A whole separate discussion, but really insulin is not teh evil. Despite the popularity of that simplistic notion.
In terms of fat loss, whole fruit has, because of its fiber, high satiety. Fruit as part of a nutrition plan to lose fat is usually effective (obviously not if one is going low carb).
Interesting. Your thoughts on these articles?
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/insulin-levels-and-fat-loss-qa.html
But . . . isn’t fruit, like, 99% liquid (aka juice), so the only difference in eating fruit and drinking juice is the tiny increment in “fiber and bulk and stuff”, which can be easily regained with a simple supplement? Fiber is fiber (and bulk and stuff), wherever it comes from, even if processed, isn’t it?
On the other hand, in defense of your argument, I believe the highest concentration of nutrients in many fruits is in the non-juicy parts, like the layer just beneath the peel, which typically has little or objectionable flavor and adverse mouthfeel. But if the consumer typically discards that part of the whole fruit, there is little advantage to eating what remains in solid form rather than processed into juice.
By the way, “mostly sugar” in fruit juice is a bit of an exaggeration. Even Sugar-cane juice contains only 15% sugar.
Don’t have the time to read all of them right now, and honestly the insulin debate can evoke such religious-style fervor that I do not have the energy for today either. But looking over the first one quickly it looks fairly reasonable …
The second also, on quick read, seems to be hitting a reasoned note:
The simple message remains that you can’t beat regular exercise and a diet low in refined carbs, added sugar, and processed foods, and high in vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. How much protein is a subject for reasoned debate; I lean toward moderately high myself (20 to 25% of daily energy needs) as making sense but understand the POV of others.
A friend of mine told me of his interesting diet. He calls it the 5# rule. If he hits a weight 5# above target he diets like hell till he gets back below target. If he is below the 5# max he eats whatever he wants. He claims that the first year doing this he was like a yo yo but he eventually just naturally leveled off to where it doesn’t require much thought to stay within his boundaries. He uses fruit to counter his love for pastry, candy and carbs from bread products.
When people say “fruit juice is mostly sugar” they are saying that the caloric content is due to sugar and the nutrition is trivial – not that fruit juice is 51% sugar by volume.
“Nutrition is trivial” is a nonsense term. Vegetable and fruit juices have plenty of nutritional value. The biggest issue with them as part of some cornerstone of your diet is most people fall apart because of compliance. Compliance is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th most important thing to making positive changes in how and what you eat.
The BMJ study while interesting honestly has such easily flawed and imprecise methodology that I certainly cannot imagine being so foolish as to use that as a basis for saying fruit juice increases a specific person’s risk of getting Type II diabetes.
Fruit juice, like basically all liquid forms of food have a terrible satiety effect and thus consuming them does not make you fill full. A whole 8 fl oz of basically any fruit juice will have greater content of basically everything (other than fiber) than a whole apple, this is because it’s simply a more energy dense food so it has more of everything than a comparable piece of raw fruit. So you’re getting greater caloric intake with less satiety than a single apple. You do get a high dose of various micronutrients, but also a more concentrated dose of sugar. But the sugar content to me isn’t that important when compared with the fact that it isn’t a filling way to consume macronutrients which means you will be more likely to have poor compliance.
Further, while again I’ve yet to see well crafted studies on this, my experience is people who consume large amounts of fruit or vegetable juices tend to be people that do not like fruit or vegetables in their normal form. So they are basically consuming a more palatable and less satiating form of food and that’s a recipe that often is involved with people who are prone to overeating and having poor dietary compliance in general.
I speculate that if you have a tight control of your diet and a strong willpower such that you’re going to comply with your nutritional plan regardless (you do see this in some populations–lots of serious fitness type athletes like bodybuilders often have high compliance regardless of the palatability of their food) that fruit juice as long as it doesn’t push your total sugar consumption to an unreasonably high level will have no more deleterious effects on your body than any other daily activities and can be part of getting a total balanced intake of nutrition for the day.
Consequently on the satiety / palatability spectrum, the reason the OP’s friend has probably not fared so well in her quest is she has a tendency toward processed foods. “Processing”, which is a broad term that usually means taking lots of single ingredient (raw food) and turning it into a pre-prepared finished food “product” in the United States since the early 20th century has also meant doing so in a way that maximizes the palatability of the food while either intentionally minimizing the satiety or at least not being concerned with it whatsoever. The concern thus is making extremely “cravable” food, because that is to the benefit of the companies that do this processing. [The implication to me is that processing isn’t necessarily always bad, then, just that it is deliberately bad most of the time for most products.]
For someone addicted to highly palatable foods (which is the real problem), there needs to be a recognition that extreme palatability is kind of a modern invention of food science and you need to readjust your entire palate to enjoy simpler flavors.
A second and often pretty common thing could be that the OP’s friend simply is addicted to not having to make food herself. This is more difficult to work around as (and I’ve looked into this a lot) it’s very hard to build a good daily nutrition plan solely off of foods you do not have to prepare whatsoever. The closest best option is probably an approach I’ve followed before when limited on time–preparing week-size batches of food on a day where I have a spare 1.5-2 hours to do this and then pre-portioning them out and eating them over the next week. Depending on what goes into it some stuff will keep fine in tupperware in the fridge the whole week, but you may need to freeze some of it and thaw it out / microwave it later in the week based on what type of food we’re talking about.
Usually this involves a lot of chicken and ground turkey FYI, and a good seasoning are things that have basically no energy content in them and thus no macronutrient profile. I like chili based sauces like Frank’s Red Hot for example, the only thing of note with that approach is those sauces are always high in sodium. But I think the science supports that for the vast majority of people sodium intake is actually not important at all, and if you’re one of the small number of people for whom it is important you probably already know or should have seen some signs. The oft-mentioned link between sodium and blood pressure for example has been fairly exploded, with lots of studies suggesting something like less than 2% of people have elevated bp related to sodium intake.
It’s also worth mentioning the comments about brown vs white rice are mostly woo. Brown or white rice may be better, but I don’t think anyone knows for sure and like most things I suspect any difference to be almost non-existent in terms of practical effect.
The bran in brown rice contains orzenin which is not present in white rice as the bran is milled out, this is a reactive protein that causes digestion problems in some persons–particularly those persons likely to complain that they have gluten insensitivity (whether they do and/or whether it exists or not outside of celiac disease.) Meaning the substitution of brown to white rice for those persons may not be so great just in terms of having happy digestion. Additionally the added nutrients in brown rice are bound to phytate and do not get absorbed by the body during digestion, meaning the supposed positives of brown v white rice may not be realizable in how we actually digest rice and if your digestive system reacts negatively to the reactive proteins present in brown rice that aren’t there in white rice it may be a straight net negative to your daily life to be doing brown over white.
I think if that’s not the case, they are essentially similar nutritionally. I personally prefer brown from a taste perspective, I made it a staple years ago before I knew that they were basically a wash for most people and I guess I’ve just acclimated to it, I don’t enjoy white rice so much at all when I do have it (not saying I dislike it, just that I don’t prefer it to brown.) But if I was having digestion problems from it I would try white instead.
Rice in general is often vilified by the paleo / GI slave people, but most of the studies supporting those positions just show that people with rich diets in Asia who also consume a lot of white rice have some negative health impacts. I don’t know of many / any studies of actual fit healthy people who make white rice a part of their staple diet and that’s a big problem in nutritional studies. When your study has poor ability to control for the fact most of the people you’re studying are unhealthy and in poor shape to me it minimizes much of the value of the science.
Not to mention we also have a real problem where doctors and their organizations adopt nutritional guidelines based off single studies which are deeply flawed. Like the single study that basically lead to a generational vilification of saturated fat and which is almost entirely responsible for pushing people to high in trans fat alternatives.
I’m not assuming - I’ve known her since grade school. She has been significantly overweight for most of the 35+ years since then and right now is likely in the morbidly obese category. Whether she knows intellectually about good nutrition is one issue, but let’s just say it’s more than a little grating to essentially have her pronounce that she knows better about healthy eating than the rest of us when clearly, whatever she’s doing isn’t working so well for her. It would be a bit like having a doctor tell you to stop smoking while puffing away on a cigar.
I have seen low carb work well for some people, and I agree that the dieting friend would be well served by cutting down on sugar and simple carbs - giving up the pint a day of ice cream is going to be a big dietary improvement even if she changes nothing else about her diet. But I have trouble buying the notion that a carb is a carb is a carb. The best-planned diet is also no good if you can’t stick to it at all, and at least for myself, I know that eating fruit makes me less likely to eat other sweets (baked goods, etc.), or to eat less of them if I do eat them. Or that eating a piece of homemade whole-wheat toast with jam makes me less likely to eat a brownie. Whatever I’m doing for myself seems to be working better for me than whatever Moralizing Friend is doing for her.
(And my dieting friend says she is trying to cut down on her carbs, but mentioned that she often grabs a cereal bar instead of eating a more balanced breakfast because it’s easier. Is there anyone here who doesn’t think she’d be better off nutritionally eating, say, a piece of fruit with some plain yogurt for breakfast?)
Things like a “carb is a carb is carb” get into complex issues. For some purposes that is absolutely true. It depends on what’s going on, what your goals are, what you’re talking about etc.
I don’t think there’s any real negative to eating fruits or your friend eating the sorbet. But it’s also incorrect if you think that a sorbet is healthy while Haagen-Dazs isn’t because of sugar. You don’t seem to know what sugar actually is, and probably your dieting friend doesn’t either.
Quick lesson, there are four major macronutrients (nutrients from which we derive energy): Carbohydrates, Protein, Fat, and Alcohol.
Your sorbet if made as described is going to be almost entirely carbohydrates, actually I don’t believe a single serving would have even a gram of the other macronutrients so let’s say it is entirely carbs.
There are three main types of carb: starch, sugar, and fiber. Fiber is mostly indigestible, and based on how you describe the sorbet it will constitute maybe 1g per serving while sugar (one of the other types of carb) will probably constitute anywhere from 25-35g per serving. I’m guesstimating here with a serving being similar to a “standard” serving of sorbet of say 1/2 cup size. Starch will make up also essentially none of the nutritional content of the sorbet.
So it’s incorrect for you to think your sorbet is materially different for your friend than the baklava in terms of “sugar avoidance.” The sorbet is going to be entirely sugar whether it is made with added sugar (as yours was) or made with no added sugar at all.
This is because the energy content of fruit is basically solely from fructose and a small amount of protein ( actually the protein content varies a good bit from one fruit to the next, there is also fiber, but we don’t derive energy from fiber.) If you made a sorbet with no added sugar, it would be a much less “energy dense” food, but its percentage of energy from sugar would still be basically 100%. The only thing you might do to change this is to add fats or protein to the sorbet, but then it’s getting to be a different animal.
The most notable (really only notable) nutritional difference between say, a pint of sorbet and a pint of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream is actually the fat and protein content. The vanilla ice cream is made with milk which has both protein and milk fat. So a pint of vanilla ice cream from HD may be like 1000 calories, because it is far more energy dense than a pint of sorbet because the sorbet has no fat and hardly any protein in it.
As for a cereal bar versus a piece of plain fruit + yogurt, depending on the cereal bar there may be little difference in truth. But like I said, compliance is the biggest thing, yogurt has protein and the fruit has fiber which both will help a lot with satiety. The cereal bar may have a lot of both too though, it would depend on how they were made. I’m aware of specialty bars that would probably compare similarly.
The second part was exactly my point. There is a huge calorie and fat difference between a pint of Haagen-Dazs and a pint of sorbet. And considering that the six of us ate a pint and a half of sorbet total, an even bigger difference between a pint of Haagen-Dasz and a reasonable serving of sorbet. (And yes, I do know what sugar is and what carbohydrates are.)
In fact, a 1/2 cup serving of Haagen-Dazs peach sorbet (which has a lot more added sugar than what I served) has 130 calories and zero fat. A 1/2 cup serving of Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream (to pick a flavor at random, one of my friend’s favorites - I’m sure there are others that are nutritionally worse) has 250 calories and 17 grams of fat, so a pint has 1000 calories and 68 grams of fat.
So having a reasonable serving of fruit sorbet once a day instead of a pint of ice cream once a day, not counting any other changes in diet or exercise, is a net decrease in calorie intake of more than 6,000 calories a week, or a weight loss of close to 2 lbs. a week (not to mention the decreased consumption of fat and cholesterol).
That’s pretty damn significant. My friend would reach her goal weight in a few months if she stuck to that.
Okay, but again, your post notes you suggested the sorbet to your friend because she was “watching her sugar.” I don’t know why or for what reason she was limiting her sugar intake, but sorbet is not low in sugar since it is almost entirely sugar.
As mentioned in the OP, she is generally trying to lose weight and eat healthier.
Eva, MH’s estimate of the fiber content per serving (1) seems improbable to me but the best way to know is to look at the actual recipe of your sorbet. Could you share it with us?
For reference, one peach typically has about 68 calories, 3 g of fiber, and 15 g of sugar (along with 10 to 20% of RDA for vitamins A and C); one cup of mango 107 calories, 3 g fiber, and 24 g sugar (and 25% of A and 76% of C RDA); one cup of raspberries 64 calories, 8 g of fiber, 5g of sugar (and 54% of RDA for vitamin C). Figure maybe the recipe for a quart being three peaches and 2 cups each of mango and raspberries with the 1/2 cup of added sugar? That 1/2 cup is about 380 calories. Total for the quart is 926 calories and 31 g fiber. In that case each of you ate about a 90 calorie serving with about 3 g of fiber and a bunch of vitamin A and C along with a large cast of antioxidants and other phytochemicals. Not bad for a satisfying dessert and a lot different nutritionally than the ice cream or eating a half cup each of sugar. Empty calories it is not.
And the sorbet is materially different than the baklava in terms of sugar avoidance. One piece of baklava clocks in at 330 calories - mostly fat and not as much sugar. One can argue that it is not a bad thing if one wants … lower carb and a fair amount of the fats are MUFAs … but 3 to 4 times as many calories in a typical serving anyway.
Details of course vary with the actual recipe.
It wasn’t really a recipe. I tend to make sorbet when I have fruit that is slightly overripe. So call it…2 small mangoes, 3 large peaches, juice of half a lemon, a couple tablespoons of rum, and ~ 1/2 c. sugar. Made about a pint and a half. I threw in ~ 1 c. fresh raspberries when it was almost frozen.
This is nonsense. Most of the sugars in most fruits are not fructose, and certainly not all. The OP mentioned peaches, in 100g of peach there are 8.4g of sugars of which only 1.5g is free fructose. There’s more glucose than fructose even if you process it such that the 4.8g of sucrose dissociates into fructose and glucose.
It may well be that fears of fructose are exaggerated but that’s no reason to invent from whole cloth the notion that all sugars in fruit are fructose.
I could definitely be wrong on a homemade sorbet–but I checked commercial sorbets prior to posting and most were essentially devoid of fiber.
To be honest while I’m sure my estimation of a homemade sorbet is inaccurate, it’s no worse than your 330 calorie figure for Baklava you made without knowing the provenance of the Baklava.
For what it’s worth, anytime I make a complex food I just sum all the nutrition facts of its constituent parts and then guesstimate a rough division of them (say, a cake I slice into 8 slices I guess has 1/8th the figures of the total of the cakes ingredients.) I know that this isn’t exact, but I also don’t believe that I can get any more exact for day-to-day life purposes.
Yep, my bad. It’s easy to make a mistake in this free form entry type environment–replace the word “Fructose” with “sugars”–a broader classification. It doesn’t really change the point though, in that OP’s friend wanted to avoid sugar and was offered something where almost the entirety of its macronutrient content was sugar carbohydrates. If you look at the nutrition facts for almost any fruit the lion’s share of the energy value is derived from sugar carbs, with usually a gram or so per serving of the other macronutrients and then a good bit of fiber (which is good, but does not provide energy.)
I’m not one who thinks a sorbet is a problem, but OP seemed to think it was “crazy” to call a sorbet high sugar (when by nature it has to be.)
The friend making the comment about fruit=sugar=bad was not the one trying to lose weight, just the heavy set “expert” other guest. The comment is just plain wrong. And rude to make. And while most of the calories in sorbet come from sugar it still does not have that much sugar in it. 90 total calories all sugar is not so much for dessert serving especially when it comes in a slow to digest form and with lots of other nutritional goodness.
No matter what the provenance of the baklava it is mostly nuts with phyllo and a sweetener (either honey or sugar syrup with rose water) and has more than 90 calories per typical serving. Does not mean it is a bad choice but it is materially different.