cheese. I love
cheese, but I don’t really love eating just a huge chunk of cheese, with
no crackers, or chutney, or fruit, or… something! So what this means is
that it’s just not going to happen that I’m not eating a mix of these
categories of foods, one way or another. The second thing that I’ve
realized is that, while I don’t feel like eating huge quantities of them,
I really do like eating bread and rice and potatoes and beans and pasta
and all that agriculture originating stuff, in combination with other
stuff. So, even if it were an option, the strict paleo diet isn’t going to
happen. And that in turn means that I need to figure out how to integrate
these agriculture based foods into my diet in a good way.
posted at: 12:45 |
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Water heater temperature
We interrupt our scheduled entry on the ratios of carbs, protein and fat
in various food groups to bring you
this
information on water heater temperature settings. Maybe getting
scalded vs maybe getting Legionnaires’ Disease. You decide!
posted at: 14:32 |
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Happy Diet vs Happy Planet
All of this information is quite interesting, but it leaves me with a bit
of a conundrum. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the Paleo
people are somewhat on the right track and that it might not be bad, from
a health perspective, to eat a diet relatively high in wild or pasture fed
meat, along with a variety of vegetables and fruits and nuts. This still
leads to some problems. The first is that it isn’t exactly easy to get a
hold of pasture fed meat, and it’s expensive. The second, connected to the
first, is that this sort of diet is not actually sustainable given the
world’s current population. The fact is that agriculture is able to support much higher
densities of people than hunting and gathering- up to 10 times higher.
And right now our population is so high that even agriculture has to work
pretty hard to feed people (although there is technically enough
food for everyone at the moment, it just isn’t being distributed that
way). So, the question I find myself facing is- just because I, being
extremely privileged, might be able to eat this ideal diet, is it really
all that ethical for me to do so?
I really hate getting into
discussions of ethics, but let’s say, for the sake of the discussion, that
it isn’t ethical for me to go whole-hog (pardon the pun) and eat the
non-sustainable paleo diet all the time, but it also isn’t entirely
ethical for me to knowingly just starve myself or feed myself bad food
(I’m sure there could be a lot of debate about that one, but moving
on…). So now what do I eat?
posted at: 15:36 |
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Return to the mystery of carbohydrates
I woke up today still pondering the question of how people could have had
50% of their calories coming from carbohydrates before agriculture. The
period before agriculture is called the Paleolithic period, so what I was
really wondering about is how people avoided starvation during the
paleolithic period. The problem with finding an answer to this is that
people tend to have their own agendas and biases when it comes to
answering this question. I did find this page,
which looks agenda-ized, but also tries to provide references. The author
writes: “In general, the mean plant to animal subsistence ratio in terms
of energy was 35% plant and 65% animal [6-9]. This suggests that humans
evolved on a diet that was primarily animal based and consequently low to
moderate in complex carbohydrates (fruits and vegetables- about 25% of
total calories), high in protein (up to 35% of total calories) and low to
moderate in fat (about 40% of total calories) [1-9].” She also makes a
very important note about the nature of the fat intake, which is: “While
the Paleolithic diet comprised 35-40% fat, the fat content of “game
animals” and fish is mostly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat
compared to the quantity of saturated fats and trans fatty acids fats
consumed today [3, 6, 8, 9, 10,]. Their omega 6 : omega 3 ratio would have
been less than 4 compared to 10 in most western countries”.
The
problem with such information is that it is mainly coming from people who
have particular opinions about the appropiate current human diet. In
trying to discover a more objective source for this information, I came
across the field of nutritional anthropology.
Neat.
posted at: 15:14 |
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Eating specifics- a second pass
Okay- let’s take a second pass at getting down to specifics, now that I’ve
had a few moments to get over ‘the carbohydrate mystery’. I think I’ll try
just focusing on foods that seem like they might be good parts of a
healthy diet:
What to eat- getting down to specifics
Okay- so I’ve put out some of my general thoughts, but I still haven’t
gotten down to specifics. So let’s get down to it. Just to take a really
extreme hypothetical situation, let’s suppose I was only able to eat
spinach and beef steak. Again, nutrients aside, how much of these items
would I have to eat in order to meet my daily fat, carbohydrate and
protein requirements (while I’m at it, I’m going to cut back on the grams
of protein and pump up the grams of carbs, since apparently we don’t need
30% protein in order to keep our
bodies from falling apart). Based on information from nutritiondata.com. I would have to
eat 276 grams of beef roast in order to get enough fat in my diet, which
would put me a bit over the top for protien at 86 grams of protein. I’d
then need to eat a piddling 14 cups of spinach to round out my calory
needs with carbohydrates.
Right. No problem. This might explain why the ancestors of humans were into tubers but it also raises a bit of a mystery. According to various sources, we modern humans should be getting roughly 40% to 50% of our calories from carbs. If that’s the case, what were pre-agriculture humans eating to get enough carbs in their diet? I suppose one answer might be nuts and fruits, both of which seem to pack at least somewhat of a carb punch. However, to get enough carbs you would still need to be eating upwards of 8 cups of nuts and fruits each day in the pre-grain era, just to have enough energy to sit around and do not much. So what’s up with that?
Okay- all of this is making my head
hurt. Maybe I should just skip to figuring out how much butter I would
have to eat every day to get enough fat calories. 5 Tablespoons. Okay. Not
that I’m going to take that approach, necessarily. I’m just saying.
posted at: 22:25 |
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What to eat? What to eat?
So, on to social and personal preferences. As far as social preferences
are considered, I like to adhere to social norms in social situations
since I tend to feel most comfortable that way. In the case of food, to me
that means eating whatever the person serving the food is serving, and
trying to eat the amount of it provided, if I don’t have a choice over the
amount served. This is just a me liking to conform to social norms type
thing. Fortunately, I don’t have any foods I really can’t stand to eat,
and I’m happy to make occasional exceptions when it comes to environmental
or nutritional guidelines, so that’s all okay.
In terms of personal guidelines that aren’t related to food appreciation or preferences, I like to eat food that is mostly grown relatively locally (like- within Canada!) and grown using sustainable practices. When it comes to meat, I like to eat meat that is free-range with a free-range diet, or wild. Of course, these guidelines sometimes come into conflict with my eating preferences, which are up next for discussion.
In terms of what appeals to me, I know I’ve said it in my blog before, and I’ll say it again now. Quite apart from whether or not I need it from a nutritional perspective, I like fat. If I had a choice, while I wouldn’t want my foods to be swimming in fat (usually), I would definitely want fat to be present as a food component in pretty much all of my eating events. All in all, I think that’s my primary food preference. From a straight food appeal perspective, I can’t think of too many foods or food categories that I couldn’t give up if I had too and remain reasonably satisfied. Having said that, I can’t think of too many food categories that I don’t like, either!
I can however think of a few food categories the loss of which I wouldn’t shed too many tears over due to my ambiguous feelings about them from a nutritional stand point. For example, although I actually like them from a taste-wise perspective, I’m a bit suspicious of beans and grains. I can’t help but feel like they are a bit of recent addition to the human diet (only for the last 10 000 years or so ( wheat and rice)) and I wonder if they are such a good idea. It’s true that we might be adapting to eating them, but it’s also apparently true that our brains are shrinking, as I’ve mentioned in a previous blog article.
This, however, is where my environmentalist guidelines and my food preferences frustratingly collide. While I might enjoy a diet made up almost entirely up vast quantities of vegetables for carbohydrates, cooked tastily in fat, combined with some meat on the side for protein, it doesn’t work so well for someone who is living an urban life in a cold Northern country and wants to be somewhat sustainable. Which, come to think of it, is probably why we started eating beans and grains in the first place- easy storage for long periods of time and able to feed large bunches of people stuck on small amounts of land (aka cities).
Thinking about wheat also leads me to think about the question of eating
processed foods, by which I don’t just mean processed in the current sense
of the word but also in the sense of foods that are made up of various
combinations of other foods, like baked goods and sausages. For me, these
foods confuse the eating scheme a bit, because it’s just plain hard to
know what you are actually eating. The potential problem with this has
become apparent in today’s current processed foods, which often tend to be
composed at least partially of items which I consider to be non-foods.
That’s why I tend to feel happiest with a whole-foods approach where
possible.
posted at: 20:41 |
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Thoughts on food
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on food over the last couple of years,
and I feel like I’m finally beginning to get a better understanding of how
food works in conjunction with our bodies. To that end I feel like I
should try to summarize to myself what I’ve figured out about food and how
it’s going to influence my eating behaviours and other behaviours.
To begin with, a good place to start seems to be the fact that, aside from vitamins and minerals (which we are setting aside only temporarily), there are really only four types of stuff that we humans eat: carbohydrates, proteins, fats and fibers (a.k.a stuff in food that we can’t digest). All of our food is some combination of these four items, with the first three categories giving us the energy we need to stay alive.
Setting aside fiber for a second, it’s easy to realize why it doesn’t make too much sense to get rid of any one of the three remaining categories. Namely- we need all three for our body to function well because each has effects that the others can’t duplicate. For example, we need fat for fat soluble vitamins, hormones, and to provide a bit of padding for our internal organs. We need carbohydrates so that our body can store energy, and make our muscles and brains work. We need protein so that we can repair our muscles and other body parts. This page goes into a bit more detail on this front. As well, if that weren’t reason enough, any one of these three has its down side in the form of side effects, so trying to eat mostly one or the other probably won’t work out well in the long run. What that means is that, even if we were eating enough of one single type of food to technically give us enough calories in a given day, we would still get into a great deal of trouble.
Putting aside the question of too much, not enough, or just the right amount of calories for the moment, the question then remains, how do we decide what to eat. But before considering that, it’s worth considering how much control we have over what we eat and what factors influence our eating decisions. I happen to be one of the luckiest organisms on the planet when it comes to food choice, since I’m human, I live in North American and I’m a member of the middle class. As a result, I have a great deal of food availability, both with respect to amount and selection. Consequently, for me, the main external factors that influence my eating are circumstantial and social. The main internal factors are how appealing or unappealing I find a particular food, positive and negative opinions I have about the food (e.g. does it have a strong environmental impact, is it a pain in the butt to prepare?), what I know about the effects of any particular diet on my body, and what I know about the composition of the foods themselves.
It wouldn’t seem too hard to divy up available calories between fat, protein and carbohydrates, but it gets complicated quite quickly. One of the complicating factors is that, especially in the case of fats and carbs, there are a lot of different subcategories and there is a huge amount of disagreement regarding whether or not each of these subcategories is good or bad or indifferent in various contexts. We really don’t understand how our bodies work that well, so a lot of the assumptions and predictions of doctors and dietitians in the Western world have turned out to be embarrassingly, and sometimes health damagingly, bad.
Avoiding these controversies for the time being, suppose that the decision is made to have 30% of your calories coming from fat of some sort, 40% coming from carbs of some sort and 30% coming from protein of some sort. Based on my age, size and gender, according to this calculator even just lying around doing nothing, I would need 1271 calories each day. Having a light activity day- which most of my days qualify for- I would need a few more calories- namely 1692. So what does this give me to play with in terms of fat, carbohydrate and protein? That works out to 169.2 grams of carbohydrates, 126.9 grams of protein and 56.4 grams of fat a day, for a grand total of 352.5 grams, or .77 pounds of food + however much fiber I care to stuff in (with the recommended amount being something like 25-30grams a day). This sounds about right to me based on my camping book’s estimates for how much food a person needs.
So far so good- now I just need to decide… in a general way… what I
want to eat! That’s where social and personal preferences come in to play.
posted at: 18:30 |
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Washing Fruits and Vegetables
I was talking about fruit and vegetable washing the other day and thinking
about it again today as I washed off my kale. The issue is relevant to me
because I like to buy local produce, and I’ll usually choose it over
organic produce, which means I have to deal with the residual pesticide
issue. My strategy for this is to soak vegetables in a big bowl of water
(which has the advantage of letting the dirt sink to the bottom too), lift
the vegetables out of the water and then either rinse them or soak them
again. Of course, I have no idea if this is actually doing anything, which
is why I was gratified to find this
page, that reports on a study investigating the effects that washing in
tapwater and using a light soap solution has on pesticide residues. The
results suggest that rinsing produce under tapwater for one minute
significantly reduces pesticide residues of several of the pesticides
considered (9 out of 12), and that using a soap solution does not
significantly increase the effect.
posted at: 12:14 |
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Flaxseed Questions
I keep hearing a lot about flaxseed and its wonders, so I thought I would
investigate further. I keep hearing that it is a good source of Omega 3
Fatty Acid, but I had some questions about this, since it isn’t a meat
source, and often when we think dietary chemicals are ‘close enough to be
the same as’ they turn out to be rather importantly different.
Consequently I was quite interested to read, on this
page that “…the omega-3 fatty acids in flaxseed oil aren’t identical
to what you get from fish oil. Flaxseed oil contains alpha-linolenic acid
(ALA), while fish oil contains eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and
docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). The effects and potential benefits may not be
the same.”
I’ve also been wondering why it says everywhere not to cook with flaxseed
oil. This
page explains that it’s because the oil easily goes rancid, especially
when exposed to heat, light and air. So frying is out. However, the same
site does say that ground flax seed makes and excellent egg substitute in
baked goods. That’s something I’d like to try out. For some reason, people
generally aren’t worried about bad things happening to the flaxseed while
baking. The no doubt slightly less than impartial
ameriflax
website says “Baking with flaxseed does not reduce the quality or
availability of the nutritional components of flaxseed according to
published research3.” with the reference “Cunnane, S.C., et. al. American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1995; 61:62-68”. They also entertainingly
say “Flaxseed can be added to baked products as a whole seed, imparting a
healthy appearance and increased texture quality.” Yay for healthy
appearances.
posted at: 11:23 |
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There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing
We went camping last weekend, and before we went I did a bit more research
on canoeing in cold water and staying warm. My favourite link from this
research is the site of Dr.
Gordon Giesbrecht”, who is also know as ‘Dr. Popsicle’. There are a number
of interesting PDF articles on his website for people who are doing
wilderness activities.
posted at: 11:51 |
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All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.