I was at the bike store-coffee shop this morning for an Americano between clients (Cyclelogik has great Americanos – featuring beans from Francescos….mmm…) and was feeling a little snacky. It was almost 1130 and I had another couple of assessments before lunch. So I noticed the snack offerings they had today: a big oatmeal raisin cooking and a protein bar. Not thrilling, but I considered them enough to look at the nutrition numbers for each. The power bar looked decent: less than 250 calories, and it was somewhere in the 3:1 to 4:1 carbohydrate to protein ratio. It has fat, but fat is really not such a big deal – unless there is so much that it increases the calorie content too much. In fact some would call fat essential. And by some, I mean smart people who understand nutrition: The “Essential” in Essential Fatty Acids is not just a marketing thing.
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If you listen to Gary Taubes (author of Why We Get Fat, and Good Calories, Bad Calories), you would believe that the reason we are fat is because we eat too much carbohydrate, and that the way to solve the problem is to stop eating carbohydrates.
I’m not sure that the facts exist to support Taubes’ thesis. One hole, is that we in North America are fatter than virtually everyone else in the world (32% of men and 35% of women in the US are obese), but we eat less bread than they do. In fact North Americans ate an average of 60 lbs of bread per capita in 2000, which is less than half of what the skinnier Spaniards (15% of men and 21% of women are obese), Danes (no data found), and Germans (20% of men and 21% of women are obese) ate.1,2
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It’s been one week since I started my Precision Nutrition journey (click here to start at the beginning). All in all a pretty great week. Some ups, a few downs, but all in all a pretty great week.
- I have avoided cottage cheese my whole life. I was probably 12 the last time I had it. And even
then, it was only because I didn’t make the household food decisions. When I saw cottage cheese in the PN program, for some crazy reason, I decided it was time to give it a second chance. Read more…
My friend Mark Young (check out his great articles at www.markyoungtrainingsystems.com) turned me on to this great TEDx presentation video about will power. If you have 15 minutes to spare, watch this. It is a perspective that I have never heard before.
I was chatting with Mike at the Fit Shop and he was very keen on the protein bread. I wouldn’t call myself keen, but I was definitely intrigued. I’m generally not a member of the “carbs are bad” fan club, and so whole grain bread is a part of my diet. It’s not an enormous part, but it is a part. But I know many people who stay away from bread either for fat loss reasons or because they feel lethargic when they eat bread. And because I love to stand on a soapbox and talk about all things exercise and nutrition, doing a review of this high protein bread for my blog was an obvious next step. Read more…
This is another follow-up to my previous two posts about sodium and the Health Check label.
The first was about high sodium content of Heinz soups, and the second addressed sodium levels in products with the Health Check logo.
In short, I was driven to correspond with both Heinz and the Heart & Stroke Foundation (who run the Health Check program) after being shocked at the high sodium content of Smart Ones soup. This lead me to identify reporting irregularities in nutrition information posted online. I have received correspondence from both parties that do address this issue. I’ve included copies of both letters below. And for those who are in a hurry, here’s the tweet-sized version:
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I sent the following letter to Heinz Canada after almost buying a can of their soup, but then putting it back because of the alarming sodium levels. Their answer follows…
My email to Heinz:
“Can you please tell me why your soups have so much sodium? I almost bought your Southwestern vegetable soup today but then I saw the label and put it back. 820mg of sodium in a 60 cal serving? Wow! Im not sure Ive ever seen another food that is so sodium dense. Seriously! So 3% of daily calories has 34% of daily sodium?
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Eat outside McDonald’s.
Seriously.
Bring your healthy meal and eat it outside of McDonald’s. Or Pizza Hut. Taco Bell. KFC. Whatever your guilty pleasure.
This thought came to me yesterday as I had to do a quick dash across the street to the mall for something fast to eat before my next client session. I grabbed a booster juice and was drinking it as I walked back through the parking lot, behind the McDonald’s. Specifically, I seemed to have walked right past a vent from their kitchen. So as I was drinking the smoothie, I was also smelling Big Macs and McDonald’s fries. It kind of felt like I was actually eating McDonald’s. That got me thinking back to someone I used to work with who had lost his sense of smell from an accident as a child. He said that he has no trouble keeping a normal weight because the loss of his sense of smell meant that he had no sense of taste either. So food was not a pleasure for him. I thought of this deep connection between our senses of smell and taste.
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I snack. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I try to snack a bit less often, and I try to keep most of my snacks relatively healthy. But snacks definitely have a place in my life.
For a while I was on a mission to find those great tasting snacks that are still reasonable in terms of calories. And boy did I find some. Ever had Chapman’s Frozen Yogurt? Wow. It’s seriously tasty. I recently had some Caramel Pecan Crunch. I’m amazed that it tastes that good at only 140 calories per 1/2 cup serving. I was thinking that this is amazing – basically the same nutritional impact as boring old yogurt, but tastes like ice cream (seriously – it’s good). Obviously this has to be a regular snack item.
But sadly there is a problem. Read more…
Time Magazine recently published an article that concluded exercise does not help with weight loss. That’s’ not entirely true, but nor is it entirely false: When it comes to weight loss, food is a bigger factor than exercise.
I am not saying don’t exercise. Quite the opposite. Exercise is crucial to living a long and happy life. If done properly, it can improve your mood, reduce back pain, increase self-esteem, improve your heart health, and help you to maintain strong bones and muscles as you age so that you can be one of those people who are still skiing and running in their 80s. I know I want to be one of those people.
Let’s not forget nutrition though. One of the most renowned experts in the field of sports nutrition is Dr. John Berardi, who has done great work in helping us understand the importance of what and when we should eat.
