As always, newsletter subscribers will get first grab at it at a discounted price. To let you know a little more about the project, I'm running an excerpt as the feature article. I'll run part 2 of the steady state vs. interval workout article in the next issue
In the research review, a look at beverages and how the body treats them (note: this one got a bit long).
In the Q&A, determining percentages of micronutrient intake on a diet, 8 day Ultimate Diet 2.0 cycle.
Lyle
Research Review
Wolf A, Bray GA, Popkin BM. A short history of beverages and how our body treats them. Obes Rev. 2008 Mar;9(2):151-64.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that beverages containing sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or alcohol are handled differently by the body than when sugar or HFCS are incorporated in solid foods and as a result the overall caloric intake from solid food does not adjust to account for the calories in these beverages. A consideration of our evolutionary history may help to explain our poor compensatory response to calories from fluids. This paper reviews the history of eight important beverages: milk, beer, wine, tea, coffee, distilled alcoholic beverages, juice and soft drinks. We arrive at two hypotheses. First, humans may lack a physiological basis for processing carbohydrate or alcoholic calories in beverage because only breast milk and water were available for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. Alternatives to those two beverages appeared in the human diet no more than 11 000 years ago, but Homo sapiens evolved between 100 000 and 200 000 years ago. Second, carbohydrate and alcohol-containing beverages may produce an incomplete satiation sequence which prevents us from becoming satiated on these beverages.
My comments: This is sort of a departure from the typical paper I talk about but I think it's very interesting and, as you'll see towards the end, does have some practical implication for dieters and folks looking to alter body composition.
After the necessary introduction, the paper first looks at changes in the patterns of beverage consumption within the US. They point out that by 2004, Americans were consuming over 135 gallons of fluids other than water or about 1.5 liter per day. Basically, Americans are drinking a lot but it isn't water; obviously it's something else.
The early part of the paper also trots out something called the Beverage Guidance Panel which, in my opinion, is about as useless as the current food pyramid. It's complicated and pointless, simply confusing people more about the issue. I'm not going to bother talking about it.
Quoting the paper, they state that "While consumption of healthful beverages is falling, consumption of the most unhealthy beverages is strong." While milk and coffee consumption are at roughly one half of their historical maximum, with tea basically unchanged, regular soft drinks are the most popular beverage; beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup are consumed at a rate of over 35 gallons per year on average. The second most popular drink is beer which at least has some nutrients.
Positively, low-fat milk makes up two thirds of milk consumption with soft drink consumption trending downwards. However, this may be a false artifact due to how drinks are classified, energy drinks aren't being counted as soft drinks which is making it look like folks are drinking less soda. They aren't, they are just drinking energy drinks instead.
Looking globally, drink patterns have shown massive growth with soda products being consumed at a rate in excess of one billion drinks per day. Beer consumption has shown the greatest increase with tea showing a slight increase. Wine and milk consumption have fallen globally, presumably due to the introduction of all the drinks that have made America rich, proud and very fat (my comment, not theirs).
The next section of the paper got into what is arguably the most important issue of the paper: the simple fact that for all but the last 11,000 years, the predominant fluids consumed by humans were water and breast milk and nothing else. Now, they go out of their way to point out that milk is a complete beverage containing protein, carbohydrate, fat and water. Water is, of course water which provides no calories. This is important because numerous studies have shown that humans show poor compensation for fluid calories.
Let me explain that a bit. Compensation means that the body will adjust caloric intake at other times of the day (or days later) for a given caloric load. So say you eat a bunch of candy earlier in the day and it provides 450 calories. What you might see is that, later in the day, folks eat a few hundred calories less than they'd normally eat. The body 'compensates' for the food you ate earlier. The problem is that most liquid calories aren't compensated for well and figuring out why is of some interest to researchers.
The paper suggests that one of two possible mechanisms may be at stake here. First, we may simply lack a physiological mechanism by which to compensate for liquid calories. Second, it may be that liquids are treated essentially like water, being digested/absorbed too quickly to have any impact on food intake (normally eating food does things hormonally that tends to make you eat less later).
With that out of the way, the paper examines the majority of fluids consumed by humans from a historical perspective. I'm not going into deep detail for each or this would take pages. While interesting, this really isn't that relevant to the rest of the paper or how it impacts on things like weight, fat or body composition.
The main take home point of this paper has to do with how the body responds to different beverages. Various lines of research indicate that the intake of calorically sweetened beverages do NOT reduce the intake of solid food (the compensation issue I mentioned above). Reviewing the literature, they basically point out what I wrote above. Of some interest (especially to me since I like jelly beans) one study compared the intake of 450 kcal or jelly beans to 450 kcal of a soft drink. the jelly bean consumers actually reduced their food intake by slightly more than the 450 calories in the jelly beans (my next book: the Jelly bean diet) later in the day. The carb containing soft drink group not only failed to compensate for the drink but also increased their intake of other foods slightly. That is, not only did they get the added calories from the soft-drink, they ate more food as well; a double whammy in terms of weight gain.
Continuing on, the paper addresses the issue of why the body shows weaker compensation to some fluids; the exact reason is unknown. The propose that one mechanism is in the way that the GI tract responds to the form of the food; solutions can stimulate stronger sensory responses than solid food (e.g. sweet drinks taste sweeter than sweet foods sometimes). As well, the components which make up the beverage or food may play a role.
Obviously the sight and smell of beverages are important, we may react badly to a repugnant or bitter smelling drink and well to a good smelling drink. How drinks affect the taste buds comes next; humans can taste sweet, sour, bitter, salty and something called umami. There is also a taste bud for fatty acids.
A sickness response to a drink can cause an aversion to foods down the road. Remember when you drank something and you threw up afterwards, and how the smell of that drink would make you gag? That's what I'm talking about. The sight and smell of foods also affects hormonal response, there is something called the cephalic insulin response for example, insulin can go up when people smell or taste sweet foods, long before it hits the bloodstream.
Then comes digestion where mixing with the other components of the stomach affects many things, including digestion rate. Average digestion rate of fluids is 1 cal/minute with water digesting the most quickly (no calories). Other drinks digest at relatively slower speeds depending on the composition with fat containing beverages emptying slowest.
Moving into the intestine, more stuff happens including the release of a number of different hormones many of which are involved in appetite. I don't want to detail this as there are 15 or more that may play a role here. The pattern of release of these chemicals depends on the composition of the drink and this is where we can start to see the problem.
Carbohydrates alone stimulate the least number of appetite blunting factors, protein and fat stimulate the release of more. So you'd expect much less of a compensatory response to a drink containing protein and fat (think lowfat milk) as compared to one containing only carbohydrate (think fruit juice or a high sugar soda). Which is exactly what the studies have shown. Milk shows a nice normal compensation to intake, it might as well be liquid 'food'. Soft drinks show no compensation.
So folks living on sugary drinks are causing themselves major problems. Not only do the drinks themselves have scads of calories, the body doesn't compensate for their intake. So all of those calories essentially end up being 'added' to the normal food intake (which is just as often awful in folks who drink lots of soda).
Alcohol is weird as it's treated strangely in the body. I've mentioned in previous newsletters that alcohol intake shows a weird relationship with bodyweight. Weight often goes up with alcohol intake in men but either stays the same or goes down in women. What few direct studies exist suggest that alcohol intake does not cause compensation of food intake later on. So what explains the gender difference? Most likely, men drink in addition to eating (beer and wings) while women drink instead of eating (glass of wine for dinner). Oddly, at least one piece of research suggests that regular drinkers may be more active. It may also be that drinkers under-report their true food intake.
The paper than concludes although they don't say much I didn't mention above. Humans didn't evolve on anything but water and mother's milk with other drinks such as alcohol and soft drinks coming into common usage at a much later date. Because of this, we don't appear to have evolved good mechanisms for dealing with fluid calories.
Liquids tend to digest quickly (although fluids with protein and fat, such as milk, are much slower) and carbohydrate only drinks such as soda don't release as many of the appetite blunting peptides during digestion as whole food (or milk which is a liquid whole food). This makes the consumption of sugary drinks (fruit juice or soda) a major problem. People don't compensate for intake and end up simply adding the massive amount of calories to their diet, which is often bad to begin with.
As a final take-home comment, I'm reminded of a client I had years ago. He wanted to lose weight and one of the habits I identified in him early was the intake of multiple cans of full-sugar soda. Simply switching him to diet soda saved him something like 800-1000 calories/day, he started losing at a nice 1-2 pounds per week with no other change to his diet.
In summary, in terms of the impact of fluid calories on bodyweight, bodyfat and body composition,
Milk good: plenty of studies show improvements in body composition with regular dairy intake
Non-diet soft drinks and fruit juice bad: lots of calories, no fullness, no compensation
Alcohol: it's complicated....we need more research.
Revised and Updated Rapid Fat Loss Handbook is now available
At the beginning of 2008, I decided to completely update and revise the original Rapid Fat Loss Handbook. This included adding about 30 pages of additional information along with writing an accompanying home exercise handbook for beginners. Finally, we developed an online calculator to do all of the calculations in the book necessary to set up the diet.
Additions include a completely revised section on meal and diet planning along with extensive additions to the exercise chapters. Other information was updated to reflect changes in current nutritional science.
You can purchase the book here.
Feature article:
Stubborn Fat Solution Excerpt
Introduction: This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my forthcoming Stubborn Fat Solution; it summarizes the three primary factors that are involved in making stubborn fat stubborn. I'd note that the chapter also addresses several other issues of primary importance to stubborn fat. I want to make it very clear that this is simply one of the background chapters; this leads into a an applied discussion of how diet, training and supplements impact on the issues described below. As well, the final chapters of the book discuss four specifically laid out protocols for targeting stubborn body fat.
Chapter 7: Why is Stubborn Fat Stubborn
So you're now nearly 50 pages into this book and still wondering why stubborn fat is stubborn. Perhaps you've picked up some of the reasons by inference but finally, in this chapter I can put everything together.
Fat cell overview/review
In the past 6 chapters, you've learned a ton about fat cells and fat cell metabolism. One of the points I've tried to get across is that fat cells are not the same, different depots have different functional characteristics in terms of how easily they store fat, how easily they give up that fat, etc.
In general there are clear gender differences that show up at puberty, suggesting that sex hormones play a role in how fat cells develop. And there is much truth to this. It turns out that if you take a fat cell from a man's thigh and a woman's thigh, they are functionally identical and essentially indistinguishable physiologically. Even though the man generally has extremely low levels of estrogen.
The difference, practically, is that men don't generally store fat in their legs and women do (i.e. the fat cells in a man's legs are emptier than in the woman's). As I mentioned before, men who store fat in their lower body have the same problems as women to get rid of it. But most men don't.
The same holds true for visceral or abdominal fat from a woman versus a man. The female's visceral/ab fat is physiologically identical to the man's, although she has very low levels of testosterone. Hence, on average, she won't store much triglyceride in those fat cells.
What this suggests is that fat cells in different areas of the body (which, again, are found in both men and women; the difference is in whether men and women actually store calories there as adults) have certain physiological characteristics that occur irrespective of the hormonal setting. So while the hormonal setting may affect where ingested calories get sent, they aren't really controlling the underlying physiology of the fat cells.
Which is fundamentally why blocking estrogen doesn't fix the lower body fat problem. Lower body fat cells act a certain way whether estrogen is present or not, that's how they are genetically wired to act. The same goes for abdominal fat. Regardless of the person's testosterone levels, they are wired to be a certain way. Now it's time to learn what that wiring is and what makes stubborn fat cells stubborn.
Adrenoceptor redux
Recall from Chapter 5 that there are two types of adrenoceptors that control not only fat cell metabolism but also blood flow into and out of the fat cell. Beta-receptors can be thought of as the 'good' receptors, increasing lipolysis and adipose tissue blood flow. In contrast, alpha-receptors are distinctly bad, inhibiting lipolysis and adipose tissue blood flow.
So why does this matter? Different areas of body fat have different distributions of alpha-2 and beta-2 adrenoreceptors and this profoundly affects how well or poorly fat can be mobilized and transported out of them.
The most extreme example of this is lower body fat (hips and thighs), which have been found to have roughly 9 times as many alpha-2 receptors as beta-2 receptors. Some research suggests that men's abdominal fat has higher alpha-2 receptor density (relative to say, visceral fat) although it's not as bad as lower body fat. While not studied, lower back fat is likely to also be relatively resistant to lipolytic stimuli due to a greater alpha-2 receptor number.
This is clearly part of why stubborn fat is so stubborn, the normal lipolytic stimuli that should mobilize fatty acids don't work effectively. Quite in fact, due to the high alpha-2 receptor density, certain types of exercise can be distinctly anti-lipolytic. You'll learn more about that in the next chapter.
Now couple that with information I presented earlier about how men and women store calories after eating. Women's bodies may preferentially shuttle calories into lower body fat after a meal, on top of possibly redistributing fat from upper to lower body fat. Yet, they can't be mobilized out as rapidly.
Years ago I remember some women claiming that while their upper bodies leaned out, they swore their legs were getting fatter. I dismissed it as nonsense at the time but the above physiological facts lend support to that idea. A woman might be mobilizing fat from her upper body fine, yet storing some of that fat (or incoming calories from meals) in lower body fat later in the day. Upper body gets leaner, lower body gets fatter.
Blood flow redux
In addition to differences in responsiveness to lipolytic stimuli, certain fat depots have significantly poorer blood flow than others. You can test this yourself, touch an area of your body where you lose fat more easily, it should feel fairly warm. Now touch your butt, hips or thighs. Probably stone cold. Studies have shown that blood flow in lower body fat can have 67% lower blood flow than other depots. Visceral fat has extremely good blood flow, it also goes away very quickly. If you could drive your hand into someone's stomach and feel their visceral fat, it would probably feel fairly warm.
Poor blood flow has two consequences of importance here. First and foremost, it means that blood borne hormones (such as the catecholamines which, recall, don't work well in the first place) can't get to the fat cells. Second, poor blood flow makes it harder to get mobilized fat away from the fat cell so that it can be burned elsewhere.
Why the blood flow is so poor isn't well established. Part of it may simply be less blood vessels, imaging studies show very few in that area. As well, it appears that the blood vessels in the lower body have more alpha- than beta-receptors; this has the same consequence as for lipolysis. More alpha-receptors means more vasoconstriction and less vasodilation which adds up to less blood flow.
Insulin redux
As I noted, after a meal, blood flow to the lower body increases preferentially in women, due to the effects of insulin. Lower body fat is also more sensitive overall to the anti-lipolytic stimuli of insulin. Contrast that to visceral fat which is not only super-sensitive to lipolytic stimuli but also relative insensitive to insulin. Ab fat is somewhere in the middle for both, somewhat sensitive to insulin, somewhat sensitive to the lipolytic effects of the catecholamines.
How much protein is optimal? Which protein is best? When should protein be consumed around training for the best effect? What are the negatives of 'high-protein' diets? These and other questions continue to be topics of much debate, argument and controversy.
The Protein Book: A Complete Guide for the Athlete and Coach addresses them all and more. At over 200 pages and with over 500 scientific references, The Protein Book addresses the topic of protein nutrition for strength/power, endurance and physique athletes from both a technical and applied point of view. Every topic is discussed and this will be your protein bible for years to come.
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Author of Girth Control: The Science of Fat Loss and Muscle Gain
Read more
Q&A
Q: I don't know how to figure % to mg's. For instance, if I drink a cup of skim milk is states that the calcium is 30%. So, how do I convert into miligrams? I should be getting about 1120mg of calcium a day and when I try to keep track of it with the food and drink I consume per day I don't know how to convert it.
So many things are listed in % on the food labels. Same thing with fiber, carbs, etc. I'm doing that Best Life Plan and everything has to be documented in mg or grams. Can you tell me how to convert these things from percent to miligrams and grams? I added my plan in case you wanted to refer to it. I really appreciate your help.
A: The percentages for calcium are based relative to the recommended daily intakes. So for calcium, the recommended intake 1200 mg. So 30% will contain a little less than one third of that or about 360 mg. There's no way to convert any given %age to mg's because it will all depend on what that %age represents.
So in any situation, you first have to find out what the daily recommended intake (DRI) is for a given nutrient. Then multiply the percentage on a given food by that value to determine what amount is actually present.
Or, you can not worry about percentages and just make sure that you hit 100% on everything at the end of the day.
Frankly, any diet that insane about what I consider fairly irrelevant details gives me some pause anyhow. There are far more important things to worry about than mg of calcium per food item.
Q: You mentioned several time in UD2 that you were trying to "cram" the 10 day program from THE ULTIMATE DIET into a manageable 7 day week. Later on, you stated that you would rather have the diet on an 8 day cycle. I do not have the first book. My, as is my wife' life is conducive to however we make it, and can therefore be structure to reap the optimal benefit from the program. How is it best to structure the course? Both my wife and I have different goals; she wants to loose fat (trim) and I want to gain muscle and trim. We both love the scientific approach. We are both extremely studious and love the opportunities to learn.
A: The 7 day cycle was chosen primarily as a consequence of how most people's work week is structured. As I mentioned in the book, my preference based on physiology would be for an 8 day cycle. For reasons discussed in the book, this would be vastly superior to the original 10 day cycle of the Duchaine and Zumpano's Ultimate diet.
The set up as per the book (specific details) for the 8 day cycle would be:
Day1/2: Depletion
Day 3/4: Lowcarbs/cardio
Day 5: (morning): tension, start carb-load
Day 6: continue carb-load
Day 7 (morning): power workout, normal eating
Day 8: continue normal eating, return to lowcarbs in evening
Before returning to day 1.
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Figured I'd copy and paste this from the email I get every couple of weeks
