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

And now, the 2003 Nutritional Villain of the Year is - may I have a drum roll, please! - bread.

That's right, folks, the staff of life turns out to be a stake through your heart, if you read the latest reports. Bread makes you fat, they say.

Bread-phobia appears to be almost entirely due to the Atkins diet and all its low or no-carb permutations that have recently swept the country. The basic idea is that if you eat only meat, dairy products and vegetables you'll feel full and lose weight.

Bread sales across the country are falling like punched-down dough as chubby consumers shy away from carbohydrates. I heard all about this for the second or third time on a radio program on the way to work the other day. They were interviewing bakers who were wondering what to do to revive sales. Maybe they need a bread check-off.

Studies and anecdotal experience show that the Atkins diet works, at least in the short term. Close to home, both my parents lost weight in the first year. In recent months they haven't.

One veterinarian I chatted with about the diet wondered what happens to people's livers when they're on the Atkins diet for long periods of time. He knows what happens to cows that eat too much protein and not enough roughage.

Wasn't it just a few years ago that bread was the culinary darling du jour? But as with so many other foods, fame has proven to be treacherous. Look what happened to eggs, butter, chocolate and red meat. Two or three decades ago the once-beloved egg was suddenly renamed as the great villain, a nasty little thing that raised your cholesterol and gave you heart attacks.

Then real butter came under attack, and we were all supposed to eat margarine. Dairy products in general, once a cornerstone of the nutriiton pyramid, were suddenly discovered to be fattening and bad for you. So much for my childhood instructions to "drink lots of milk for strong bones."

The next victim was red meat. I don't remember exactly what the reasoning was behind that vilification, but we were to substitute with chicken and fish. Chocolate got a nutritional hatchet job for being fattening, probably because we love it so much. But that was then.

Now eggs are OK to eat again, since they're wonderfully complete nutritional packages. Cholesterol evidently has more to do with your genetic inheritance than your diet, though diet is still important for those who need to bring their levels under control.

Butter has been found to be better for your blood vessels than margarine, and red meat is great for adding vitamins and minerals to your diet, especially iron. Chocolate is a mood elevator and teeth protector. I knew all along it made me feel better; now many experts agree.

In the past two years many nutritionists have restored dairy products to a place of honor as the best source of calcium for a calcium defiecient nation. Several recent large studies have also shown that dairy is an aid to weight loss. The calcium and perhaps other components in dairy products have the effect of speeding up the metabolism, so you burn calories faster.

In the 1973 movie "Sleeper," actor Woody Allen played a vegetarian California health-food store owner who is cryogenically frozen and then thawed out 200 years later.

After he's properly re-warmed, his hosts offer him - to his horror - a healthy meal of steak and brownies to restore him to good health.

Of course, not all nutritional experts agree that eggs, meat, milk and butter are good guys again, but the tide has certainly turned.

I have great hopes that in a few years this smear campaign against bread will blow over and carbohydrates will be restored to their proper place in the national diet.

Before nutrition became a polticial issue, grade school students, myself included, were taught a pretty simple, user-friendly program for staying healthy and slim. The gist of it was that everyone should eat three moderate - moederate is a key concept, here - well-balanced meals each day.

Well-balanced meant a combination of meat and dairy, fruits and vegetables, and breads and starches. It did not mean a continuous intake of nutritionally worthless, high-calorie pop, chips and candy.

Maybe it's not so much what you eat, but how much, and how much you exercise. Not a revolutionary thought, exactly, but one that might be usefully revived from the dustbin of nutritional history.

Ann Hansen covers news in west-central Wisconsin and is the small acreage section editor for The Country Today. She may be reached at shansen@bloomer.net.

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.

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.

"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).

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