Fat Content, Sugar Content Or Carbs For Weight Loss. What Is It Really?
What you are about to read is probably the most important message related to weight loss that you’ll ever get.
Forget diets – Atkins, Zone, South Park, Israeli Army, American celebrity-for-a-day – the brand doesn’t matter; forget food combining so as not to eat that kangaroo with those yams; forget blood type tests to determine what you can and can’t stomach. Instead, focus your attention on one thing, the ‘end-game’ in food politics; energy density.
The need for doing this has come about through some slippery commercial footwork; The exploitation of food manufacturers on a vulnerable nutritional science. To explain this, the Professor proffers a brief walk through the last 10 years of the world obesity epidemic.
The need for some understanding
There’s little disagreement that food is a source of energy, which can be measured in calories, or kilojoules (1Cal = 4.2kJ). There’s also little disagreement that the more of these that are consumed (and the less ‘burned up’ in exercise and/or metabolic rate), the greater the likelihood of a residual energy reserve (in the form of fat) being stored on the body.
Because different nutrients (ie. protein, carbohydrate and fat), have different numbers of calories per gram – fat is 9cals/g, protein and carbohydrate 4.5 – it was assumed in the 1990s that reducing fat in one’s diet would be sufficient to reduce body weight. And while this would logically be true, all else remaining equal, it naively assumed that that all else would remain equal.
Food manufacturers however, being driven by more base motives than scientists, capitalized on this by reducing fat from their processed products, while surreptitiously replacing this with a greater number of sugar calories. In the process, they gained the high moral health ground by promoting foods as ‘fat free’ or ‘’x% fat free’. Nutrition and obesity scientists were left in the wake of this ‘responsible’ health initiative by the food industry to try and explain why fat wasn’t pealing off the populace.
Calories and ‘Energy Density’
While a ‘biological’ calorie may not be the same as a ‘physics’ calorie (see box), total calories do count, and hence replacing one source of calories with a multiple amount of another source, is unlikely to solve the problem of excess calories in the diet.
So what’s the solution?
The end-game, and one which devious advertisers can’t distort, is an accent on ‘energy density’ when deciding on the weight loss benefits of foods and drinks. Energy density is quite simply, the number of calories/kilojoules per gram of a food or drink; the higher the energy density, the more potentially fattening that product. And while no scientific standards for this have yet been set, Professor Garry Egger has put forward some guidelines to help us navigate the perils of food labels in the diagram below
Advertisement
AlphaOne
Submit this page to: