Eating Mostly Whole Grains, Few Refined Grains Linked to Lower Body Fat | Hacker News Reader

Eating Mostly Whole Grains, Few Refined Grains Linked to Lower Body Fat

news.tufts.edu

15 pointscwan19 comments

As interesting as hacking the body is, am I really the only one who can't seem to keep up with which of these articles to listen to? I mean, it used to be fat was bad, then it became some fat is bad, some isn't, then carbohydrates became bad (even as that is literally what we are made of) now grains (well, mashed in small pieces but still).

What the hell am I supposed to eat that doesn't take hours to prepare and doesn't cost a fortune?

Tell me about it, sometimes I think that it'd just be better to stop eating altogether. It seems that, for each and every food, someone will tell you it's terribly harmful and you shouldn't be eating it.

In the end, I've decided to follow some dietician's advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" is a quote from Micheal Pollan (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma). As far as I know, he isn't a dietitian. I believe he is a Journalism Professor at University of California.

That's him, thanks. I didn't know he wasn't a dietitian...

I know there's a perception that nutrition science is churning, and I'm sure that behind the scenes it really is, but at the macro- scale that laypeople care about, aren't the trends straightforward and aren't they unfolding pretty slowly?

* Fat is bad

* Saturated fat is bad, olive oil is good

* Transfats are particularly bad

* Carbs are bad

* Fat's not so bad after all

* Fructose is particularly bad

* Refined carbs are bad, normal carbs maybe not so bad after all, and complex carbs are good

For 50+ years, this doesn't seem that hard to keep up with.

It's also one thing to say that we're "made of carbohydrates" and another thing altogether to suggest that our metabolisms are equipped to process large quantities of purified, metabolically dense nutrients that our ancestors never had access to.

Also, not that you particularly exercised it here, but the whole what-did-cavepeople-eat argument is totally retarded. Cavepeople clearly could reproduce a fair amount of the time on the diet they had. That doesn't even a little bit mean that their diet was the diet people were 'designed for' or that that was even remotely related to their optimal diet.

(Which obviously doesn't necessarily mean that refined sugar is either good or bad.)

So we should all stop mentioning our ancestors when thinking about what to eat.

Not that I buy into the whole caveman fad, but isn't there evidence that the switch from hunter/gatherer society to agriculture came with a decline in health?

Dunno. Offhand, if the HG diet is berries and meat, and the farm diet is bread and more bread, could be. But we already kinda knew that bread and more bread wasn't the best diet; cavemen don't add more information if that's what was going on.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the truth about nutrition and caveman diets are conditionally independent given currently actually-known science about nutrition. If we didn't have science, and all you had was cavemen observations, that might be valid, but we do, so it's not.

(And by "currently actually-known science" I mean very basic things like that we can't make iron from scratch so if we don't eat stuff with iron in it then we get sick, and same with some amino acids, and same with noticing that if you eat 20 cheeseburgers a day you get fat quickly. Not stuff like whether fat is bad or good.)

Why would it be “totally retarded”? Our ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years on a similar diet while our own diet changed together with our environment much more radically in the last few thousand or hundred years. Understanding the diet of our ancestors might at least help us understand what we were optimized to eat.

That’s not to say we should eat what our ancestors ate, it’s just a nice starting point when you want to go hunt for the optimal food. Evolution obviously influences what we can eat – lactose tolerance (only a few thousand years old) is the best example of that – and evolution clearly had not yet time to react to our radically changing environment (cookies still taste absolutely delicious and not the least bit awful as they should).

Try sticking to whole unprocessed foods. Lots of fresh fruit and veggies and lean meats.

Eg...

Breakfast - yogurt, muesli, fresh fruit

Lunch - chicken or salmon salad OR sandwich on grain bread

Dinner - Mixed vegetables /w steak/lamb/fish

Try avoiding stuff that isn't real food or spent along time in a factory.

I found Michael pollan's In Defense of Food to be a really interesting and refreshing read. On the cover is the motto: eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

A while back I made a choice to lose some weight and eat healthier. I cut out anything with lots of sugar or refined starches - and deep-fried food. So, I switched from white rice to brown, white bread to whole wheat, and white tortillas to corn. Other than that I ate just about what ever I wanted and ate until I was full, but not over-full.

One of the things I found was that the temptation for sugar went away as long as I cut it out completely. Whenever I had a little, it started to creep back in.

I steadily lost about 3 pounds a week until I'd lost about 40. I was even able to stop taking high blood-pressure meds. That was about a year ago I've kept the weight off. Actually I'm still losing weight, but much slower.

I'd be interested to also see a study comparing a regular diet with one that's only whole grains as well as one that is completely grain free. I know that processed grains are definitely starting to show up as really bad for us but I think removing grains entirely is likely to be even better than just going with whole grains.

I think whole grains are great. They provide fiber, lots of vitamins, and they fill you up with less calories, so you eat less of the other bad stuff.

I can attest to this. I gave up gluten last year. I don't know if I was really allergic. I never had the blood test done. The result is that I pay greater attention to everything I eat and stick mainly to whole grains, vegetables, seafood and dairy.

But I eat a lot more dairy. Something about the diet makes me crave ice cream and creme brulee type things. I must be consuming more fat than I ever did before.

The net result is I lost about ten pounds, which is about 8% of my body weight.

If I wasn't allergic to begin with, I also gave myself a gluten intolerance, so it's not something to enter into lightly. But I feel like a new man.

Sounds like you went in the Atkins/Paleo direction, rather than the 'whole grains' direction of this study. (The 'whole wheat' servings mentioned in this study still have plenty of gluten.)

I, too, lost about ~8% in ~2 months when I eliminated most complex carbs and sugars, while retaining (and probably increasing via whole milk and cheese) my dairy intake.

Yeah, I wonder if that's part of it.

But I still eat a ton of carbs. They're just in the form of things like potatoes, corn, lentils, etc. It's one of those things I try not to think about too much. I worry that if I decide it's all psychosomatic that I'll go back to feeling how I did before.

When you say you eat whole grains, does that just mean rice like grains? Whole grain bread still has plenty of gluten in it so I'm interested what your whole grains look like. I'm in the process of converting to a completely grain free diet and it's made a big difference in my sleep as well as my body fat percentages.

Yup, that's right. Also quinoa. Grain Free looks pretty intense too.

As someone who tries to keep a low profile (or at least only be noticed for things I think are cool about myself) it's not ideal having such a dietary restriction. But the benefits erase the question in my mind.

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