Calories in-calories out

[JKonSB]

There was a a lot of noise made recently about a medical study which reached the conclusion that no matter what the diet, it's all about caloric intake and buring those calories.

I know a woman who won a bet that sort of proved these findings. She lost 20 ls on a hot fudge Sundae diet.

That used to make sense to me, but now it doesn't seem to match up to some of the more complex aspects of what make SB work.

Things like- the idea of avoiding food that has been processed so the body needs to work harder to unlock the calories means some calories actually make the body work harder to digest so are "better" calories. Or how about the process of slowing the "unlocking" process which allows semi processed foods to pass through you before depositing those calories, or finally how about fat inhibiting the absorbtion of some calories? These are all examples where it DOES matter what kind of food consitutes the calories.

So w/SB calories in aren't the whole story...

Why didn't these aspects of SB (or other diets) come through in the new findings data?

-JK

[RedRox]

Originally Posted by JKonSB

Things like- the idea of avoiding food that has been processed so the body needs to work harder to unlock the calories means some calories actually make the body work harder to digest so are "better" calories. Or how about the process of slowing the "unlocking" process which allows semi processed foods to pass through you before depositing those calories, or finally how about fat inhibiting the absorbtion of some calories? These are all examples where it DOES matter what kind of food consitutes the calories.

So w/SB calories in aren't the whole story...

Why didn't these aspects of SB (or other diets) come through in the new findings data?

-JK

I'm not sure your description is entirely accurate. Certainly for carbohydrate sources of calories, whole grains and lower GI carbohydrate sources convert more slowly to blood glucose, which releases less insulin at once, which does two things. 1.) It does allow the body to utilize more of that blood glucose for body needs rather than storing the excess as fat because it can only use so much at once, and 2.) It helps prevent the insulin spike and drop cycle which leads to more sharply and more quickly felt hunger pangs, i.e. cravings. Whatever calories are in the foods we eat are either used or stored. I don't believe that the digestion is so slow that they "escape" through the elimination process without going through that conversion one way or another.

For me the focus on real foods and minimally processed foods has to do more with maximizing and optimizing the total nutrition available to our bodies given the level of calories consumed. So maybe the woman you know on the hot fudge sundae did lose weight, but she probably was hungry a lot of the time and if kept up for any particular length of time would probably manifest itself in a variety of health issues.

Don't know why other studies are not corroborating the healthiness of SB eating, but maybe they aren't structured to do that in the first place. If you look at SB as a program for weight loss I don't think it makes that much sense in some areas. (alcohol, treats, liberal fat intake, etc.) So maybe the studies are only concerned with the effect on weight loss and are not as concerned with the other and more primary goals of SB which are to reduce overall fasting blood glucose levels, reduce LDL, reduce triglycerides and combined with exercise, raise HDL and ultimately greatly reduce the risk of cardiac and vascular issues.

If you just want to lose weight there are lots of ways to accomplish that and many probably are more efficient at it than SB. If you want to lose weight, learn how to eat properly for the rest of your life so you can keep it off and get off the yo-yo diet cycle, and increase your overall health and the quality of your life all at the same time and suffer at all from any aspects of insulin resistance/metabolic syndrome, then SB is probably more efficient at doing that.

just my own ramblings!!