If I may…I think that x-ray 's point is that assuming that you are going to have a glass of milk, the glass of 1% is healthier than the glass of 2% since 1% has less fat (and more protein, lactose, and water). When balancing a diet, even small amounts of things add up. I will spare you all my dieting rant, but remember that 150 calories is almost 10% of what the average person’s diet should be. Multiply that by your dairy 3-a-day and notice that even a 1% difference in milkfat is rather significant. Handfuls of potato chips really don’t belong in this discussion, because chips by the handful don’t fit into a healthy diet.
An interesting website that has all the nutritional information of just about everything. paste
An aside to the OP, et.al, don’t feel bad for not understanding nutritional labels, most people don’t. groman , your scenario is how products get labelled as ‘reduced calorie’ or ‘lite’ The new product is compared to the original product (and the package usually says which product was the comparison) a 25% reduction in fat is officially ‘reduced fat’ paste
Looking at the nutrition label is the best way to really tell what is in your food, but you still have to remember that there are rounding rules and that the label goes by serving size. PAM, for example, is fat free which means that it has less than .5g fat per serving but the serving size is something like 1/3 of a second of spray. If you eat a whole second of spray’s worth then I would guess that is just under 1.5g of fat.
I really doubt Shalmanese 's claim of adding fat to a fat-free product to make a label claim. It just doesn’t make any sense. Fat is too expensive to add to foods for no good reason and a 99% fat free label claim isn’t going to boost jam sales. If they were adding fat, I would guess it was for the functional properties in jam or flavor attributes in other spreads.
The standard canola oil I buy at the supermarket costs approximately $1 per litre. For a standard 300mL bottle of jam, you would been to add 3g of fat in there or a total of 0.3c worth of fat. Hardly breaking the bank. It may very well have been that the fat contributed something tastewise or texturewise to the jam, however, it was damn funny to see the jam as the only one on the entire shelf to proudly proclaim itself 99% fat free! Since none of the other jams made any mention of the fat content, uninformed consumers might be mislead into thinking that this jam was somehow healthier and buy it instead.
That’s nonsense. You have a cite for that? I can give you cite after cite that will tell you its fat percentages that count. By your logic, a pat of butter just became healthier because you mixed it in a glass of water.
You want to look at how nutrient dense your food is. You do this by looking at the amount of calories that are in the food and how much of it is good, how much of it is bad, how many other nutrient dense goodies are you getting out of it for the amount of calories you’re consuming, etc. How much the food weighs is of zero importance. Water and fiber don’t have calories.
I never said that total calories and total fat grams don’t count. I’m saying that a diet where you are getting more than 30% of its calories from fat isn’t healthy and by drinking whole milk your a consuming a food that gets about 46% of its calories from fat. To make up for that, you now have to cosume food that has much less than that percentage of its calories from fat, and we all know that’s not an easy thing to do. That glass of whole milk, those few slices of bacon, and everything else you can look at individually and think that the amount of fat isn’t that much, add up to too much at the end of the day.
34mg cholesterol in milk. Total daily recommendation is less than 300mg. Sure, saturated fat is probably worse for you (and that’s in milk too) but right now the medical community still thinks that we have to limit our consumption of cholesterol to under 300mg and under 200mg for those with heart disease.
What I’ve wondered is whether fat can be measured based purely on its raw chemical properties, instead of its various natural states.
Dehydration specifically. I take a 100g cup of 100% juicy drippy fat, and then dehydrate it. Is it still considered to be 100g of fat, even though it now weighs only 20g after all of the water weight is gone?
Uh, fat is fat, it’s not a composite substance that has water in it. If it’s pure fat, there’s no water and would be no dehydration. If it’s something like lard or the butter I mentioned below, there’s a littel bitty bit of water but not much.
Why yes, I believe that if I got a pat of butter, mixed it with a table spoon of flour and then poured in a pint of liquid, that would be far healthier as I advocated in the gravy thread. Humans don’t just eat until a certain amount of calories and stop. They eat until they feel some measure of fullness. In most cases, fullness is correlated strongly with the mass of the food as well as taste and and a couple of other things. The reason why eating vegtables is good for you is because they are not very energy dense and thus, reduce your net caloric intake and that is how you lose weight. I’m arguing that milk plays a similar role because it is similarly not very energy dense. Especially when used in cooking where it can be used to bulk up other substances.
But nobody drinks 10 glasses of milk. Unless you deviate significantly from the norm, most westeners drink maybe the equivilant of 1/2 a glass with breakfast and maybe another 1/2 a glass on average from cooking. So you get 8g of fat and 34mg of cholesterol, so what? it’s fairly trivial on the entire scale of things. Until you’ve cut out all the major sources of fat in your diet, cutting milk is going to get lost in the noise.
Yes, people eat until they feel satiety. Vegetables are less nutrient dense because they contain alot of water in a very loose network. This arguement is not helping you!! A glass of milk is a glass of milk. USDA recommends three a day. Three glasses of skim are as satifying as 3 glasses of whole, if you don’t mind the taste of skim. 0.6 grams of fat in 3 servings of skim 9.75g of fat in 3 servings of whole milk. 9.15 grams of fat times 9 calories per gram of fat is 82.35 calories. Seven days of whole milk is 576.45 additional calories. You gain a pound with about 3500 extra calories, so…you gain a pound every 6 weeks or so.
Yes, fat contributes to satiety by affecting flavor and mouthfeel, but a very small amount of fat does this. Adding protein and carbohydrates to a fat does not make the fat more healthy. This is the problem with fad diets, you focus so much on one thing that the big picture completely escapes you.
Milk is quite enery dense, you are confusing addition for functionality and addition for nutritive benefit again. There is more water (the only non-nutrative major component in food) in beef than in milk. If you are eating for nutrient density, you’d do better to ‘bulk up’ food with hamburger. Unless you can cough up a legitimate source to back you up, I may suggest you bow out of this thread.
What exactly do you want a cite for? Do you want a cite that lower nutritional density foods aid in weight loss? Do you want me to admit that skim milk is healthier than whole milk? Well duh, of course it’s healthier, the question is by how much. Under your metric of fat calories as a percentage of total calories, you conclude that skim milk is roughly 50% healthier than whole milk and thus, very significant. Under my metric of fat grams as a percentage of total grams, it’s about 2% healthier, ie: not very much. However, before you jump all over it, the percentages are not directly comparable, everything under my scheme will have a lower percentage number than under your scheme, the key is to look at comparative measurements rather than absolute ones. ie: How does switching from whole milk compare to cuting back on potato chips.
If skim milk is healthier than whole milk, then water must obviously be healthier than skim milk. Why not advocate the drinking of water and multi-vitamin pills instead of skim milk? Because theres a trade off between nutrition and flavour. The goal of a diet should be to optimise both facets instead of looking at just one. By just focusing on the health benifits, you ignore the very real loss of taste and mouthfeel that goes along with dropping from from whole to skim and an even larger one dropping from skim to water. Whether that drop is acceptable to you is a personal choice. All I am advocating is looking at it from a big picture kind of view.
My personal philosophy of dieting comes from my Computer Science background. First, you set up your dream diet if weight was not a problem and include all the things you would like to eat. Then you set up a “budget” of various constraints which your diet has to fall under. From then on, it’s just a linear programming example, trying to match your dream budget to your constraints while cutting the least amount of “pleasure” possible. The way to do this is to start cutting things which have the highest gain/pleasure ratio and to go downward from there until you reach your budget. What I’m arguing essentially, is that for most people, the amount of gain from switching to skim is low enough and the amount of pleasure is high enough such that it’s well under the budget threshold. Sure, if you absolutely cannot tell the difference between skim and whole milk or if you absolutely must have the healthiest diet in the world, then it will be cut. But for most normal people, there are enough drastically worse habits in their diet that need to be gotten rid of first that cutting whole milk just doesn’t make sense.
It’s not so much a diet as a way of dieting. Any diet can be accomodated under this scheme. The advantage of this is that it’s provably optimal, ie: given a “diet plan” (ie: atkins, south beach, whatever), it can generate the “diet” (ie: eat 3 bananas, 4 pineapples, 8 cups of rice etc.) that is optimal. We can argue about what sort of diet plan all we want and chances are that I largely agree with you (reduce calories, decrease saturated fats, decrease trans fats, eat a wide variety, minimize processed foods, etc.) our methods of determining how to follow the diet are different.
Funny, adding proteins and carbs to fat makes it exactly more healthy under your metric while it makes it less healthy under mine. A pound of butter and a pound of water gets 100% of it’s energy from fat, a pound of butter mixed with a pound of sugar gets about 60% of it’s energy from fat. Ergo, this is more healthy under your metric right?
According to this. Ground 85% beef contains 60% water and 15% fat. Which I assume means roughly 25% of it is protein as well. Milk contains roughly 90% water, 4% fat and 6% protien. 85% lean is commonly considered too lean for hamburger which prefers about roughly a 30% fat ratio which would skew the figures even more. I suggest you back up your own cites before you go looking for mine.