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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – If you ask someone, “Can you eat potato chips, snack cakes and pizza and lose weight?” you typically get a pretty unequivocal answer: “NO!” Or possibly, “I wish.” But research and my experience shows that the truths about weight loss are not so black and white – instead, there are various shades of gray. For example, labeling foods as “good” or “bad,” particularly against the backdrop of the current focus on obesity, isn’t a black or white issue.
As the buzz around obesity grows by the day, more people are seeing confusing headlines and studies that might lead them to ask “Are the calories I eat stored as fat or burned as energy?” and “Is the source of my calories more important than how many I’m consuming?” Some might have you believe that the source of calories determines whether fat is stored. But the truth seems to lie in how a person balances those calories over time.
In order to demonstrate whether the amount of calories matter – and not the makeup of a particular food – I conducted a unique project over ten weeks last fall for my students at Kansas State University. I kept my caloric intake under 1,800 per day, which was a daily decrease of about 1,200 calories. The goal of the project wasn’t to test the idea of what would happen if I decreased my calorie intake; rather, it was to test how I was decreasing those calories.
Two-thirds of my calories were of the convenience store variety, things like ‘salty’ chips, ‘fat-loaded’ snack cakes, ‘sugary’ cookies and the like. You know, things that are almost always lumped in the “food to avoid” category. The other third of my daily diet included protein shakes, whole and 2 percent milk, multivitamins, and a few vegetables, such as canned green beans or a handful of celery stalks.
What I found, and to the surprise of many, was that the “bad” food did not lead to enormous weight gain. In fact, I lost nearly 30 pounds, and some of my health indicators, like LDL cholesterol, improved by 10-30 percent. Not changes you would expect from eating mostly vending machine foods over a two-month period.
Please note that I do not advocate an everyday diet of snack cakes and chips. But one of the points I wanted to illustrate to my students was that the amount of calories seems to be important – maybe more so than the source or form of the calories consumed. For instance, if you eat donuts, drink sodas and burn enough calories, you will maintain or even lose body fat and weight.
The physiological explanation for this is if you eat more calories than you burn off through exercise, then compounds like glucose and fat tend to remain in the bloodstream longer. Your pancreas then releases insulin and signals some of your organs to store those calories mostly as fat. Some people think that fat storage occurs only when insulin is secreted after eating high glycemic or sugary carbohydrates – but as you may have figured out, it is much more complex than that. This also explains why many think that foods containing refined grains and sugars, like cakes and sodas, cause obesity.
My project helps show that specific foods are not inherently the cause of obesity. Others are supporting this concept, as we’re seeing published peer-reviewed research illustrating that it’s the ‘excessive’ amount of food and calories that contribute to obesity, not simply the source of calories.
But there’s a catch.
Consuming fewer calories than you burn is not easy. Our current environment makes access to tempting and delicious food much easier than access to ways to be active and burn it off. It might be easier for some to achieve this balance through diets that cut out carbs, count points, exclude meat or just through good old fashioned balance and moderation. But no matter the approach, total daily caloric intake seems to be the primary consideration, not the type of foods you eat. Simply put – calories are calories.
We are at a pivotal time in the history of food and nutrition, as food’s role in affecting health has been a prevalent and burning topic over the past decade. Before we continue with a “black and white” mentality toward food, let’s all stop to consider this: To find truth in the science of nutrition, you might need to venture into gray areas. And in that search, you just might find that your favorite “bad” foods are not inherently bad after all.
Mark D. Haub, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Nutrition at the Kansas State University where he teaches topics including nutrition and exercise, obesity, disordered eating, and energy balance. He also consults with companies on food and nutrition issues including Coca-Cola. Dr. Haub has degrees in Psychology and Exercise Physiology, and has published more than 40 scientific articles and book chapters on the effect of food and supplements on obesity, diabetes and/or performance.
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