Indecisive nutrition 'experts' should leave us alone [Bread will kill you, keep the cows off Atkins]

.thecountrytoday ^ | 11-12-03

[JmyBryan]

Do you think setting up straw men and knocking them down is sanity? This article contributes to confusion regarding dietary understanding, not sanity. I am sure we could have a reasonable debate about Atkins. I am not a devotee, but see hysteria in the reactions to its popularity. IMHO this would be in that category.

Atkins has brought many to the understanding that what one eats changes one's hormonal balance, directly influencing one's sense of hunger. This, in and of itself, gets one from lack of willpower as the reason for failing weight-loss diets to what or how one eats. An obvious improvement .

[oldcomputerguy]

At the very least, bread rots your teeth.

This sounds like ununstantiated claptrap. I have not heard this before at all. Nor have I experienced it. I have eaten way too much bread in my life and never have cavities.

The biggest cause is excessive cavities is going to a dentist whose children are going to expensive schools. I am quite serious with this statement. If you have lots of cavities, got to another dentist, one who has been recommended by friends and neighbors who never seem to have any cavities when they go to see him. Your cavities will drop substantially.

[aruanan]

I am not a devotee, but see hysteria in the reactions to its popularity. IMHO this would be in that category.

I see hysteria, that is, a strong, unreasoning, emotional reaction, in the proponents of Atkin's-like diets. The opponents in the field of nutrition sciences are pretty uniformly fact-based in their criticism. Look at the hate mail to Fumento on the subject to get an idea of pro-Atkin's hysterical hate-speech. Fumento starts with fact-based criticism, receives the hate-mail in response, and then, deliciously, answers on the writers' wavelength. It usually rolls off them in the water-off-duck's-back mode just as the fact-based criticism did because they are not interested in anything but what they want to hear.

Atkins has brought many to the understanding that what one eats changes one's hormonal balance, directly influencing one's sense of hunger. This, in and of itself, gets one from lack of willpower as the reason for failing weight-loss diets to what or how one eats. An obvious improvement .

This talk of food changing one's hormonal balance is an example of nutritional newbies talking in a superficial manner about a well-known subject and thinking it's all something marvelously new brought to the world by the much-maligned Dr. Atkins. However, it's long been known that a meal high in carbohydrates leads to faster gastric emptying which can lead to a more rapid onset of hunger compared to a meal with more protein and fat that promotes slower gastric emptying. This is no mystery.

It's also long been known that a low blood sugar level leads to increases in glucagon which signals low fuel levels and leads to fat burning as well as to a desire to eat. But it's also long been known that it's impossible to have an increase in body weight unless the caloric intake exceeds caloric expenditure and that human metabolism converts very little glucose into fat. Given that humans shift their substrate oxidation in a hypercaloric diet away from fat oxidation and toward protein/glucose oxidation, it's no mystery where the fat is coming from: the diet. If someone is consuming more kilocals than he expends, he'll gain weight in the form of stored dietary fat. If he is consuming a high carbohydrate diet that is also hypercaloric, he'll also be hungrier more often, leading him to maintain the hypercaloric intake and, hence, the steadily increasing fat content in his adipose tissue.

A few things follow from these basic nutritional facts.

1. If someone is eating mostly protein and fat (ie., a low carbohydrate diet) and he is losing stored fat, it is because his total kilocaloric intake (absorbed, not just consumed) is less than his total energy expenditure across the measurement period. The reason for this may be that he experiences less hunger and eats less often or less at each sitting.

2. If someone is eating mostly protein and fat and his energy intake exceeds his total energy expenditure, he will increase his body mass.

3. If someone is eating mostly protein and fat and his energy intake (consumption, not necessarily absorbtion) exceeds his energy expenditure and he doesn't gain in total body mass, it's because there's a problem with his nutrient absorption in the small intestine.

[Aquinasfan]

It could not therefore be a food man evolved to eat, as no species would naturally evolve to eat something that destroys the species means to ingest food.

Will bread-eaters die out? If so, when? How much bread must a person consume to be categorized as a bread-eater?

[JmyBryan]

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/10.23/03-lowcarb.html

[Age of Reason]

"A pair of identical twins was brought into Tufts dental clinic while I was there. One twin had perfect teeth without a single cavity. The other had rampant decay all over his mouth. Being from the same family, they both ate the same things at each meal (mom was adamant that she gave them almost no sweets) and being identical twins, they were genetically identical, so neither one should have been any more susceptible to cavities than the other. No one could pry out of the twins any differences in their eating habits. Finally, one of my older professors cornered the two of them and after much prodding finally discovered that the cavity prone one liked to suck on bread balls. "Bread balls?? What are bread balls?" "Well you take the soft middle out of a slice of bread, ball it up real tight and suck on it!" Bread is not sweet. How could that cause cavities? Actually, bread is made of starch which normally does not cause decay, but when kept in the mouth for a long time, an enzyme in the saliva called amylase begins to break down the starches into their constituent parts, and those parts are simply sugar. Try it sometime. If you keep a piece of bread in your mouth for a while it begins to taste sweet."

Taken from this site: http://www.doctorspiller.com/Decay.htm

To which I would add that bread also forms a paste that can stick to your teeth, especially between your teeth, where once your saliva breaks it down into sugar--it forms a perfect growing medium for bacteria whose excretions contain the acids that eat-away at your teeth.

And to make matters worse, many store-bought breads have sugar (Yuk) added to them (corn syrup. Yuk).

[Nov3]

2. If someone is eating mostly protein and fat and his energy intake exceeds his total energy expenditure, he will increase his body mass.

All that education and you still don't get it.

[Nov3]

WOW - a researcher did research on a low carb diet and actually did it on a low carb diet. I hate it when you read an article where a researcher describes how low carb didn't work and then you find that the researcher considers a 30% carbohydrate diet "low carb"

[oldcomputerguy]

"Bread balls??"

Oh I am sure that bread ball sucking is very a very common cause of tooth decay....not.