More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 19 - March 21, 2023
We have two separate appetite control systems: the homeostatic system and the hedonic system. The homeostatic pathway maintains our calorie balance by making us hungry when energy reserves are low and abolishing our appetites when energy reserves are high. In contrast, our hedonic, or reward-based, regulation can overwhelm our homeostatic pathways in the face of highly palatable foods.2388 This makes total sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
This tendency seems to be driven by a phenomenon called sensory-specific satiety.2392 Within minutes, the pleasantness of the taste, smell, texture, and appearance of an eaten food drops off compared to the uneaten foods.2393 It’s like how the first bite of chocolate tastes better than the tenth bite.
Feed people a four-course meal, and they eat 60 percent more calories than when presented with the same dish served at each of the four courses.2395 It’s not just due to boredom.
Diets don’t work almost by definition. Going on a diet implies that, at some point, you will go off the diet. Short-term fixes are no match for long-term problems.2421 Lifelong weight control requires lifelong lifestyle changes.
The hook for low-carbohydrate diets that may explain their recurring popularity since the 1860s is the rapid water loss that can accompany them. Put people on a ketogenic, eight-hundred-calorie-a-day, low-carbohydrate diet, and they lose ten pounds in ten days, compared to only six pounds lost on the same number of calories of a higher-carb diet.
What the bathroom scale isn’t telling you, though, is that those four extra pounds were all water. Indeed, in the first week of a ketogenic diet, most of the weight lost is in water, not fat.
when low-carb diets were actually put to the test, they were indeed found to impair artery function.
Ketogenic diets tend to be so nutritionally vacuous that one assessment estimated that in order to get a sufficient daily intake of all essential vitamins and minerals, you’d have to eat 37,500 calories a day.
Ironically, even though plant-based eaters are restricting entire categories of foods, they end up getting more nutrition.
those eating more plant-based were getting higher intakes of nearly every nutrient: more fiber, more vitamin A, more vitamin C, more vitamin E, more of the B vitamins thiamine, riboflavin, and folate, and more of the minerals calcium, magnesium, and iron.
Plant-based is often confused with vegetarian or vegan, but it can have very different health implications.
Any diet that results in reduced caloric intake can cause weight loss. Dropping pounds isn’t so much the issue; the problem is keeping them off. A key difference between plant-based nutrition and more traditional approaches to weight loss is that people are encouraged to eat ad libitum, which is, as I’ve noted, Latin for at one’s pleasure. In other words, people on a healthy enough plant-based diet can eat as much as they want. No calorie counting, no portion control—just eating. The strategy is improving the quality of the food rather than restricting the quantity of the food.
A whole food, plant-based diet achieved the greatest weight loss ever recorded at six and twelve months compared to any other such intervention published in the medical literature.2527 The record-breaking study can be read in full for free at www.nature.com/articles/nutd20173
Thank goodness it’s hard to stick to something like a ketogenic diet, since the long-term, adverse health effects could be devastating. Whereas low-carb diets have been shown to impair artery function2535 and worsen heart disease,2536 whole food, plant-based diets have been shown to actually reverse heart disease.
The Paleolithic period, when we started using tools, only goes back about two million years. We and other great apes have been evolving since the Miocene era, more like twenty million years ago.2539 So for the first 90 percent of our hominoid existence, our bodies evolved on mostly plants.
We’ve known for more than a century that you can clog the arteries of herbivores like rabbits by feeding them meat, eggs, and dairy,
After two years on Weight Watchers, the average weight loss is about six pounds.2547 After two years in the Trevose program, the average weight loss is thirty-nine pounds.
Tobacco is a member of the nightshade family, along with tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and bell peppers, and they all contain nicotine as well.2603 This is why smokers can’t be identified just by looking for the presence of nicotine in their toenail clippings. Because nicotine is in the food supply, nonsmokers grow out some nicotine into their nails too.2604 The total amount of nicotine we eat in our daily diets is hundreds of times less than we would get from a single cigarette, though. So while we’ve known for at least twenty years that there’s nicotine in ketchup, it’s been dismissed as
...more
Their taste is described in the medical literature as “pleasantly acidulous,”2617 which is doctor-speak for sour. I had just been sprinkling them on my oatmeal because they’re so tasty, but evidently they’ve played a prominent role in traditional systems of healing around the world for thousands of years.
I produced a video for NutritionFacts.org that discussed a clinical trial of barberries for acne. Teenagers randomized to take about a teaspoon of dried barberries, roughly eight cents’ worth, three times a day for a month experienced a dramatic 45 percent drop in inflamed pimples compared to the placebo control group.2622 That’s great news for zits, but what about barberries for weight loss?
Obese individuals randomized to just about four teaspoons of yacon syrup a day for 120 days lost nearly four inches off their waists and more than thirty pounds, whereas those on the placebo syrup gained weight.
And we know that children’s cereals are the worst. Breakfast cereals marketed to American kids have been found to contain 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber, and 60 percent more sodium than those marketed to adults.
As it turns out, it’s not just what we eat but when we eat. Because of our circadian rhythms—circadian coming from the Latin words for about and day—morning calories don’t appear to count as much as evening calories.2798
Breakfast Like a King, Lunch Like a Prince, Dine Like a Pauper
by the end of the twelve-week study, the king-prince-pauper group lost nineteen pounds compared to only eight lost by the pauper-prince-king group despite eating the same number of calories.2830 Eleven additional pounds lost eating the same number of calories. That’s the power of chronobiology.
The researchers concluded that one clear communication physicians could give is: “If you want to lose weight, eat more in the morning than in the evening.”2832
The researchers calculated that the meal given in the morning took about 300 calories to digest, whereas the exact same meal given at night used only about 200 calories to process. The meal itself was about 1,200 calories, so, when given in the morning, it ended up providing only about 900 calories compared to around 1,000 calories at night.2837 Same meal, same food, same amount of food, but effectively 100 fewer calories when consumed in the morning. So a calorie is not just a calorie. It depends on when it’s eaten.
A meal eaten at 8:00 p.m. can cause twice the blood sugar response as an identical meal eaten at 8:00 a.m.2845—as if we had eaten twice as much! Our bodies just aren’t expecting us to be eating when it’s dark outside.
Check this out: If you put people on a plane and fly them halfway around the world, then feed their poop to mice, those mice grow fatter than mice fed their preflight feces.
Social jet lag is the discrepancy in sleep timing between the days we work and the days we’re off.2896 From a circadian rhythm standpoint, when we go to bed late and sleep in on the weekends, it’s as if we flew a few time zones west on Friday evening and flew back east on Monday morning.2897 Travel-induced jet lag goes away in a few days, but what might be the consequences of constantly shifting our schedules every week over our entire working career?
During the winter, some animals hibernate and, in preparation, double their fat stores with autumn’s abundance to deal with the subsequent scarcity of winter.2926 Genes have been identified in humans that are similar to hibernation genes,2927 which may help explain why we exhibit some of the same behaviors. The autumnal effect isn’t subtle. Researchers have calculated an average difference of 222 calories per day between caloric intake in the fall versus spring, and this isn’t just because it’s colder, since we eat more in the fall than the winter.
Other “recommendations for the prevention of obesity . . . by improving the circadian system,”2962 based on varying degrees of evidence, include: • Sleep during the night and be active during the day • Sleep enough (seven to eight hours a night) • Early to bed, early to rise • Avoid bright light exposure at night • Sleep in total darkness when possible • Eat dinner at least two and a half hours before going to bed • Avoid eating at night
To truly test for a solid-versus-liquid effect, you’d have to use the exact same foods in two different forms. Finally, a study did just that. Researchers looked at what happens if you eat a fruit salad of raw apples, apricots, and bananas and drink three cups of water or, instead, blend the fruit with two cups of water to make a smoothie and drink the third cup of water.2964 The meals are identical except one is in solid form and the other is in smoothie form. What happened? People felt significantly less full after the smoothie, even though it was the same type and amount of food. In
...more
the participants felt just as full sipping the smoothie with a spoon as they did eating the whole fruit—so the answer is time.2975 The only real reason smoothies aren’t as filling is that we gulp them down. If we sip them slowly over time, they can be just as filling as if we had eaten the fruits and veggies whole.
We evolved for millions of years trying to extract calories from undomesticated fruits and vegetables, which were much tougher and fibrous than produce today. This was long before hot dog-eating contests enabled the human frame to inhale twenty thousand calories in ten minutes.2980 Our bodies are built to expect us to take our time when eating.
In other words, the same fullness with less food. If you have people eat the same amount but chew more, they end up less hungry,
The cephalic phase of digestion starts before food even hits our stomachs. Cephalic means in the head. There are nerves traveling straight from our brains to our mouths. This is how even the thought of food can get us salivating. And the nerves are a two-way street. Signals coming from our mouths can tip off our brains to what’s coming down the pike.
So choose foods that take longer to eat, and eat them in a way that prolongs the time they stay in your mouth. Think bulkier, harder, chewier foods, such as apples, carrots, or intact grains, eaten in smaller, thoroughly chewed bites. Snack on raw veggies, and fall in love with soup. If possible, extend meal duration so it lasts at least twenty minutes to allow your natural satiety signals to take full effect.
Think of it this way: A moderately obese person doing moderate-intensity physical activity, like biking or very brisk walking, would burn off approximately 350 calories an hour.3092 Most drinks, snacks, and other processed junk are consumed at a rate of about 70 calories a minute. Therefore, it only takes five minutes of snacking for someone to wipe out a whole hour of exercise.
EPOC, or excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. EPOC can bump up our resting metabolic rates as much as 5-10 percent. That may not seem like much, but it can build up. For example, a brisk half-hour walk may only burn 150 calories,3100 but if it then boosts our metabolic rates by 7.5 percent over the subsequent thirty-six hours, that EPOC effect alone could burn an additional 170 calories or so—more than was burned during the actual walk.
Our gross overestimation of the capacity of exercise to burn off extra calories may be one reason people can rapidly become disillusioned with their new gym membership.3101 Consider some foods that are CRAP—that is, calorie-rich and processed, as I explained here. To walk off the calories found in a single pat of butter, we’d have to add an extra seven hundred yards to our stroll that evening. What about a Snickers bar? We’d need to jog a quarter mile for every single bite. If we eat two chicken legs, we’d better get out on our own two legs and run an extra three miles that day just to outrun
...more
A piece of pizza has about three hundred calories, which converts into an hour of brisk walking per slice. How many kids are jogging two hours a day to burn off their Happy Meals? Who’s got time to climb up the Empire State Building’s eighty-six flights to burn off a single donut?3102 That’s one reason what we put into our mouths is most important.
It doesn’t take much energy for us to move. Take sex, for instance. One of the “Seven Myths About Obesity” identified in The New England Journal of Medicine is that a bout of sexual activity burns a few hundred calories.3104 So you may think, Hey, I could get a side of fries with that! But if you hook people up (literally and figuratively) and actually measure their oxygen consumption during the act (assuming they don’t get too tangled up in all the wires and hoses), having sex only turns out to be the metabolic equivalent of bowling.
Experimental psychologists took a group of men and women, put them on stationary bikes, and had them cycle until they burned either 50 calories or more than 250 calories. Unbeknownst to them, the experimenters effectively manipulated the machines to give false readouts such that, in actuality, both groups burned the same number of calories, about 120; they just thought they had burned more or less than that. The subjects were then offered snacks ten minutes later, ostensibly to measure the “effects of exercise on taste perception and food reward.” The real purpose, however, was to covertly
...more
The secret to weight loss through exercise may be sheer volume: at least three hundred minutes a week to achieve appreciable fat loss.
An increase in exercise can inadvertently result in a decrease in nonexercise physical activity. When overweight adolescents engaged in an hour of moderate-intensity exercise, they burned off a total of 286 calories. Within that same period, they would have burned off 80 calories just existing.
Let’s say that after you wake up tomorrow, you go out and take an hour-long walk in nice weather. (See the Coming In from the Cold box here to see why this temperature-related caveat is necessary.) Over the rest of the day, you’ll likely end up eating and moving just as much as you would have had you slept in instead of gone for a walk. So if you walked off three hundred calories, at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a three-hundred-calorie deficit. Your body doesn’t like being in the red, though, since millions of years of scarcity-stress has been hardwired into our DNA. As a result,
...more
Nearly everyone seems to agree that the current national3142 and international3143 recommendations of 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity exercise simply aren’t enough. That only comes out to be about one hundred calories burned a day, against which our bodies could easily compensate.
Published recommendations range from the American College of Sports Medicine’s 250 minutes a week3149 up to a USDA-funded paper pushing 250 minutes a day.3150 I checked with the lead author, and, thankfully, the latter was a typo.3151 They also had meant to say weekly.
