Certain Diets May Help Body Burn More Calories: Study
Low-carb and low-glycemic plans work best, but low-carb regimen has drawbacks
http://www.ivillage.com/certain-diets-may-help-body-burn-more-calories-study/4-a-468579
I wanted to title this “Another thing that makes you go ‘Duh!'”, but felt that would be too repetitious, so went with something completely different (a man with three buttocks!). The gist here is that the way they measure calories for food has nothing to do with metabolism (except that at some point someone was smart enough to label food that didn’t get digested as having zero calories). Why does that matter? Well, when you are counting calories, the number on the label doesn’t tell you what the actual number that will be utilized by your body and as such, you may be making very poor eating decisions. Fat calories, while they look huge on the label, are a bit deceptive. The body does not efficiently convert fats into energy on a per-molecule basis, so despite fats as being reported as a high calorie food in comparison to carbohydrates, because (simple) carbohydrates are generally turned into energy with the highest level of efficiency, you could actually be much worse off with a low fat diet. Also, interestingly (to me, anyway), most fats have to be metabolized before they can be repackaged into your own fat cells, so in many cases the body will preferentially pack the energy from carbohydrates into stored fat and instead metabolize fat in the diet into energy for immediate use.
Proteins are generally very poor sources of energy for your body’s cells and cause problems with toxins (we can ‘excrete’ carbon, oxygen and hydrogen via breath, nitrogen (proteins always have nitrogen, fats and carbs almost never) has to be excreted as a solid or liquid). In addition to having complex metabolic pathways to make use of proteins, your body would rather use it for cell maintenance than for just keeping warm. Indeed, there is a fairly rare genetic disorder that causes people with the defect to slowly poison themselves by eating protein and they have to be very careful in their diet.
So, the net effect is that pure calories are not enough to determine an optimal vs non-optimal diet. The different food groups have different types of energy sources and the body makes use of them very differently. There is also a big difference between the highly refined foods (pure sugar and refined flour are biologically almost identical) and more ‘raw’ food (like whole grains) in that the more complex foods require energy just to break them down to become an energy source. This is never taken into account on the nutrition labels either, so you can imagine that relatively modest changes in the types of food in your diet, despite having the same number of reported calories, can have a vastly different effect on your waistline. The vast majority of information made available to the average Jill and Joe is totally misleading (of course, that is because of a vast (right wing?) conspiracy with food producers, so you can be sure something bad will happen to me on my way home this afternoon) and instead of simple information like ‘eat less, exercise more and avoid processed foods’, we are drowned in blather about how to drop 40 lbs in 40 minutes or some such.
