Oh, please- what you're doing is the definition of scientific- experimentation and observation. See below:

There you have it, dear Plinge!

PS- very curious about the screen name, too.

I am certainly doing self-experimentation and using the hypothesis-testing method. But I am not trying to pretend that I'm scientifically literate; my education was in the arts, so I'm "translating" what I read into a sort of layman's terms on my level. I don't mind if my lines of reasoning are out, so long as the results are good on the scale.

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As for Plinge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Plinge

Alrighty, then... I'll keep checking in for updates on the experiments, and congratulations on reaching goal!

Aha, Plinge is the Brit version of Alan Smithee. Thanks for that, I've been wondering for months.

Cheers!

Finally taking the time to read through the details of your experiment of one and you've brought up some interesting ideas.



I don't doubt this a bit. I recently had an experience where I went from eating raw sunflower seeds to eating roasted and salted ones. Not only did I begin gaining, but I also craved them more. It would be an interesting experiment to see if the gain came from eating more of them, or eating them roasted & salted.



I'm curious if the research showed this to be true for men and women equally.



I don't know....so many people here (and many in maintenance) say that calories <DO> count for them.



This makes perfect sense to me.



Are you familiar with the Weston A. Price Foundation or the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon? They recommend that you purchase raw nuts, soak them in salted water and then roast them on low heat for an extended period of time to reduce the phytic acid content <and make them more digestible!> I find that highly interesting in the context of this thread. Here is an article from the Weston A. Price Foundation site:

Living with Phytic Acid

I'm not a proponent one way or another. Sometimes I soak my nuts and sometimes I don't. Right now I'm sitting here eating raw almonds because all this talk of nuts made me crave them.



I have no doubt. I have been very pleasantly surprised at the number of carbs I can consume and still lose or maintain - but it solely depends on the source of the carbs! If I stick to natural, unprocessed sources I am able to tolerate more carbs than I would have thought (at least 50-60), and actually do better than on a very low amount of carbs (20 or less).

So you are saying that I should just swallow the nuts whole? LOL I am maintaining so if I go up a pound or so, I know how to bring it down. I am still also watching calories, so if I include nuts into the equation, I should come out ahead.

You washed the salt off your nuts (this really could be read with a chuckle under one's breath) and found that it was the salt that caused a slight gain. In Atkins book, he recommends that a person on less than 50 net carbs a day, include extra salt in a day's menu. I add it liberally, and add 1/2 tsp (1/4tsp 2xday) or I get horrible leg cramps at night. I don't think a bit of salt on a nut, as long as it is not accompanied with an oil to make it adhere, like safflower or sunflower or other vege oils will make me gain.
Now I see that you think that roasted nuts, even unsalted, may not give a person the same results as raw nuts. Okay, I just purchased packages of roasted, unsalted nuts, and will let you know if I gain.

Here in the states, the first chioce is roasted-salted, nuts of all sorts. Sugar and candy coated are also found in some salads. We have to tip toe carefully through the minefield of nuts.

LOL I am posting this url everyhere, too. Oh, did you want to keep this a secret? Too late!

Arlene, if you want to find unsalted, unroasted nuts, check the baking supplies aisle of the grocery store. I find them in the bulk bins in my favorite store!

Nuts are a bit daunting calorie-counting wise; they are so blasted high.



I haven't experimented much on roasted and salted nuts, because the provisional results were so terrible. I can't bring myself to experiment for long on anything that's adding weight.

I think the reason salt doesn't make you gain weight is that you already eat salt--so your water weight stays at a consistent level. I'm not afraid of salt--I don't believe much of the fear-mongering written about it. But in processed food, which is what commercially oil-roasted and salted nuts are, traps are laid for us by a food industry that contrives to make their products as morish as can be. The combination of the roasting oil and salt is lethal for me.

I've toasted nuts occasionally myself, with no oil, but I don't like them as much (probably because I'm doing it wrong); they taste a bit soft and abused to me. But then I belong to the LAC2N (League Against Cruelty to Nuts).

I couldn't get my head round Atkins's line about salt; but I never followed him, anyway--being a Briffa/Mackarness man to my tonsils.

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I know what you mean about the perils of the nut minefield. I once lost a toe when I trod on a walnut.

No, it's lovely having people visit and chat. I just don't want the nutrition blogosphere to get onto me and bring their squabbles here.

I should think it’s a combination of the two. After some successful experiments with raw nuts, I tried eating salted, oil-roasted nuts for two days. It was a very different experience. They seemed to go down much quicker, and I felt less satisfied afterwards. I wanted to eat more straight away, but fortunately I stuck to my planned intake. But I gained weight. End of experiment.




I didn’t look for differences, but the research on the health effect of nuts seems consistently good, and I’ve read a lot of it. I do recall that some of the studies were just of women. I tend not to look too closely at health studies, just the ones focusing on body weight. But I couldn’t help noticing other positive effects of nuts on health too.



Calories do count: there’s no getting away from science. But I'm proposing a theory of unavailable calories. We know about unavailable carbohydrates, also called fibre; what about unavailable calories–ie., those trapped inside the unavailable carbohydrates? Of course, we’ll never be reading about unavailable calories on food labels (measured per the famous Plinge scale), because digestive efficiency varies with the individual; but individuals might be able to work out which foods they digest incompletely.



Yes, I’ve a lot of time for the Weston Price Foundation, and Mary Enig in particular. But I deliberately make as little fuss about preparing food as possible. I don’t soak beans, let alone nuts, and I don’t care about phytic acid at all. Ever since I was a teen I have eaten every part of a food I can. For example, I’ll eat all the skin of a kiwi fruit, including those tough bits at the ends; I'll drink the cooking water of beans. It may be famous last words, but I'm not concerned by antinutrients. I believe in hormetic theory, which suggests that the body is designed to fight the natural resistance of plants to digestion and is in fact stimulated by them. After all, the human body has been at it long enough. There’s a view that antioxidants derive their beneficial effect from antagonising the body to react against them.

If I buy raw almonds, I want them with the brown skin on; the skin is not tasty, and it probably wants to fight my digestive juices. Bring it on, I say. I’d not buy the blanched almonds, flaked almonds, chopped almonds, shredded almonds. In my opinion, all of those will release more of their calories into my body than the whole almonds with the skin on.



I’ve noticed that when people on this website jump for joy at unexpected losses, the food they list is often more natural than processed.

I so agree, as I read the label and see the different vege oils that are brought in to trap the salt. I get most of my nuts at a store that has roasted, salted nuts that say, in the contents on the label, nuts and salt. Nothing else is labeled. However, due to the information you are so generously providing us for FREE!!! I will stick to unsalted or raw nuts in the future. One must get used to the taste, or lack of salt, mussent one. (Actually, I enjoyed it last night)

The physical character of food

Though not a populist, Heaton had a way of talking about science that an unscientific person like me can at least half understand. He relates science to the thinking processes of the everyday person, for instance by explaining that the digestibility of particles of food varies according to their different size or softness.

Like most people, I suspect, I’ve always pictured fibre as being made of, you know, fibres--a bit like those in my coconut mat, which would be tough to digest if I mistakenly attempted to eat it. Scientifically, this is nonsense. Very little fibre is made of threads; the word fibre itself is misleading--dietary fibre comprises a large group of diverse carbohydrates that react in a seemingly infinite number of chemical ways.

The field is dauntingly hard to grasp for the man in the street. Scientists increasingly separate fibre into its many different types, whose individual chemistry they study, to the point--as Heaton has observed--that the physical character of food (its mass, its lumpiness, its bittiness) is often taken out of the equation. Heaton draws back from the “ever more minute areas of investigation” of fibre science and reminds us that food contains solid physical matter whose particles must be broken down in the body before the endless, often obscure, chemical reactions come into play.

"If a chemical approach to fibre leads us into a maze, perhaps we should go back to basics and ask “What is fibre there for?” What is it doing in the plant? If we leave aside gums and mucilages, fibre may well be associated with cell walls, and the function of cell walls is structural and mechanical." (Heaton, Dietary Fibre Review, 1990)

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One of the reasons I’ve latched onto the idea of calorie excretion is that I can picture it in physical terms, at least on a simplistic basis. When I see a black-eyed bean in the lavatory pan, I don’t have to be Einstein to know that its calories and carbs are there too. Or to deduce that many more, perhaps in crushed or semi-digested form, will have met the same fate. Another reason I’ve latched onto the idea is that--unlike the satiation rates or metabolic rates--there’s something I can do to affect the resistance rates of my food. I can influence the degree of intactness it retains before I put it into my mouth.

Heaton and his colleagues once performed an experiment to see if there are differences in digestibility between whole apples, pureed apples, and apple juice, when subjects consume equal calories of each:

"Fibre-free juice could be consumed eleven times faster than intact apples and four times faster than fibre-disrupted purée. Satiety was assessed numerically. With the rate of ingestion equalised, juice was significantly less satisfying than purée, and purée than apples. Plasma-glucose rose to similar levels after all three meals. However, there was a striking rebound fall after juice, and to a lesser extent after purée, which was not seen after apples. Serum-insulin rose to higher levels after juice and purée than after apples. The removal of fibre from food, and also its physical disruption, can result in faster and easier ingestion, decreased satiety, and disturbed glucose homoeostasis which is probably due to inappropriate insulin release. These effects favour overnutrition […]" (Haber, Heaton et al, The Lancet, 1977)

They found a similar difference between whole peanuts and peanut butter, when both contained the same calories. Such were not chemical findings; they were physical findings: food digests more quickly the more it is broken down before we eat it. The principle is easy for a non-scientist like me to grasp. Since Heaton’s studies, which were important at the time, many comparable studies have been carried out on various foods, and the finding is almost always the same: the less refined a food, the more resistant it is to digestion.

Eating pineapple with a knife and fork

I’d always imagined that in order for their nutrients to be absorbed, pieces of food would have to be liquidised in the body, so that all necessary chemical reactions could take place without hindrance. In reality, it turns out the body does not break food down into smaller particles than it needs to--and that it seems to thrive on resistance. Another assumption I’ve always made is that chewing is just the crude starting mechanism of digestion, likely followed by a far more sophisticated breaking down of food in the stomach. In fact, chewing has the greatest impact of all on the size of the food particles travelling through the digestive tract. The stomach has the second-greatest impact.

"The nourishment to break down is imprisoned within the cell walls […] The tools to break [it] down are the teeth and the antrum of the stomach, which, respectively, chop and churn up the food until it is reduced to particles of 1-2 mm or less. The wall-breaking is incomplete, but presumably this doesn't matter, since teeth and antrum are all that is available to do the job." (Heaton, Concepts of Dietary Fibre, 1990)

What Heaton suggests here is that the body’s digestive process does not require the infinitesimal breaking down of food. I wonder if food which has been reduced to smaller-sized particles--such as highly refined industrial food substances--might flow straight through the intestinal walls into the bloodstream the moment it gets the chance. The body’s usual defence against overnutrition–the regulated sifting of a mass of natural food particles moving through it at a controlled speed (mediated by viscous fibre and other indigestible content) could be overwhelmed.

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I don’t know whether my guesswork has any merits. But I do know, from reading various studies, that food which contains large particles has less calorific effect than the same food consumed in small particles. This information might help me with my weight maintenance, because not only can I choose to eat less processed food and more whole food, but I can hand-process and prepare my food in ways that will make it less digestible, by not soaking, blending, chopping, cooking it, etc., more than necessary.

Last night, for example, I ate a big piece of raw pineapple, with some cream. Instead of, as I used to do, chopping the pineapple up and leaving it ready to eat after my first course, I went into the kitchen after my first course, trimmed off the hard outer layer, put the whole piece in a dish, and went back to the dining room to eat it, cutting bits off just before I put each one in my mouth. The idea was that if chopped and left standing, the pineapple would have started breaking down--predigesting, as it were. Everything I do to a food that my digestive system would have had to do–ie., breaking it into pieces, removing its fibre, churning it, heating it, whatever–removes some of its defences against digestion. My body would be spared from burning the calories necessary to carry out those reductive activities itself. In addition, every reduction in particle size that resulted from my food preparation would open more of the food to penetration by the digestive processes of the body, meaning fewer undigested calories would make it out of the body intact.

Now, I admit the saving might not be great for one slab of pineapple. But what if I cook my unsoaked beans to al dente rather than mush? What if I fry my onion, which I sliced four times instead of chopped, to golden rings rather than caramelised ribbons? And drop those halved tomatoes into the pan for just the last minute of cooking, two minutes after the whole mushrooms went in? And what if I do similar things each meal of the day, with the slow cooker (that great predigester of food) gathering dust in the cupboard under the stairs? We talk so much about industrially processed food and forget how far we process food ourselves before putting it into our mouths. In so doing, are we helping it add to our waistlines?

I think if the only ingredients of the roasted nuts were nuts and salts, they at least won't have added oil. The roasting will make them release more of their calories, because they will be softer; but I'm sure they will still be partly resistant.

One thing I have done is sprinkle salt on raw nuts, but I prefer them unsalted and the salt has no way of clinging to them.

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On the days when I ate only nuts, I was surprised how satisfying three portions of nuts a day turned out to be. I looked forward to them, and those experiments were no hardship. I'd put them in a dish and eat them one at a time, savouring their flavours. My favourite nuts are Brazils and cashews, both of which taste rich to me. Mixed nuts are my usual fare, though, because it's more interesting to eat a mixture, and each type of nut has some specialised health benefits of its own.

I agree with you.