Going to have to wait until I get back from my next trip to experiment. I did not have the time to get supplies and not enough days until we leave again.

I've eaten nuts daily for the last three months. I don't know whether they've helped my weight loss, but I've lost 26 pounds, so they couldn't have been too harmful. I only buy them in the shell. I figured cracking them would prevent overeating due to reaching into a bag and scooping them by the handful!

I have thought they contributed to my satiety, and prevented me from craving something more damaging to weight loss. I also believe that my total caloric intake is lower without the carbs, so the calories in the nuts are manageable in a way they would not be in combination with the carbs. Your calorie absorption resistance theory is interesting though. I pray you are right about dried fruit. I love fruit, dried or not, and am only now reintroducing it.

As I have been at goal only three weeks, I'm not yet bold enough to do major experiments on myself yet. I always admire self-experimentation, even if the n=1 leaves room for questioning. Thanks for your reports and analysis!

Congrats CPSnow for reaching your goal! It is good to hear about your nut eating, as well. I have not had any craving for fruit but now that my plum tree is producing, they are the best plums I have tasted off the tree! I can eat one and be happy. I, unfortunately am not going to be home for most of the crop, because I would love to get a dehydrator and experiment. I may be able to do it with my peaches and nectarines. I do know plinge says he has to watch calories, but like you, I think the nuts sort of regulate themselves. I get full when I eat them and have used them as meal replacements when traveling. It is not a regulated plan, however, just eat them when I have no other options, like on airplanes.
After this trip, I do want to do a trial with them, low carb, watching calories and as a meal replacement, just to see what happens.

I too am headed for an airplane and I will bring nuts. Haven't flown since sorted LC, so I'll have to figure out what else to bring. (Cheese, dried meat?)

Anyway, my raspberry bushes sadly will ripen and be over while I'm away. <sniff>

This is SUCH an interesting thread, I must pull it to the surface in hopes that plinge will post another report.

I wish that your findings re: nuts were true for me. There was a time, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, when I was new to low carb and could seeming eat unlimited nuts - 3 to 4 ounces a day, every day - and maintain. Sadly, it is no longer the case; like everything else, I have to limit nuts and calories to maintain or lose.

Plinge, you might enjoy Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire (in fact I wonder if the Discover Magazine article is extracted from it). The premise is that without cooking we would not have civilization: the amazing development of the human brain came only because cooking allowed our guts to use less energy to digest food, leaving energy and time for brain development. (If you look at other primates they spend a good bit of their time simply eating and digesting.)

I would love to see some large scale studies comparing those on raw food diets vs those who eat a cooked food diet to see what other differences there may be besides weight maintenance. Are those eating cooked food capable of more complex thought? I don't know.

It's sort of amazing that we have become so good at extracting calories from food, and producing so many calories so cheaply, that some people resort to stepping backwards evolutionarily-speaking in order to not extract too much energy from our food.

I haven't read Wrangham's book, but I've read some large extracts from it on line. I don't think those eating cooked food are capable of more complex thought, because any genetic adaptations would have developed over hundreds of thousands of years and advanced our brains permanently, whatever we eat now. On the other hand, Wrangham's experience trying a monkey diet probably shows that we couldn't function at the sophisticated level needed for modern life on such meagre calories--for a start, we'd be so busy eating all the time we'd never be able to do much else.

The way to experiment safely, I believe, is to try eating a certain food up to what you consider your gain-loss borderline for a day. That way, even if you put on weight, it could hardly be very much (an experiment can be just for one day). I tested dried fruit several times by eating nothing but that all day up to my calorie limit. The carbs would be frightening for strict no-carbers, though.

For me these days, neither carbs nor calories are the significant factor (though I still measure them); the type of food is the significant factor. I don't even bother to eat the foods that are fattening for me, fish being the worst by far.

I did try eating in-shell nuts for a while, but my favourites--walnuts and Brazils--are a devil to crack neatly. In theory they would be fresher in the shell, but they rarely taste it and the stock in Britain always seems to be from last year's crop. One of my principles is to eat nuts in as intact a form as possible, and I'm so bad at cracking them that I break them, opening them up to a moment's oxidation before I put them in my mouth.

It sounds to me as if, unlike Liz, you are one of the lucky ones with nuts. Maybe it helps that we are blokes.

They do help with satiety; my morning snack of walnuts and coffee with cream keeps me going for a long time: those three things together are the perfect package to give me a sustained concentration boost.




We had raspberry bushes when I was growing up, and I miss them. The raspberries in the shops here are expensive and often tasteless. I think my garden is too shady to grow them in. Have a good trip.

I'm much safer with prearranged amounts of food than with going by satiation. I seem to be able to stick to my plans fairly well, thank goodness. When I'm eating out or eating what others put in front of me, I choose light food or eat small portions. My journals aren't just a record but a motivation for me: I don't want them blotted.

Am I late for the party?!?!

What a very thought provoking thread!!

Thank you for doing all this research and for sharing it!

The moving computer

I used to think of digestion as the crudest of bodily functions--a necessary fuelling mechanism with a wastage system that doesn't bear polite contemplation. Now it fascinates me.

The way I look at assumptions afresh is to turn them upside down. For example: what if digestion is not the crudest bodily function but the most sophisticated? Even the brain, I read, depends for its most basic instructions on signals from the gut.

Take seratonin. Fruits contain seratonin, especially their seeds. It acts by speeding up the digestive passage of seeds, making the intestine walls contract faster. Seratonin-containing food may act physically on the digestive tract, but it also transmits neuro-signals to the brain that affect mood and appetite. So, on the one hand, seratonin is implicated in the transit of fruits through the gut, and, on the other, in moods, from euphoria to depression. Lack of seratonin-containing foods can lower mood, provoking an individual to seek food. Without this effect of nutrient shortage on mood, animals might happily starve, unmotivated to eat. Seratonin could explain why depression or stress states sometimes trigger eating. It’s just one of numberless dietary factors that naturally regulate our balance as organisms.

*

Heaton speculated that incomplete absorption is not a failure of digestion but a strategy of digestion. In this view, indigestible plant fragments act as barriers to overnutrition. Far from being irrelevant passengers in the gastrointestinal tract, they could be significant players there–-perhaps key players.

“One would be unwise to study the nutritional consequences of any group of substances without some reference to their reaction with dietary fibre.” (J H Cummings, qt Tudge, New Scientist, 1979)

If everything were digestible, we wouldn’t need a lower intestine at all; the small intestine could take care of it all. But the more digestible a diet, the further it departs from a basic principle of life on earth: resistance to decomposition.

Is partial digestion an ingrained physiological principle? Do we have inside us a moving computer that monitors and controls the rate and degree of nutrient absorption into the bloodstream? A computer that ensures the body doesn't absorb more calories at one time than it needs? And which thereby satisfies the brain? If so, it is a computer programmed millions of years ago.

“Dietary fibre has many functions in diet, one of which may be to aid in energy intake control and reduced risk of development of obesity.” (Burton-Freeman, Dietary Fibre and Energy Regulation, 2000)

*

“Calorific value may not simply be additive metabolizable energy from fat, protein, and carbohydrate provided by factorial equations but may be a function of the interaction of these nutrients with dietary fibre. (Baer et al, Dietary fibre decreases the metabolizable energy content and nutrient digestibility of mixed diets fed to humans, 1997)

Here Baer proposes, in effect, that the amount of calories we metabolise from food may be dependent on nutrient need, calculated through the body’s interaction with fibre.

Wild animals rarely get fat on a natural diet, and only when they’re supposed to, before hibernation--or because, as with walruses, they’re designed to be bulky. Animals do sometimes get thin, when they can’t find the food they need. Bones protrude on the cheetah’s ribcage. But when the cheetah has a kill to feast on, she does not get fat; nature keeps her at hunting weight. Though humans are clearly programmed, perhaps through evolution, to accommodate excess weight (giving us an advantage over wild animals, who starve to death in hard times), our digestive computers, too, may be capable of homeostatic precision. If only we’d give them the input required by the programme--that is, an input of meat and whole plant food.

From Newton, through Einstein, to the Higgs boson, the holy grail of knowledge has always been a theory of everything. For weight management, I suspect the theory of everything lies somewhere in the hinterland of the following sentence. With the exception of refined sucrose and refined vegetable oils, all plant foods contain indigestible elements.

The life cycle of plants as a model for human digestion

“It is well to remember that fibre is a botanical entity. In the plant it has essentially physical and mechanical roles–enclosing cell contents, trapping water, stiffening the plant, and conducting sap. The natural relationship between carbohydrates and fibre is that of a nutrient enclosed within cell walls, the whole food complex being a food which is solid in texture”. (Heaton, Medical Aspects of Dietary Fibre, 1980)

“Man, like all other plant-eating animals, has until modern times eaten his food with a largely intact cellular structure which is only partly destroyed by the time the food is discharged, still in particularate form, into the small intestine.” (Heaton, Concepts of Dietary Fibre, 1990)

“Future research will tend to concentrate on specific components of the dietary fibre complex, but unless it includes studies of the whole cell wall and of whole food that is histologically [at the microscopic level] intact we may lose sight of the wood for the trees.” (Heaton, Dietary Fibre, 1990)

Heaton’s reminder that fibre is a botanical entity alerted me to the similarities between the life cycle of plants and the sequence of human digestion. It struck me that the body’s digestive processes echo those of the plant’s decomposition and regeneration in nature.

Heaton did not regard fibre as a nutrient but as a component of the environment. In many ways, the contents of the gastrointestinal tract remain part of the external world; they only become part of us once their products are absorbed through the intestinal walls. The gastrointestinal tract has been described as the outside world contained by walls within the body. The bacteria in animal intestines, for example, are foreign to the body. They operate the same way as the bacteria that turn leaves on the ground into humus or demolish a dead fly. For this reason, manure makes most excellent fertiliser.

*

There are two types of indigestible material in plants: architectural parts and storage parts, the first more rigid, the second–which hold the nutrients–more viscous.

The architectural part is tough, since it has to resist degradation by the elements, particularly air and water. A soluble leaf would be little use. It would not suit the plant’s purpose to degrade at once--better to do so in stages, over a season or more. But all plant matter will decompose in the end. Once its job is done, it falls to the ground and rots there to release seeds and provide bacterial sustenance for living plants. Indigestible plant matter is therefore resistant to hydrolysis in the small intestine but may sustain a degree of bacterial breakdown once it reaches the lower intestine.

Soluble plant fibre forms a viscous gel in which the plant stores the food needed for its growth. It gradually releases the suspended nutrients to feed the plant, holding onto them till the moment is right. Soluble fibre also forms a gel in the human small intestine, where it is similarly parsimonious in releasing the nutrients it contains. Because of its chemical structure–which programmes it to bind (chelate) nutrients to itself, it also grabs some nutrients from other foods. Soluble fibre is known, for example, to bind fat in the small intestine, reducing its absorption and potential deposition. It also binds some bile salts, reducing cholesterol by excreting a portion of it out of the body with the bile salts. Many studies show that soluble fibre blocks some other nutrients from digesting in the small intestine, releasing them only when the fibre ferments in the lower intestine, and then not all of them. It may be that, even in the human body, soluble fibre regulates the rate at which nutrients are released to provide energy, just as it does in plants. The more it degrades, the more calories it releases. A ripe apple, for example, provides more calories than a sour one, ripeness being a stage of degradation.

The gelling behaviour of plant-storage sugars makes them expandable. The plant requires a flexible medium in which to suspend nutrients, so that it can store more food as it grows. Soluble fibre is therefore elastic and resilient, allowing it to expand the reservoir of the plant’s food supply while resisting the elements. It combines the flexibility of a fluid with certain characteristics of a solid. Soluble fibre retains these properties while progressing through the stomach and small intestine.

*

It seems to me logical that animal digestive systems evolved in tune with the needs of plants–which in turn evolved in tune with the needs of animal digestive systems. (It’s noticeable that the physiology of most animals varies with the seasons. Even humans are likeliest to gain weight in the autumn, when the fruit is on the vine.) Denuding our food of its natural plant-cell material confuses the body and provokes digestive dysfunction and potential overnutrition.

No party here–got my dull hat on.

Well, it's not research, just a spattering of reading. If a scientist came here, they'd probably shudder.

Thanks for visiting, Chris.

I am reading Wheat Belly, and this sounds much like his book, the same conclusions. He hates anything refined and loves nuts, too.

I'm not the biggest fan of Wheat Belly, though I had given up wheat before I read it. In broad terms, I agree with Davis; but he is a little dodgy on the science, in my opinion, which is what happens when you exaggerate to suit your argument; and his writing style got on my nerves.

You're the first person I've heard that didn't really like Wheat Belly. I liked it, but as you said, I am already on board with being wheat free. The other thing is that I'm not that scientifically minded.