ARGH!!! I just found you!! I have to bookmark and read tonight to catch up. I LOVE macadamias but never went as far as you. I may have to try a week of macs vs a week of brazils....... I am not trying to lose, but what if...... LOL

This is a very interesting thread! I love nuts!

Plinge, I'm another enjoying reading this thread.

Have you see this in The Telegraph today?

On my way to Trader Joes for nuts. I used to cringe when DH would bring out the pistachios and snack away, but now I will buy them for him to travel with! And now I am going to add nuts into my day as well. YUM!

This is a very interesting read Plinge! I am curious about how the process of "toasting" or cooking nuts might change this weight loss/maintaining effect - I don't buy nuts roasted (except peanuts... but they aren't really nuts at all) but enjoy toasting raw almonds, pecans, etc. in the oven until browned (with no oil or salt).

We are all different, and now I'm worried in case nuts don't work for you. My mum always told me I didn't chew my food enough, and maybe that's something to do with it for me.

The way my thinking is leading is towards the possibility that nuts, and foods with related properties, may be regulatory, rather than weight-reducing as such. In other words, if someone is at the right weight--as you may be--they might decline to confer weight loss.



I've had mixed results with pistachios, on the few occasions I've tried them. The trouble is, I think they have to be roasted to become edible, and for me that spoils the taste.

In simple terms, roasting will make the calories in the nuts more available, because it is a form of predigestion, in a way. So the nuts will have less resistance to releasing their calories. However, I should think they will have some.

I did do an experiment to find out why roasted salted peanuts and roasted salted mixed nuts were fattening for me. I washed the salt off a set load of nuts, which I ate for a day. I compared the scale with that after eating the same load of them salted or raw. I founded that I gained weight after eating them with salt but not with the salt washed off. But on raw nuts I lost. Salt intake raises water weight, but I do think it's more sinister than that. Studies of weight gain through salt find that more weight is gained than is explicable just from salt. I suspect that it makes an obesogenic cocktail with fat.

I didn't see that, but I have read lots of research that found the same thing. I tend to focus on weight rather than health, because I take it that a good weight will take care of health.

There are one or two issues with nuts, such as the amount of n-6 in them and their potential for rancidity, which I'm going to mention eventually. But the research on them is consistently positive from a health point of view. I think of them as the perfect low-carb food: low-carb, high-fat, high-protein, high-fibre, convenient for snacks.

Many thanks.

Me too! Thanks for visiting.

Guru

I recently acquired a guru. I've never had one before, because, as Joni Mitchell said, “No one can teach you everything”.

Just because someone’s right on one thing doesn't mean they’ll be right on another. Even Newton had only four great ideas. When it comes to physiology, specialists alone are to be relied upon–and then only in their specialism, usually one tiny area of study (specialists may come unstuck when they’re tempted to speculate or generalise). Gurus, on the other hand, miraculously know it all. Atkins, Taubes, the Eades, et al, may hit a bullseye or two, but they fire all round the target as well. And these are some of the better gurus.

*

Anyway, now I have a guru of my own. His name is Kenneth Heaton––you may not have heard of him--and he was an expert on bowels. I say was–the great man's still alive, but he’s long retired from his career as a gastroenterologist at the University Department of Medicine, Bristol Royal Infirmary, and now pursues a lifelong passion for Shakespeare. Heaton would be surprised to be called a guru; he published a few scientific papers and reviews, plus a book on the bowels, called “Bowels”. Mostly he specialised in the gallbladder, on which subject his main conclusion after several decades was that we don’t know very much about it.

Heaton usually reported anonymously with collaborators; but his contributions are unmistakable. For example, at the start of a report to the Royal College of Physicians (1980), he quotes (I suspect it is he) the following 1585 observation: “Doe we not see the poore man that eateth brown bread health fuller, stronger, fayre complectioned and longer living than the other that fare daintelle every day?” This is a typical Heaton touch: he doesn't aspire to say something new; rather, he reminds us that there’s nothing new under the sun. Unlike most scientists, Heaton writes beautifully, sometimes poetically. What other gastroenterologist could write, for example (on the difference between juice and whole fruit): “The fibre was all there in a chemical sense, but it was well-nigh gone in a physical sense, like a violin that has been stamped on”?

*

I came across Heaton in Eat Fat and Grow Slim by Dr Richard Mackarness, who quotes an article of Heaton's in The Lancet, a medical journal. Here Heaton first signposted for me the link between gut behaviour and weight regulation. He does something few gastrointestinal scientists do–he actually makes a suggestion about obesity:

“The refined products have an artificially increased energy/satiety ratio, increased ease of ingestion, and more complete absorption. Thus they are inherently likely to cause excess energy intake. The extreme commonness of obesity in Western countries may be related to the fact that most dietary carbohydrate is refined and fibre-depleted.” (Heaton, quoted in Eat Fat and Grow Slim, Mackarness, 1973)

It was commonplace enough, even in those days, for nutritionists to associate obesity with intake of refined food; but this gastroenterologist notes (to him a simple scientific fact) that energy absorption varies according to how refined a food is and affects bodyweight according to the degree of that absorption.

This sent my mind into overdrive. Did it mean, say, that 50 calories of peas are less fattening than 50 calories of jellybeans? If so, the very basis on which we plan our calorie intake lies exposed as the biggest pile of elephant droppings since Hannibal camped in the Alps and fed his elephants melons. On the one hand, it suggests we might eat more peas; on the other, it suggests that the handful of jellybeans we plan as a treat packs more threat to our diet than we might expect. Amongst other things, this set me wondering whether even very small amounts* of a highly refined food will disrupt our calorific calculations. Do those one or two junky little treats many dieters allow themselves torpedo their weight-loss plans below the waterline, however meticulously carbs and calories are counted?

* Around this time, I’d also started to grasp how very small is the amount of weight available for us to lose each day. The vast majority of the energy we consume is needed for body functions, leaving only a miniscule battleground of calories to diet or exercise over. Small, unnatural items such as sweets, sugar drinks, or a piece of pizza may be all it takes to scupper our weight loss for the day, because every last calorie in them will get absorbed, and quickly.

Hi Plinge-
Very interesting thread you've started here.

Just curious, are you a raw foods proponent in general, or more particularly with nuts?

-Kim

Nutritionally incorrect

Everywhere I look in the gastrointestinal literature, the same four explanations for the calorie-reducing effect of resistant foods crop up: satiety, promotion of energy expenditure, raised metabolism, and excretion. Of these, the last is paid the least attention–surprisingly little, it seems to me. Since it is the one with the most actionable implication for dieters, I'm left wondering why no one has made a big thing of it. Why has no guru latched onto the idea that selecting certain foods might allow us to consume more calories overall?

Well, in a way, some people have. In the last few years, several weight-loss plans have appeared which rely on the eating of resistant starch. In principle, I’ve no doubt these plans are onto something; I doubt, however, that there’s enough resistant starch in most foods to justify the claims made for its weight-loss magic. I'm not accusing the resistant starch exponents of making up the weight-loss figures reported on such diets. What I suspect is that other resistant content in the so-called resistant-starch foods behaves just as the resistant starch does, thus augmenting the weight-loss effect. A food--beans, for example--which contains resistant starch will also contain resistant fibre, often in much larger quantity. So a proportion of beans will escape digestion in the small intestine, and a further fraction will escape fermentation in the large intestine, leading to the eventual excretion of a percentage of the calories in beans. I suggest, therefore, that resistant-starch diet plans do get things right, but partly for the wrong reason. Those, such as Dr Eades, who oppose resistant-starch diets on the grounds that we don’t eat enough of it to justify the weight-loss claims, get it wrong, but for the right reason.

That aside–and I’ll come back to resistant starch in this thread because it is very interesting– the question remains why the phenomenon of calorie excretion has not been pounced on as the basis for a diet craze. I have a theory about that: I believe it is because the idea is nutritionally incorrect. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that unmetabolized calories include nutrients, many of them important to the body. It would be nutritionally incorrect to launch a diet which promised that you would excrete calories but also lose many minerals such as calcium, iron, magnesium, as well as many vitamins. As it happens, nutrient loss doesn't bother me at all, a conclusion I reached after flipping my previous thinking about vitamins and minerals on its head.

Kenneth Heaton used an intriguing word in his Lancet article: “overnutrition”:

Overnutrition may be involved in the aetiology of such common diseases as diabetes, cholesterol-rich gallstones, and coronary heart disease. It is widely assumed that overnutrition is the result of taking an abnormal amount of food. Could it result merely from taking an abnormal type of food? […] I believe fibre to be a natural obstacle to nutrient intake, and suggest that foods from which fibre has been removed cause overnutrition, and that starch and sugar are non-fattening when eaten with their natural complement of fibre. (Heaton, The Lancet, 1973)

I had always assumed that “overnutrition” meant overeating. Calcium is a useful nutrient, for example, but eating a huge slab of cheese would give us too much of it. Heaton’s proposal prompted me to look at it another way. Maybe the human body, if allowed to eat only natural foods, can decide for itself how much of a nutrient it needs. The mechanisms of nutrient balance are so intricate and complex that perhaps we are presumptuous to think we can adjust it externally, by taking supplements of this or that, combining foods, etc. Our guesses at what the body needs may be crude at best, damaging at worst. The body probably requires thousands of nutrients that we haven’t even identified yet, so perhaps we should just provide it with good food and allow it to sift out what it needs.

Diet websites, slimming plans, and health columns often report the fact that many nutrients, including important ones such as calcium and iron, may bind, to a greater or lesser extent, with fibre, which can block their absorption in the small intestine. Such is sometimes seen as a disadvantage of fibre, leading to advice on which supplements to take to counter its chelating (binding) effect. This always worried me so much that till recently I made sure I ate dairy at a different time from fibre–I didn’t want osteoporosis setting in, after all.

I have noticed, however, that the science on the matter always includes a reassuring word to the effect that, whether fibre binds with nutrients or not, there’s no need to worry about mineral and vitamin deficiencies in our affluent society, at least if we eat normally. In any case, it seems that nutrients whose absorption is blocked in the small intestine through binding with fibre may later be fermented into availability when they reach the large intestine, a department of the digestive system often overlooked when absorption of nutrients is calculated.

Dietary fibre may reduce acutely the absorption of some vitamins and minerals by binding or entrapping them in the small intestinal lumen. However, there is little evidence that population groups consuming nutritionally adequate diets rich in high-fibre foods have any problems with vitamin or mineral deficiencies. Recent studies show that fibre may reduce calcium availability in the small intestine, but that at least some of the calcium carried into the colon, bound or entrapped by fibre, is released when the fibre is fermented, with short-chain fatty acids facilitating calcium absorption from the distal colon and rectum. (FAO/WHO Report, Carbohydrates in Human Nutrition, 1998)

I realised, as someone who now eats a range of healthy foods, that I needn’t worry myself about mineral absorption. Instead, I plunged in the opposite direction and began actively seeking out foods that are said to block certain nutrients. It occurred to me that since nutrients and calories aren't mutually exclusive, anything which blocks the absorption of nutrients would also block absorption of the calories with which they came, thus assisting with my weight maintenance. Just as the body might regulate weight by disposing of unwanted calories bound to fibre, so it might regulate nutrition in the same way by disposing of nutrients surplus to requirement. It could even be that the fermentation process in the lower intestine adjusts the final topping up or passing on of nutrients and calories according to need, which would explain why their availability for absorption is postponed till that stage in their gastrointestinal journey. Too much calcium, for example, is known to be bad for us.

I think in Britain we mostly eat nuts raw anyway. The only nut we usually eat roasted is peanuts, though I eat mine raw.

I'm not a raw food proponent, because I love my cooked food. But I like it lightly cooked. I'm going to say some stuff about this later on.

Thanks for visiting. Goodness knows how people are finding this thread.

Because anytime we see the Plinge by-line, we know it's going to be good, whether it's a witty one-liner or a scholarly essay!

That's very kind of you! Not scholarly, though. I throw in a few random quotes, but I'm not scientific. Just floundering about trying to find out what works.