MM#290--How NOT To Diet, pt 2--The Missing 28 lbs.

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, David Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo man and we are continuing our nutritional look at that socratic question isn't a calorie just a calorie? And so far we have said no. In fact it is not, not actually. With that, let's continue from our book how Not to Diet, the Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, permanent Weight Loss by the great and almost always funny Dr Michael Greger, and let's go to that Vermont prison study which I talked about last week. Go on to the book In the Vermont prison studies I mentioned earlier, where lean quote volunteers were overfed to study experimental obesity, the researchers made an important discovery. They learned how difficult it is to get people to gain weight on purpose unless you feed them lots of fat. To get prisoners to gain 30 pounds on the mixed diet, it took about 1,000, I'm sorry, 40,000 excess calories per a certain body surface area To get the same 30 pound weight gain just by adding fat to their diets. All the researchers had to do was feed the prisoners as few as 40,000 extra calories. When the extra calories were in the form of straight fat, it took as many as 100,000 fewer calories to gain the same amount of fat I'm sorry to gain the same amount of weight. Why isn't a calorie just a calorie? Why are our bodies so much more efficient at storing fat calories? The reason our bodies so easily store fat as fat is because it's already fat. Our bodies can turn protein or carbs into fat, but it's costly To store 100 calories of dietary fat as body fat. It only takes three calories of energy by converting 100 calories of dietary carbs into fat for storage takes 23 calories. So if your body wanted to store fat from 100 pats of butter, it would have to essentially burn three pats to make it happen. So you'd end up storing only 97 pats. But in order to store 100 sugar cubes as fat, the conversion process alone would burn up nearly a quarter of them. This is why our bodies would rather burn carbs and store fat instead of the other way around. Simply stated, fat may be more fatening. There is a nugget of wisdom, in fact, a nutritional nugget of wisdom at that. Yes, this is nutrition 201 stuff now. But Did you hear how that lost or couldn't account for the over 100,000 excess cowries? How crazy is that? 3,500 cowries is a pound we know, at least in the energy balance equation we learned last time. So 100,000 cowries divided by 3,500. That's like over 28 pounds that are missing and if my public school math is helping me here, it looks like it is Holy smokes again. Pretty cool stuff, though, the missing 28 pounds. Now let's keep going with this wisdom. Going back to the book, when we eat a meal, most of the fat is deposited directly as fat on our bodies, whereas a large portion of the carbs get stored in our muscles for quick energy. A study on children found that a high fat meal deposited 9 times more fat onto their bodies than the same number of cowries of a low fat meal. Where exactly does the fat go? Researchers at the Mayo Clinic tagged the fat in a meal with special isotopes to track its movement throughout the body. They had research subjects eat the tagged fat and then, 24 hours later, brought them into the operating room and took fat biopsies from their thighs, belly flab and deep within their abdomens. Of the fat in the meal they could account for, about 45% was burned right off the bat, but most of that fat consumed was simply directed right into their fat stores. The researchers found that about 50% went right into the belly flab, 40% to their thighs and most of the remaining went into their visceral fat, the fat that's buried around your major organs. Under normal circumstances, less than 1% of ingested carbohydrates suffers the same fate, based on similar studies of isotope labeled sugar. Now, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool stuff, but let's keep going for just two more paragraphs, because here's where we get some other nutritional nuggets of wisdom. Low fat proponents often point out this fact that making significant amounts of new fat from scratch, from ingested carbs, only occurs with massive overfeeding of, for example, a diet consisted of candy. If you fed people an extra thousand calories of sugar a day, the equivalent of up to 11 bags of cotton candy, they do gain about 4 pounds in three weeks, but most of the extra carb calories end up being burned off as excess heat. If, however, you added an extra thousand calories of fat, like a stick or so of butter every day or a half a cup of oil, most of that would be directly socked away and stored for a rainy day Under normal circumstances I'm sorry, under more normal circumstances. Even if less than 1% of the carbs in a meal end up as fat, that doesn't mean that the carbs can't be fattening. Normally, our bodies burn fat around the clock at interestingly about the rate at which a candle burns. Candles, after all, used to be made from animal fat. Candles are the body's preferred fuel, so when we eat them, our bodies switch from burning fat to burning carbs, effectively snuffing out the candle for a few hours. So while we can certainly gain weight from eating carbs, it's more from sparing our own fat from being used rather than adding more fat directly. Ah, so the low carb folks really don't have the nutrition right either, and the low fat folks are a little bit closer to the truth on this one. So that's pretty good stuff, and it is indeed nutrition tool one stuff. Now, the last time I said I would bring you a solution instead of just talking about all the problems. And here's where Dr Greger's book is just as good. In that respect too, he provides us solutions as we get to the end of the book. In fact, 21 of these so-called tweaks to our diet so we can optimize and flourish. One of those is time restriction of your eating. Let's go back to the book for that wisdom. Confine your eating to a daily window of time of your choosing, under 12 hours in length, that you can stick to consistently seven days a week. Given the circadian benefits of reducing evening food intake. The window should end before 7 pm. Ah, there's some very cool advice. So the 12 hour rule would have us eat as early as 7 am. If we're keeping this window, and at the end of the window by eating our last meal right before 7 pm, that sounds very doable. So in today's mojo minute to flourish in life, we have to understand how nutrition can help us in life or, in fact, hurt us. Now I will be, over the course of the next five months, be putting more of this nutritional information out from our best books that I cover, and we will be putting theory into action, because my health says it needs to be improved. How about you? Can you improve your nutritional health too? I will see you in our next class.