clevermanka | When a calorie is not a calorie

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When a calorie is not a calorie

Rant alert!

I was going to title this post "Not all foods are created equal," but then I realized that there are a lot of things people eat that I don't consider to be food anymore. So.

mckitterick sent me a link to an article about how cancer cells like sugar, but they love fructose! And here I thought the worst part of HFCS was that it gave me the runs.

Do I think corn-syrup-sweetened soda should be taxed? No. But I think people should be made aware of how damaging it is to eat processed foods all the time. I have to hear about how bad cigarettes are? That's fine. I know they're bad. But people should also get schooled on the health hazards of eating out of a box for three meals a day--especially sweetened foods. Which is just about every processed food out there. And are mostly targeted at kids. It's sad.

I cut out HFCS ages ago. Then I cut out wheat, went back to wheat (mistake!), then cut out all grains. Then sugar. The only packaged foods I eat now are those with three or fewer ingredients, and I'm shooting to cut that down to those with only two.*

Yesterday, I made a fast-and-loose mental calculation of how many calories I'm ingesting per day on Whole30. It's coming in at just under 2,000kcal. That's a lot for me. And makes me all the more itchy to get on the scale--out of curiosity and nervousness! But my pants aren't getting tighter, and I'm not bloating as much after meals, so I remain stoic about the weight thing.

Speaking of good and bad calories, those who believe that we can only lose weight by cutting calories or that all calories are processed equally by our bodies should consider checking Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories out from the public library. I appreciated how he addresses the conservation of energy and thermodynamics issue for the science-y types.

*Right now my favorite coconut milk has three ingredients. I'm trying to find one that doesn't have added water and/or a stabilizer.

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We haven't all-the-way cut out HFCS, but we've been trying to avoid it whenever we can. I was shocked the other day to find that the kind of soy sauce we were getting had corn syrup in it, so I switched to another kind that didn't and also tastes better anyway!

At this point, I refuse to eat HFCS as much for the health benefits as I do out of irritation at the companies who continue to put it in every damn food they produce. Assholes.

Sing it sistah! You can rest assured that one child of the future generation is getting correctly schooled over here!

And there are a couple more here in town, thanks to

stuology and

_mac_!

I'm trying to diet using real food. Most reduced fat, no fat or low calorie stuff is full of WTF is that. So I get the real stuff and have less or go without. Also no margarine, real butter or none.
I'm losing, so there you go, and I really wonder when I hear WW people say, "I'm following the plan and stuck on a plateau" if it's because they are eating all the "DIET FOOD" that's loaded with fake sweeteners and weirdness. I'm trying to stick to the low ingredient rule.

Good for you! That's awesome!

Most reduced fat, no fat or low calorie stuff is full of WTF

I love that. Full of WTF, indeed.

You got an amen over heah!

I had to quit the yummy summer wine coolers too, but what the heck, I can more easily mix up a batch o' Diablos or Red Devils, right?
I wonder about the likker syrups now, tho.. and they don't list ingredients.

You'll know I've gone bonkers when you see me in the kitchen making fruit reductions for my cocktails.

I bet that eventually we'll lose our taste for the sweet cocktails, too. So it might not be an issue.

You're probably right.
Now that I think about it, my faves are more tangy than sweet.

red devils? That sounds delicious.

hee. It's just my pet name for Diablos made with vodka instead of tequila.

Not all foods are created equal. This is true.
But given a fixed caloric expenditure, the only way to lose non-water weight (well, aside from amputation) is to create a calorie deficit. The folks who think that carbohydrates weigh more than fat or whathaveyou are, well, misinformed.

The weirdness comes when things like HFCS affect metabolic rate. A calorie is still very much a calorie -- this is immutable -- but the body may change how efficiently it uses those calories.

There's also our biological response to those calories. HFCS is used in foods engineered to make us ingest more than we need before we realize we're full, and even if you think you're honestly reporting your calorie intake, you're oftentimes not. So an "honest" pile of 2000 calories of satiating fat probably weighs less than a dishonest 2000-ish pile of processed carb calories.

And so are the vagaries of measurement. When we consider absolute measurements, however, the tale is less murky.

Thankfully in America we have handy nutrition labels, reviewed and mandated by the FDA. If more folks would pay attention to calories and (more importantly, IMHO) portion sizes it seems to me we'd not have such a First World crisis at hand.

I agree that label-reading is crucial. But there is another problem in that people are being told the wrong sorts of things are healthful. It doesn't matter how closely you read the label on your package of Snackwell Cookies. Someone is telling you that those are healthier than a plate of scrambled eggs, and that is just plain sad. And wrong.

When it comes to nutrition, I trust the FDA about as far as I trust any government organization.

There are caloric measurements for wood and sawdust.
I ate lots of popsicle sticks as a kid, but I assure you, I was high on sucrose, not cellulose.

Calories are only calories 1=1 in the chemistry lab, please remember that humans are a biology lab.

or to put it another way:
A calorie is not a calorie in biology, when one type causes an insulin surge, and another type causes a leptin surge.

But in absolute terms of energy, 1=1. Your body may have different hormonal reactions to insulin versus leptin, but these alone won't account for energy expenditures.

Also, why would you eat popsicle sticks?!

I think perhaps "net metabolic deficit" is a more accurate way of putting it rather than "cutting calories".
****please feel free to ignore the rest of this comment. It was caused by anti-synergistic combination of dopamine and christian fundamentalism****
Achieving this deficit is easier through eating less than exercising more...
Cutting out grains and sugars is also an easy way to get less calories per gram of food consumed. Compare the Caloric density of a poppy-seed muffin to a chicken breast gram for gram (both boring choices in my opinion), or to an equivalent weight of green pepper, and you'll see what I'm talking about. I have yet to see a processed food that is intentionally less caloricly (?) dense. By cutting out processed food you are automatically reducing calories per gram of food consumed.(unless you drink heavy cream or eat sticks of butter, shut up!) this strategy also has other lesser metabolic effects (like the extremely difficult to measure thermic effect of digestion)that might be what some individuals need to but them over the deficit mark. I have no doubt that unprocessed food is more nourishing, in the general sense, but calories are calories precisely because they are a unit of measure.
Meters are meters whether they are used to measure a sidewalk or a mountain side. Your experience of traversing them, however, way vary dramatically. One the one side the it is possible to create a precise caloric diet consisting of Hotpockets and Mountain Dew, on the other create a strict Paleo diet consisting of Whale blubber and Cashews, (hmmmm ) a year of each and you'd die of scurvy. I think sentient beings should eat what is available to them, while being as aware as possible of the results.

Meters may be meters, but 500 meters of walking on an incline is a very different experience than 500 meters of swimming through the ocean. On the map, they're both an inch, but the similarity begins and ends there -- on paper.

Food's not just its numeric value and it's disingenuous to reduce it to that. Aside from the fat/protein/carb ratios that affect the speed and manner of digestion (that's basic 7th grade life science, that 150 calories of pasta clears your stomach physically far faster than 150 calories of fatty nuts), food comes with a huge range of trace minerals and compounds that can act synergistically on the metabolism to increase or decrease food (including calorie) absorption efficiency. Just the levels of Vitamin B and D alone can drastically change what you get out of what you eat, and what you lose to elimination.

Love,
Rowan

It perplexes me that you think I'm reducing food to anything (except it's metabolites, mmmm chocolate). Calories are a unit of measure derived by burning a sample of the food in question, as I'm sure you are aware, this is in no way how humans derive energy from food, in this, they are faulty. As a unit calories are not without their uses, however. They serve to provide a common standard for judging energetic potential, and nothing else. If someone suggests otherwise they are laboring under a misapprehension. Calories are not intended to represent anything qualitative about food any more than Volts are intended to represent anything about the page illuminated by the lamp. Are all calories equal? Yes. Are all experiences of them equal? Decidedly not.
I’m not in any way saying that everyone’s experience of changing body composition will be the same. Far from it. But in all of the confusion and uncertainty calories are a great place to start. They are also a good way to judge the effectiveness of a strategy on a basic level, if that works for you and you don’t have to delve further, then great. If it does not , then you will have to educate yourself further. Also great. To say, that because one has a achieved an understanding of some of the other subtleties of the metabolic experience, this somehow invalidates the use of energetic measurement, is perhaps a bit misguided.
I used the example of meters, precisely because I was aware that there were qualitative (experiential) differences. It's nice of you to rephrase my example tho. Maps are useful not because they are an exhaustive representation of the experience of the terrain, but because they are abstracted, furthermore they use common units to allow accurate comparisons between them.
Yes, of course there are many other aspects to food (Shepard's Pie in particular), If you thought that I imagined otherwise (or that it was to be inferred from my above response) I apologize for the confusion.

I think that I put together this post and some other things you've said in the past, where you've been a fairly harsh advocate of "consuming less than you burn = losing weight" when that's not universally true, and conflated the thoughts. I seem to have gotten the wrong idea in doing that, and I'm sorry for misunderstanding you.

Love,
Rowan

"Not universally true". Ok fair point.
Rather than the rhetorical "What is?"
I'll say this:
While not universally true, (I'm assuming you can provide solid, evidence for this so I won't ask) what then is your alternative description of how fat stores in humans are used, if not by energy deficit?

Yeah, I was totally not getting it, either. At least we're in good company, yes?

As you know, I'm siding with Rowan on this one. I think you and I just gonna have to agree to disagree here.

unless you drink heavy cream or eat sticks of butter, shut up!

And what if I do? Eat them, not shut up, that is. When I'm including dairy, I do take a slug or two of cream, or eat a pat of butter when I'm feeling hungry. Being on Whole30, I'm subbing those items with coconut milk and spoonfuls of coconut oil.

somehow the phrase (looks around furtively) got lost in the aether... I eat butter all the time and have been seen drinking quarts of heavy cream.

unless you drink heavy cream or eat sticks of butter, shut up!
I managed to lose your context along the way, but I do exactly this when I am trying to consume more fat.

When I do that in the absence of insulinogenic carbs or sugars, i do not seem to put on fat to my frame, and seem to be loosing fat off of my frame at at a descent rate.

Hurrah for Cafe Breve made with heavy cream!

I was not meaning to disparage these things, they were an example. I too eat straight fat, mostly in the form of coconut oil and olive oil, but butter and heavy cream have their place too. There are often days where I'm below calorie and need a quick way to get a couple hundred. I am a believer in efficacy rather than compliance, so if it works for you...

I think that putting some fructose in a dish with cancer cells is not a good simulation of how fructose is metabolised in humans. I am not an HFCS apologist, I just think the manner of the experiment is a bit weird.

It is weird. It's also scary to think about cancer cells preferring a certain type of sugar, even in (especially in?) a petri dish.

In isolation it's easy to get really weird this to happen.

Cancer cells are raised as samples in a known way in a feeding solution that mimics the standard human body on a fairly standard diet.
The standard support solution has glucose.
Supplementing that glucose with fructose or replacing it entirely is a great way to discover what sugars have what variant effects.

My understanding of fructose absorption and metabolism was that it was absorbed in the small intestine, if crystalline, and in both intestines if not, where is was transported through the portal vein to the liver, where it is metabolized into glucose through several means. So, even if you eat, and presumably absorb, large quantities of fructose, it will still not necessarily show up in large concentrations in your blood, except perhaps the portal vein (which does feed the pancreas, and they were talking about pancreatic cancer...) This is why I think just putting it into a petri dish in place of glucose is a bit weird, not because of lab protocols but because of how it's metabolized. That said, I can think of lots of ways that serum fructose levels could rise, in general, but it would require more than just eating more of it. I'm not clear on all the details of fructose absorption, but I would hazard that, it depends on concentration differential as a limiting factor. Maybe not if bound to glucose? I cant find links to the study specifically, so I can't say how specific they were, but I could infer from the article that this might be the case for all cancers, which is a bit problematic. Anyway, like alot of articles about complex subjects this one give, IMHO, an incomplete picture. (this mayn't be the fault of the study at all)

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/25/2/353.full

Increased Fructose Concentrations in Blood and Urine in Patients With Diabetes doi: 10.2337/diacare.25.2.353 Diabetes Care February 2002 vol. 25 no. 2 353-357
has figures for fructose in the blood in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients...
I see from this that high fructose oral intake can make it to the blood in amounts large enough to affect metabolic signaling.
=====================
RESULTS—Serum fructose concentrations in patients with diabetes (12.0 ± 3.8 μmol/l) were significantly higher than those in healthy subjects (8.1 ± 1.0 μmol/l, P < 0.001) and nondiabetic patients (7.7 ± 1.6 μmol/l, P < 0.001), and daily urinary fructose excretion was significantly greater in patients with diabetes (127.8 ± 106.7 μmol/day) than in nondiabetic patients (37.7 ± 23.0 μmol/day, P < 0.001). In patients with diabetes (n = 20), serum fructose concentrations (8.6 ± 1.8 μmol/l, P < 0.001) and daily urinary fructose excretion (63.4 ± 63.8 μmol/day, P < 0.01) significantly decreased by week 2 after admission.

Yeah my Google search showed that one too...
So, are the fructose concentrations in the original study like those of diabetics? Healthy subjects? More? IDK. It would be great to have that info in order to know whether it was representative of healthy metabolisms (whatever those are).
I'm not debating weather fructose has metabolic effects. I'm curious as to weather the lab conditions in the original study were appropriate, and whether they could be safely extrapolated to the kind of inferences made in the article.

The body, it does weird stuff with calories. I gained weight on 600 calories a day (depression-related starvation, not a deliberate diet), and I'm losing it on 2000, because 2000 plays the 'close but not over' game with my metabolism and 400 scared my body into thinking it was never going to get regular meals again.

One of the things I noticed is that processed foods make it hard to play the 'close but not over' game. They make it hard to go, "I am hungry so I will eat this handful of food to see if I'm actually hungry or just a little munchy." When that handful is a plum or some carrot sticks, I don't have a half-empty open bag of things, and I didn't just munch down 180 calories of 'lite' cookies because I wanted to avoid waste. Just-enough is harder to attain with food that comes in predetermined portion sizes larger than you really need.

I think that the reason people don't buy the idea that different calories are metabolized differently is that a lot of cranks have embraced that good idea and used it badly. What starts as "Processed sugars cause metabolic shifts and chemical responses in your endocrine system that affect how you digest food," becomes "YOU CAN EAT ALL THE BACON YOU WANT AND BE A SIZE 2!!!!" I want to smack those people, because they took a really important concept about dietary balance and natural foods, and turned it into a reason to *validate* the 1600-calorie bacon-topped fried chicken plate as 'healthy'. There is no sensible diet on which bacon, cheese, or deep-fried anything should be considered healthy choices. There are diets like mine, where they're not demonized and replaced with food alternatives, but if you hold up a plate of mixed veggie stir-fry and a calorically equal plate of bacon (or a calorically equal plate of cookies), I know which one I ought to be eating and I despise the use of hand-waving pseudoscience to insist they're the same.

When you can't tell the difference between food marketing and nutritional science, you're really doing something wrong as a society.

Since I cut the HFCS almost entirely out of my diet (I figure indulging it a few times a year is no big deal in small quantities), the biggest thing I've noticed is that my hypoglycemia has almost completely vanished. Sure, I still eat a handful of cookies, but they're real butter, real sugar, home-baked cookies and they don't spin my wheels like Oreos did. I don't know if they have fewer or more calories, but they don't spike-and-crash me, and that tells me that they're a healthier choice for me as a whole.

Love,
Rowan

When you can't tell the difference between food marketing and nutritional science, you're really doing something wrong as a society.

Taubes addresses this beautifully.

As for the rest of what you said, yes yes and yes.

The bulk of what you say here is true, except "idea that different calories are metabolized differently" The word "calories" needs to be replaced with the word "food". Calories are an abstract concept and cannot be metabolized, except perhaps by the mind. If you believe in that sort of thing.
Also, what's so unhealthy about bacon?

The problem with bacon? That, ounce for ounce, it's got disproportionately high values for fat, sodium, and nitrates. As an occasional food or as a garnish/topping, it's great. I love it. But 100 calories of bacon is worse for me than 100 calories of pork tenderloin because of all the stuff that goes along with it, and any diet that tells you bacon can be a staple food (as Atkins used to, and some forms of the lingering low-carb stuff still do) is selling you something, something that very few Americans won't develop serious heart and blood pressure issues from.

And I use 'calories' deliberately instead of food because THAT is what I have the problem with: that's how a lot of people view their diets. People do genuinely think, not that a serving of cookies is equivalent to a serving of grapes, but that 100 calories of cookies is equivalent, metabolism-wise, to 100 calories of grapes. The problem really *is* in that number issue. Everyone knows that different foods are different; no one thinks a cupcake is an apple, but there's a common 'wisdom' out there talking about how 'a calorie is a calorie' and that so long as you eat less than you take in, you're guaranteed to lose weight even if it's all Little Debbie cakes and RC cola. And since in popular culture losing weight is equivalent to being healthy, it perpetuates an idea that so long as you're below the 'magic number' of calories you have a healthy diet, no matter what you eat. It keeps the idea out there that only fat people or people with diet-related illnesses need to be focused on what they eat, because everyone else is fine until they start gaining weight or getting sick.

That's why 'a calorie is a calorie' sets me off the way it does, because it's indicative of a deeper problem with food and diet culture. It's why, on the one hand, I like Weight Watchers because it both mandates a minimum intake and clearly puts together the idea that food and exercise are the TWO ways to control your calorie deficit, but I don't like it because it lends itself really well to the 'just numbers' diet game.

Love,
Rowan

While I agree that most diets are trying to sell you something, And bacon is probably not so good as a staple, the latest on heart and blood pressure issues are not as damming of bacon as you imply.

I wish I knew more about the common wisdom, and what pop culture thinks and doesn't think. Perhaps my thumb should be on the pulse of America rather than.. in it's eye? But I do know what calories are and how they are derived.
So, you have a problem with how people think about X or Y. Does that change the definition of calories? People don't metabolize calories they metabolize food, no amount of posturing, or claiming, by them (or you), will change that. This fact is more pertinent to your point than it is to theirs, so it seems odd to me that you would oppose it.
Tho from a pragmatic standpoint, a fair number of people,(just not you apparently) particularly athletes, and those in the fitness(witless)industry lose weight quite successfully by the "numbers" method, and some even weirder strategies that involve counting calories. In a forum I frequent there is a guy who includes two entire boxes boxes of cocoa-pebbles in one day as part of his program. It seems to work for him, who am I to argue? His skin did get darker when he started to eat them tho...

That's why 'a calorie is a calorie' sets me off the way it does, because it's indicative of a deeper problem with food and diet culture.

I still agree with your stance, but I now understand where

femfataleatron is coming from and I feel a little silly for not grasping it earlier.

Ah well. I never claimed to be the brightest bulb. =b

The word "calories" needs to be replaced with the word "food".

This lightbulb just flipped on in my head and I totally understand now what you are saying

*facepalm*

Yes, I like this as a way to shift the conversation.

I do love your style.

OK, personally I think HFCS is at least as bad as sodium cyclamate. It should be banned as an additive. Sure, sell Karo Syrup -- at least the buyers know what they are getting. But it should not be used in every packaged food that exists. Really.

For! Real!

We seem to run hotter on fructose, more proof that a sugar does not = a sugar.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/49/4/667

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When a calorie is not a calorie

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I don't believe in magic and barely believe in correlation.

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as for trhe article.

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nit pick

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