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S.A.N.E. -The Four Calorie Quality Factors

So we talked a bit about these this calorie in calorie out math and the question on everyone's mind I hope is okay so it's about quality I get that but there's another myth that's combating that idea that's that a calorie is a calorie if a calorie is a calorie then there is no such thing as high quality food and low quality food and one hundred calorie snack pack is actually preferable to an avocado because it has fewer calories and it really doesn't matter what we eat anyway because we could just go for a jog afterwards because the job will cancel out those calories right wrong know every part of that thought process is wrong one hundred calorie snack pack is not the same as one hundred calories of avocado and you can't cancel either out just by jogging because there's way more than calories going on here and at the heart of that is the science showing that a calorie is not a calorie but why do we think this like intuitively we know of calories in a calorie. All right, we know if we e...

at some salmon and some asparagus that we feel differently than if we eat an equal amount of calories from soda and french fries like we know that we know are children act differently, but if we think our body works like a balance scale like all a balance scale measures is quantity right if you put a pound of lead on one side of a balance scale and a pound of feathers, the balance scale says they're the same because a balance scale only measures quantity so again, like, why do I why have we been told all these things that are wrong? It's? Because the fundamental model is wrong quality matters amazingly, but in a balance scale quality is irrelevant so again, it makes perfect sense but it's wrong because our body doesn't work like a balance scale, it works like a body, so we can't use these old, obsolete metaphors think about it like this just intuitively right? We know the quality of what we in just effects our body if you breathe in low quality smoke filled the air for thirty years that's going to do something different to your respiratory system and if you breathe in high quality air quality counts, your body isn't a balance scale. If you eat low quality edible products for thirty years that's going to do something different to your metabolic system, then well, that should say eating the same quantity of fresh food, not breathing the same quantity of fresh food, but the point is that quality counts on their body isn't a balance, so this is just a bunch of researchers telling us that diet quality is really what is most associated with long term success rates so getting us to those practical house who's, we need to define what makes one calorie high quality in another source of calories, low quality there's four very simple factors I abbreviate them using the acronym sane. They're satiety how long a calorie keeps us happy and how quickly it keeps us happy in the first place. Aggression is how likely a calorie is to be stored as fat nutrition is how much required goodness comes along with that calorie and efficiency is how easily our body khun store a calorie as body fat, same calories are satisfying. They fill us up for a long time and they keep us full there unaggressive, meaning they don't dump a bunch of energy into our body all at the same time, forcing us to store some his body fat. They're very nutritious and they're inefficient, meaning our body can't readily store the miss fat. They're high quality, they're saying insane calories are just the opposite. One is good, one is evil, the more sane food you eat, the slimmer you will be bottom line because you will be too full for insane food like you can't be hungry, you have to eat something, so the only thing you can realistically do long term is manipulate the quality of your diet, manipulating the quantity of your diet can never work long term so the only thing you can do is manipulate the quality of your diet so we want to eat saying foods in fact we won't eat so much that were too full for insane foods and in fact, researchers at the university of florida analyzed eighty seven studies and found that diets consisting of seigner calories caused people to lose an average of twelve more pounds of fat compared to diets with the exact same quantity of insane calories. These air called ezo caloric studies with eighty seven plus studies that show that whatever number of calories you're eating if you're getting it from st sources, you will burn more fat than if you're getting it from insane sources. Why? Because you're healing your body, you're enabling your body to burn fat again. In fact, researchers at cornell university split people into three groups eating eighteen hundred calories per day but at different levels of quality or sanity. The most sane group lost eighty six point five percent more fat than the least same group they all ate the same number of calories like that in and of itself violates all of these things we've been taught there was a study done where it was a very caloric, restrictive diet where individuals were fed a thousand calories of either a sane diet or an insane diet and after ten days the same group bert twice as much body fat way more studies these air called isso caloric studies there's a vast vast majority of them and they show that with the same quality of quantity of calories if we manipulate quality we get a different outcome so how do we manipulate the quality of our diet? How do we increase the satiety of the foods we eat? Well the society again is how quickly calories fill you up and how long they keep you for for example of a food that has low satiety, there is a popular snack food which advertises that once you pop you can't ok so that that food is telling us that this will not satisfy you like its marketing premise is this will not satisfy there's another product which tells us that we always have room for it what that's not good on then light beer like the whole point of light beer is so that you can in just calories and not get full so it's pretty clear that there are some calories that fill us up and other calories that even make us hungrier after eating them. So the study that I'm skipping over rite now is just to illustrate that again we're not saying that calories are irrelevant they're relevant but we don't need to worry about them when we eat saying foods, for example because this study that was just upon the screen showed that when individuals switch to a more sane lifestyle they spontaneously reduced their caloric intake by a thousand calories per day without being hungry and the thing about that for a second they ate a thousand fewer calories accidentally without ever being hungry. Why would we ever starve ourselves when we can just eat healthier, higher quality foods and spontaneously do a spontaneously creating negative energy balance while providing our body with an abundance of nutrition and therefore not causing all of those metabolic problems that would happen otherwise? So calorie society comes from three things water, fiber and protein water and fiber increased the satiety of calories because they stretch our digestive organs they allow us to more quickly feel full and keep us full longer, for example were, for example, wet and fiber rich celery weighs thirty eight times more than the same quantity of potato chips so you could imagine but there's a reason you can eat an entire bag of potato chips but if you try to eat that giant bag of salary you simply couldn't one is going to stretch your digestive organs more and enable you to feel fuller faster and longer protein is also a satiety hero. The more protein we eat calorie for calorie the fuller will become the longer will stay full and the faster will become full in the first place. There has been numerous studies done on protein so tidy and is now unequivocally showing to be the most satisfying macronutrients one of my favorite was the university of washington and found that just taking the percentage of one's diet from fifteen percent protein the thirty percent protein caused a spontaneous reduction of caloric intake no hunger, no lethargy node no mental function decline ah four hundred forty one calories per day just because their body was getting those full sensations faster. And if you think about it, you might be seeing yourself well, jonathan like again, why were kind of coming back to calories now? I thought we didn't want to eat fewer calories. It's, not again, it's not that calories don't exist or don't matter, but think about it like this say you have an individual. Kelly kelly has one hundred additional pounds of fat on his body, so one hundred more pounds of fat than he needs why does kelly ever get hungry? He has hundreds of thousands of calories available to him to fuel him. Why would his brain ever make him hungry? There's no shortage of energy because there's something deeper going on, right? So it's not that we don't need to achieve a negative energy balance to lose weight. Of course we do that is the laws of thermodynamics, but we need to do so in a way that doesn't cause all these side effects to happen and by eating nutritious, satisfying foods we could do that protein is more satisfying that carbohydrate and fat in the short term as well as in the long term more evidence mohr evidence but basically this is what you need to do from a water fiber and protein perspective weaken simply stack rank foods and give him let's say satiety stars and kind of done this on the table here were non starchy vegetables so vegetables you could eat raw right think vegetables you generally find in salads so asparagus peppers, eggplant, carrots squash like all the good stuff broccoli these are high and water fiber and high in protein actually thirty three percent of calories and spinach comes from protein question I just wanted teo I love that we're starting to get practical because it is a lot of information and science but as you've been talking about it's like we have to hit these things over the head because this is how old you are that many years of of ms and things that you're changing our mind set for but I just I'm I'm really curious to go into these actual what are the foods absolutely so we've got non starchy vegetables again and this is just remember this is just one of four so we've got three more of these coming up so veggies very satisfying water fibre protein packed and then we have seafood meat eggs things that are good sources of protein you're next on the spectrum so we got you know got our salmon? We've got clams we've got oysters we've got certain dairy products that are low on sugar but high in protein such as cottage cheese and greek yogurt and then of course we have our nice nutrient dense grass fed beef lagoons and fruits, legumes or beans fruits are also quite satisfying note that everyone watching should not just write this down and go eat in this order this is the s insane and we're going to get to the a and e but this will give you a ah holistic perspective of how we end up in the place where we make our recommendations and what you'll start to notices these things on the bottom end of the spectrum like sweeteners and process starch and oils and even whole grains like they're dry they're relatively low and fiber in there not really good sources of protein, so we want to steer away from those from a satiety perspective we need to eat way more calories of these to feel satisfied as an equal number of calories from these would make us feel so now we're on to aggression. This is how likely calories are to be stored as fat the number of calories we eat is not the sole determinant of whether or not restoring fat how they get distributed in our body is also quite important for example just intuitively six hundred calories hitting your bloodstream right now is more calories and you need you don't need six hundred calories right now, but six hundred calories spaced over four hours like slowly getting into your bloodstream will obviously be treated differently by your body. We want to eat less aggressive calories think about it a bit like there's a traffic cop in your body and you just dump a bunch of aggressive energy on her all at once he's like you know what? Forget it all of you to the fat cells, right? She just it's just too much it overwhelms us, so we're told eating a lot of food causes fat game that's not true eating a lot of aggressive glucose or blood sugar spiking food is what causes that game and what causes all of that easily digested energy to just dump into our bloodstream all at the same time? Well, it's an absence of water, fiber and protein the really good news is those three factors we just talked about water fibre protein the same things that make foods mohr satisfying also make foods less aggressive. If you're familiar with the glassy mick index or glassy mk load, you'll notice that foods that have a low glycemic index or low glycemic load are generally the ones highest in water, fiber and protein, so we've got less glucose circulating in our bloodstream got a happier samantha we've got less fat storage and again were eating maur unaggressive satisfying foods that has less hunger less calories overall less energy being stored as fat and more nutrition which is the end will get into next but you can see again water fibre protein our what are getting us? Mohr unaggressive foods foods that are unlikely to overwhelm us with glucose at any point in time you can see that this list is a bit different actually quite different from the society list and that's why looking at this holistically? All four of these factors is important because for example just thinking about the amount of glucose in your blood is not enough we have to think about the amount of nutrition you're getting in how satisfied you're feeling but from a from a aggression perspective good sources of protein like again the seafood and meats and nuts and seeds in oils and veggies you know there's gonna be some common denominators up here and more importantly the common denominators of what to avoid right? What are these fat free dry fiber free protein poor foods? They're almost always the same they're starches and sweets there all of these things all the processed, sugary starchy garbage so nutrition how much goodness we get along with calories right? This is how nutrition is generally presented to us, but that gives us a very inadequate look at nutrition because it doesn't consider the quality of the calories that come along with those nutrients so when we think about nutrition quality or the calories that come along with the nutrients, we get a much different view of what? What is nutritious? We also start to see how we can actually not experience all of those side effects of starvation even though we're spontaneously consuming fewer calories than explain what I mean here. So first of all, what makes something nutritious? Why is why are ten doughnuts not ten times more nutritious than one donut like that? Ten donuts will provide you with ten times more nutrition than one donut, but we know that you'll also get ten times more of all the garbage that's in a doughnut, right? So we can't just think of the raw like percent vitamins and minerals we have to think about the calories that come along with it to increase nutrients relative to calories, we again just maximize water, fiber and protein, water and fiber have no calories, so of course the more of them that exist in the food, the more the higher the relative percentage of nutrients we get and then protein is used very inefficiently by our bodies, meaning our body really can't use it is energy effectively so again, if we have nutrients divided by calories, more calories coming from protein increases, that ratio gives us ah higher nutrient density, as it's talked about in the scientific literature so again, nutrition is all about dividing nutrients by the quantity of calories, so more water, fiber and protein reduces the relative number of calories in food and increases the nutrition so basic math we want to increase nutrition if nutrition is determined by nutrients divided by calories. If we drop the relative number of calories required to get those nutrients boom nutrition goes up right. This changes the way we look at nutrition, though, because look at whole grain starches, right? We're told the whole grain starches are just super nutritious and that we need to eat six to eleven servings of them per day, right from the get go starch is dry and protein poor that we know that it's not like packed with water, right it's dry it cracks when you break it doesn't have a lot of protein in it, so their only hope is fiber. So really from a nutrition perspective, whole grains like each your whole grains are great sources of fiber. Are they really the grams of fiber in two hundred fifty calories of whole grains? On average? If you look like the twenty most common whole grains is about six well twenty most common non starchy vegetables. You would get forty six grams of fiber in the same two hundred fifty calories highwater fibre protein high water fibre, low water fibre protein, lower lowest so doughnuts, you mean whole grains are better for you than doughnuts, but why eat whole grains and you could eat non starchy vegetables? In fact, if you wanted to get that forty six grams of fiber that you would get from two hundred fifty calories of non starchy veggies from whole grains, you have to eat nearly two thousand calories of whole grains per day it's like to provide the amount of fiber that you might want or need through whole grains you would have to overeat, you'll be forced to overeat because the nutrient quality of whole grains is so low, so again, whole grains completely inept compared to non starchy vegetables when it comes to providing fiber, they are better for us than doughnuts, but that doesn't mean they're a good source of nutrition all up. This really, really does change the way we think about nutrition because think about a recent poll a recent poll was done that showed about ninety percent of americans this was actually in the twenty eleven issue of time. Nearly ninety percent of americans describe their diet is healthy, like we think we're eating a nutritious, healthy diet, but when we have this perspective of nutrients and nutrient density, we can start to see that despite ninety of us eating a healthy ninety percent of us eating a healthy diet, we're getting sicker and it's starting to make sense why so we need a more saying in scientific definition of nutrition. Fortunately, we don't need to do all of this. We just look at nutrition for quality based on research done at university of colorado again water fibre protein make things more nutritious per calorie, low fibre, low protein and dry make things less nutritious per calorie veggies, seafood, lean meats again the all stars that you find at the top end of the spectrum in almost all categories, and then sweets, refined grains and whole grains on the bottom end of the spectrum from a nutrient quality perspective and it's a little fun to do this math. I'm kind of a geek, so I like math, but when you divide nutrients by calories, you start to really question like what's, actually a good source of protein, right. Milk, beans and nuts are often referred to his good sources of protein. Are they actually good sources of protein? When you look at amount of protein per calorie? Well, let's, look at some common foods. For example, broccoli in two hundred fifty calories would provide us with twenty two grams of protein, whereas kidney beans, we only provide us with eighteen grams. In fact, spinach would provide us with a whopping thirty three grams of protein in two hundred fifty calories. Well, mixed nuts could only provide us with seven now that doesn't mean that these foods are bad for you. It just means if you're using kidney beans two percent milk and mixed nuts to get protein, you would have to eat a massive number of calories to get the levels of protein you're certainly you're looking for. So that's why again, we just need to be more sensitive two protein divided by nutrient or or calorie quantity so that we make sure we're using our calories most effectively. You can also see that this enables us to create the need to burn fat instead of the need to slow down and burn muscle tissue because we we can't make our metabolism think we're starving sze we can't blindly eat less, but the laws of thermodynamics do apply we do need to create the need to burn fat. So is that like saying we have to draw something with three corners but not a triangle like am I proposing something that's impossible? Actually, no thanks to nutritional quality because eating less calories spontaneously because we've increased satiety can simultaneously provide us with more nutrition then we've ever eaten before because we could be eating more water fibre protein packed foods which will provide us with more nutrition in fewer calories than we've ever gotten. So how could your body thinkyou're starving when it has more nutrition, more vitamins and minerals? More essential amino acids more essential fatty acids than it's ever had and after all, if we're struggling with overweight, we already have calories they're stored on our body, but we need nutrition and by maximizing nutrition density weaken, do so. So again, more water fibre, protein packed foods, higher society, lower aggression, higher nutrition. We unconsciously eat fewer calories. We simultaneously have less glucose being stored, his body fat. We taken more nutrients that gives us more need to burn body fat, and then we don't have a need to slow down or burn muscle tissue. So it's not too good to be true it's actually a too obvious to be false once we understand the science. So again what's this nutrition summary where do we get the most nutrients, vitamins and minerals per calorie? You should start to see patterns, non starchy vegetables, nutrient dense sources of protein, lower fructose fruits like berries and citrus again water fibre protein powerhouses, nutrition powerhouses processed starches and sweets down at the lower end of the spectrum and then finally, efficiency. This is the amount of calories we burn, digesting food and various macronutrients are more or less efficient at being utilized as energy got to skip through some of the science here, but from a high level fat and carbs are easy to converted to energy. Only about three and six percent of the energy we ingest is spent turning those into usable energy by our body, but protein is hard to turn into energy protein isn't really a source of energy for our body it's a structural component so we're going to burn a dramatic amount of calories just turning protein into usable energy and because of that is very unlikely to be stored his body fat it's inefficient at being stored his body fat this is why higher protein diets almost always are more effective in lower protein diets calorie for calorie when it comes to weight reduction what is actually happening in your body is if you eat three hundred calories of protein by the time it leaves your stomach you've only really have this is conceptual but you only have about two hundred ten calories left because the sheer process of digesting protein and turning it into amino acids is very hard for your body. It burns a lot of energy doing that and then if you have an excess of amino acids just more than you need and your body wants to then use them for energy instead of for building your body it then has to convert them into glucose. It does this through a process called glucose neo genesis and that's that's a chemical change or taking amina lasses and you're converting them into glucose so a bunch of energy is lost doing that so now you've got one hundred forty one calories of glucose floating around in your bloodstream, then if you don't need that glucose as energy, your body will take that and converted into body fat but again body fat or the technical term tryg lissa ride is a different thing from glucose, so your body has to perform a chemical reaction to take glucose and converted into body fat so again you're burning even more calories. So at the end of the day, if you were to just lay in bed and exert no calories through any other activity, eating three hundred calories could only ever be stored. You could only store about a third of those his body fat simply due to the inefficiency of taking chicken breast, converting it into amino acids, converting it into glucose, which would then be converted into body fat again. Calorie is not a calorie once we start to understand this biology and for example, if you follow that same process with whole grains, we end up in a much different place and we actually see that for example calories from starch don't need to be converted into glucose the same way protein calories do so at the end of the day, if we ate three hundred starch calories and three hundred protein calories about twice a cz many calories from starch could be finished or could be stored as body fat