Eat too much over the holiday?
For many people, the New Year is a time for resolutions, particularly resolutions to lose weight. But there is a problem with weight-loss resolutions: Weight is not what matters.
If we care about how we look, how we feel and how healthy we are, it is time to direct our focus away from our bathroom scales. Pounds gained or lost are poor measures of what actually counts — such as fatness, fitness and wellness.
First, consider that it is entirely possible to lose weight while becoming fatter (fat tissue weighing less than lean tissue). Also consider that one can gain weight while becoming fitter (for instance, losing fat while gaining muscle).
It is not weight that is important per se; it is fat, how that fat is distributed and the changes that occur in the body, particularly when fat distributes around our waistlines. People with obesity defined by intra-abdominal fat have a greater risk of dying prematurely than people with obesity defined by pounds on a scale. So what gets fat to accumulate around our waistlines, and incites the various problems that lead to early death? In no small part, it is the foods we eat.
Imagine that plate of holiday cookies. Such highly-sugared refined favorites lead to hormonal changes that drive continued eating, particularly eating of additional starchy and sugary treats (like more cookies, and cakes, and other sweets). Making a habit of eating these foods is associated not just with abdominal obesity (what happened to Santa), but also related diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
If, however, instead of refined sweets we choose whole foods, we see quite different results. Take those hard-shelled morsels in the bowl near the holiday nutcracker. Nuts are filling and work to guard against over-eating. Moreover, nuts are associated with healthier weight, healthier hearts and even longer lives.
Yet what may surprise some people is that a generous handful of nuts can have more calories than a sampling of Christmas cookies. Nonetheless, it is really hard to overeat nuts. Conversely, it’s really easy to overeat cookies (and cake and other treats with it). By keeping us more satisfied, whole foods like nuts reduce subsequent calorie intake, and keep overall calorie consumption for a day lower. By driving appetites, refined products like cookies (and cake) keep us craving and eating more.
Thus, we should not focus on calories as much as on food (just like we should not focus on pounds as much as on fat). In fact, this New Year, the healthiest resolution might be to stop paying attention to any food components or constituents at all, be they calories or other.
As colleagues and I noted in a recent paper, and I later clarified in a recent talk, the tendency to look at foods as merely collections of select components is one of the biggest problems in nutrition and health today. People are taught to think about foods as balance sheets of liabilities vs. assets — liabilities being supposedly undesirable components such as calories, saturated fat and sodium; assets being supposedly desirable components like vitamins, minerals and fiber.
But such conceptualization is very misguided (and very misguiding). It tells consumers to demand, and industry to create, products that focus on narrow attributes without attention to broader issues for health. Adding positive attribute(s) to junk food does not make it healthier, nor does reducing amounts of any negative attribute(s).
In fact, often times products become less healthy by supposedly beneficial alterations, and consumers striving to be health-conscious can be harmed. Holiday cookies could provide an example. It would certainly be possible to make lower-calorie cookies. But would these cookies be better for waistlines or wellness?
Probably not. In fact, if cookies were made lower-calorie by replacing higher-calorie fats and oils with lower-calorie starches and sugars (the usual maneuver), the result would tend to promote fatness and sickness, not fitness and health.
Other manipulations of supposedly positive and negative attributes might be equally if not more detrimental. In the paper and talk, my colleagues and I review examples like supplemental beta-carotene (a vitamin) linked to greater risk of cancer, supplemental calcium (a mineral) linked to greater risk of heart attacks and added fiber causing gastrointestinal distress. We also challenge the ideas that saturated fat and sodium relate meaningfully to heart disease, or that reducing these components makes food products healthier. Indeed, some replacements for saturated fat and sodium make products distinctly less healthy.
So if searching for a healthy resolution this year, I recommend the following: Stop focusing on food constituents and start focusing on whole foods. Whole foods help keep us full, fit, fueled and running well. It is when we start modifying our whole foods (e.g., by removing component X or adding component Y) that we get into trouble.
Thus, instead of resolving to purchase only products touting “low-calorie,” “low-fat” and “low-sodium” on the label (with or without additional claims of added vitamins, minerals and fiber), we’d be better served to choose more foods without labels at all (or at least with minimal processing): e.g., fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, lentils and whole grains. Some responsibly raised, whole foods from animals might be included too, for those so inclined, but we would all do well to focus particularly on foods from plants (the living botanical kind, not the industrial processing kind).
This New Year, let’s resolve to avoid weight-loss resolutions, stop focusing on calories and constituents, and start eating real foods. That resolution would set 2016 off to a healthy start.
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New Year?s Resolution: Forget About Weight, Let?s Eat for Better Health originally appeared on usnews.com
