Hello, Zuleikaa. I am bound to be wrong about some of this stuff; but the main thing for me is that I'm getting good results on the scale while eating substantial amounts of food. Either I am doing something right or my metabolism has righted itself of its own accord. (For now, anyway: I don't trust it.)

Can I have some more?

So far, I see that I’m edging towards the view that natural foods are best, and whole foods better still, because we evolved to eat natural, whole foods whose moderate absorption rates preclude overnutrition or calorie overload. Which is all very well, but it raises a question in my mind. If our bodies fare so much better on unprocessed food, why don’t they reject the processed crap fed to them on the western diet? Quite the contrary happens. Far from rejecting highly processed food, the body seizes on it, converts it rapidly to instant and stored energy and then, like Oliver Twist, asks for more.

Why do birds pounce on the cake and toast we throw on the lawn? Why do pigs prefer precooked feed? Why, better than anything, does chocolate lure mice onto traps? We know not to put cooked leftovers on the compost heap, for fear of attracting rats. And rats have been shown in tests not only to prefer human junk food to standard rat food but to go to extreme lengths to get it--for example braving electric shocks or traversing icy environments--rather than eat their normal, available food.

“The additional food offered [to rats] was either shortcake, meat pâté, peanut butter, Coca-cola, all of these (cafeteria), or laboratory chow. Although laboratory chow was also always available in their thermoneutral home, rats invariably ran in the cold to the feeder, especially so when the food offered was highly palatable. With such foods, animals took as much as half their nutrient intake in the cold.” (Cabanac and Johnson, Analysis of a conflict between palatability and cold exposure in rats, 1983)

Why would humans and many animals prefer food that, in evolutionary terms, is unnatural?

My theory is we’re programmed to seek the highest dose of calories and nutrients--and the most quickly absorbed--that we can, because in nature most nutrients come in non-calorie-dense form. Before man started to process and cook his meals, thus intensifying the “available calories” from natural food, he had to spend much more time eating and digesting food, to glean the nutrition and energy he needed to survive.

Many wild animals do that very thing: monkeys and gorillas, for example, eat all day. The birds in my garden perpetually seek food, regularly crapping its residue onto my flowers and occasionally onto my head. In an environment where food is scarce and difficult to digest, wild animals pounce on the most calorie-dense food they can find; and they're probably programmed to do so.

I’ve seen documentaries in which the primitive Baku people of the Congo feasted joyously on honey, retrieved from perilous trees, till they were stuffed; or in which aboriginal people of the Australian outback turned up stones for hours in search of honeypot ants, whose swollen backsides are packed with sugar. And, arguably, the reason children love sugar is their need for a high conversion rate of food to calories in order to grow, to be energised, and, in certain parts of the world (as with primitive man), to survive. For such reasons, I suspect, the body naturally welcomes high-calorie food with open arms, providing as it does instant energy, and more to store for a rainy day.

In a way, our quest, as dieters and maintainers, for a diet that keeps our weight down is unnatural: perhaps that’s why it’s so hard. Designed to seek calories, we turn evolution on its head by trying to cut them. But first the food-processing industry turned evolution on its head, by conjuring for our delectation an unnatural plenty--in particular, a plenty of calorie-dense, fibre-depleted food. Or perhaps this isn’t so much a perversion of evolution as the latest stage in evolution. In an overpopulated society where early mortality has declined, maybe we needed to manufacture more ways for us to get ill and die.

Richard Wrangham

“Every day, humans in every global society devote time and energy to processing food--cooking it, grinding, slicing it, pounding it--yet we don’t understand what effect these efforts have on the energy we extract from food and the role these might have played in our evolution. It is astonishing, since energy gain is the primary reason we eat it.” (Rachel Carmody, student and colleague of Richard Wrangham, Harvard Gazette, 2011)

*

Kenneth Heaton’s interpretation of the word “overnutrition” changed my way of thinking about food. It made me wonder whether my body might have as little need for a surfeit of nutrients as it does for a surfeit of calories. After all, living as I do amidst a smörgåsbord of plenty, the chances of my becoming nutritionally deficient are minimal as long as I eat a rounded variety of foods. So I have changed my selection and preparation of food to favour a less nutrient-dense intake. As I ponder the gastrointestinal literature, the words which now interest me most are “digestible” and “indigestible”--because I see that the degree of digestibility of a food predicts the degree of calorie absorption available from it. In a nutshell, the less digestible a food, the less fattening it will be.

To switch from eating food in as digestible a form as I can--a natural human instinct--to eating it in the least digestible form I can is a quantum leap for me. It is also one most people wouldn't understand–my sister the nurse, for example--which is why I call it “nutritionally incorrect” (by analogy with the term “politically incorrect”: the saying of something that contravenes an official moral code. The doctrine of nutritional maximisation--five a day, and all that--is surely a moral imperative: do what nanny says or you deserve all you get.)

Many of our assumptions about health derive from official propaganda aimed originally, and with the best of intentions, at sparing sections of the populace from malnutrition. It was a numbers game: if we all max up on nutrients, fewer will suffer and die--who can argue with an equation like that? But the aspiration towards basic nutrition for the uneducated masses has turned into an aspiration towards maximal nutrition for the educated elite. Rare is the health guru who fails to recommend us a cartload of supplements. In fact, such gurus often set themselves up on the side as commercial dispensers, flogging us nutritional supplements more expensive than those on the supermarket shelf, which they implicitly mock us for buying. The aura of nutritional morality pervades even the scientific vocabulary, where terms such as “malabsorption” and “inefficiency” are used to describe the passing of superfluous calories in the stools, as if the body were some sick and recalcitrant child unable to polish off what was provided for its own good.

*

One day, while surfing, as one does, the topic of monkey nutrition, I stumbled on the thoughts of the British primatologist Richard Wrangham, a Harvard University professor specialising in the study of chimpanzees. As a young man, Wrangham carried out a somewhat eccentric experiment on himself, in which he tried living on a diet of chimpanzee food. He found he could just about sustain himself on the diet but only with great effort, because the food was so much less calorie-dense than what he was used to.

“I learned that nothing they ate was so poisonous it would make you ill, but nothing was so palatable that one could easily fill one’s stomach." (Wrangham, Interview in Discovery Magazine, 2011)

To absorb the nutrients you need from a chimp diet, it seems you would have to eat for much of the day, as monkeys themselves do. Wrangham hypothesised that as we evolved from wild apes something radical happened to our nutrition, something that helped us extract more nutrients, and more quickly, from our food and conferred on us an evolutionary advantage. He proposed that the revolution occurred when we began to process and cook our food, thus enabling us to absorb more calories from it than had we eaten it raw. To his surprise, Wrangham, a relative interloper in the field of nutritional studies, found his theory rejected by the food-science establishment, and not so much for its evolutionary hypothesis as for its nutritional science. Many peer commentaries simply dismissed the notion that cooked food provides more energy than raw. To test his theory, therefore, Wrangham (with his colleagues) recently carried out experiments on differences in calorie absorption rates between raw food and pounded or cooked food. Here is an extract from the summary of one of those studies:

“Using mice as a model, we show that cooking substantially increases the energy gained from meat, leading to elevations in body mass that are not attributable to differences in food intake or activity levels […] Our results indicate significant contributions from cooking to both modern and ancestral human energy budgets. They also illuminate a weakness in current food labeling practices, which systematically overestimate the caloric potential of poorly processed foods.” (Carmody, Weintraub, & Wrangham, Energetic consequences of thermal and nonthermal food processing, 2011)

This finding did not surprise me, of course, for I’d read Heaton and the classic school of British gastroenterology; but that adverb “substantially” leaped out at me. Scientists don't use such words lightly. All I’d seen to this point were estimates of between 5% and 20% of calorie savings from eating whole foods. Those are impressive enough figures, and worth taking advantage of, but I’d forgive any reader of this thread for not finding them much to get excited about (and anyway, as dietary pessimists, most of us would probably assume it our luck to calorie-save at the 5% end of things). Yet, as I mentioned in earlier posts, my experience with nuts told me unequivocally that I was excreting a considerably larger proportion of the calories in them than 20%, perhaps even the majority of the calories listed on their packets. Did Wrangham’s “substantially” encompass what had happened to me?

In another study, Wrangham’s team, under Rachel Carmody, compared mice given raw sweet potatoes and beef at certain times and cooked sweet potatoes and beef at other times.

“For both meat and sweet potato, [Carmody] found that when the food was cooked the mice gained more weight (or lost less weight) than when it was raw.” (Wrangham, Interview in Discovery Magazine, 2011)

*

What then are the implications for weight loss and maintenance? I’ve no intention of becoming a raw foodist, by which I mean someone who never cooks food and would voluntarily nibble a parsnip. In Britain, we mostly don’t cook nuts, so I don’t think of eating uncooked nuts as different from eating uncooked fruit; but both are raw, and they retain their internal architecture till they enter the mouth, at least when unchopped. If the difference in available calories between uncooked and cooked food were only small, maybe there’s little I can do (by way of food preparation) to reduce potential calorie absorption from my diet. But if, as I suspect--and as Wrangham believes--the differing potential calorific effects of cooked and raw food are “substantial”, then the degree of calorie availability should vary according to how broken up or well cooked a food is. To this end, I chop and grind my food as little as possible before cooking it, and I cook it as lightly as I may for it to be tasty. It’s too early for me to tell whether this makes a difference; but I find these days I can eat many more calories a day than I used to, without putting on weight. Of course, the reason could be something else entirely--time will tell.

As I’ve mentioned before, many studies find that food has less calorific effect the less it is processed. But, unfortunately, apart from Wrangham’s studies, little research has been done on the calorific differences between cooked and raw food, as such. Food labels that mark a difference (for example on rice) do so on the basis of calculations from calorimetric tables rather than on the basis of digestive tests. This is particularly true of meat–the meat industry doesn't fund research into the matter, because there's no profit angle. Nevertheless, I find myself choosing types of meat that can be cooked lightly, such as rump steak, chicken breast, and liver. I try to avoid overcooking meat, as so easily happens in the oven or slow cooker.

Every variety of food on the market would have to be studied at different cooking levels for a picture of what is at stake to emerge . For the moment, we have Wrangham’s estimate of what is at stake, and it is mind-boggling:

“The next wave of research will decide how profound the effects of cooking are. My best guess, based on studies of specific foods, is that the increase in net calorie gain from cooking will prove to be in the region of 25%–50%. That is only a guess, but I am confident it will be much higher than 10%.” (Wrangham, Interview in Discovery Magazine, 2011)

Wow. If anything deserves reading twice on this thread, surely that is it.

I am embarking on a week of a family reunion, and then have a week home before off again for two weeks.
I have seriously been thinking about what you are posting here and am willing to make myself a test subject. For the week I am home, I was thinking of keeping my breakfast the same, coconut oil and coffee with heavy weight cream, then lunch be raw nuts, brazil, cashews or macadamias, what ever I can get, and dinner be a close to raw as possible while still feeding my DH palatable food for him.
I was also wondering what the difference would be with roasted, unsalted nuts and roasted, salted nuts and Dry roasted unsalted and salted nuts for lunch. If I can stand it, I could try those when I get home from my travels.
Have you done something like this? Also, do you eat the nuts until you are full or do you limit them somehow- carbs or calories? And may I post my daily findings here or do you want me to start another thread?

Yes, that is amazing!
Thank you for doing all this research and for sharing.


I'm still going to keep my nut intake on the smallish side though. I can easily way overeat them....raw or roasted!

Adventures in dried fruit

A large jar of dried apricots stood in my kitchen, like an orange temptation. It had been there since before I started my diet, and I prided myself that it remained nearly full. Occasionally, when low-carb eating turned my entrails to concrete, I’d risk eating four or five of the little chaps; but I was afraid to eat more, in case the carbs and sugar in them wreaked havoc. But how remarkable, I often thought, that they never went off. My adventures with nuts had me intrigued by foods that resist decomposition; might these dried apricots do the same in the body?

When I reached my target weight, I gave the jar of dried apricots a longing glance. “You know what?” I said to myself, “Those would go down very nicely”.

Maintenance afforded me freedom to experiment, to take a chance or two with my weight. So I reached for the jar and unscrewed the lid. I didn’t overdo it. I ate 300 grams of dried apricots that day and nothing else, in three 100g lots. That amounted to 116 carbs but only 510 calories. The next morning the scale was down by 1.25 lb. Phew! I then tried something more ambitious. Could I get away with adding that amount of dried apricots to a day’s nuts? After all, I now aimed to maintain weight, not to lose it: I had leeway, did I not? The next day I ate 300g of dried apricots with 204g of mixed nuts. It felt like a feast, because dried fruit and nuts go together like ecstasy on toast. Together they totalled 137 carbs and 1776 calories, both well above my previous gain line of 38 carbs and 1450 calories. Unfortunately, the scale was up the next day by 1.5 lb.

But I decided to persist. I'm glad I did.

The following day, I ate 300g of prunes. They produced a 0.5 lb weight loss, despite the 120 carbs. Next I tried a mix of dried fruits with my nuts--o bless the day. I ate 100g dried apricots, 100g raisins, 100g prunes, and 204g mixed nuts (three lots of 68g), totalling 179 carbs and 1791 calories. I was nervous; but the next day the scale was DOWN by 0.5 lb. I became excited.

Of course, I knew that weight fluctuates of its own accord from day to day; but the net result of my four days experimenting with dried fruit was a loss of 0.75 lb--in maintenance terms, a bullseye. Encouraged, I continued to eat dried fruit and nuts together in these sorts of quantities. Sometimes I ate fruit and nut as a snack; but when I could I ate nothing but fruit and nut for whole days. Slowly but surely, and to my astonishment (and joy, because I love dried fruit), it emerged that not only could I safely eat dried fruit on maintenance, but I could also, if I chose, eat quite a lot of it. So I began to increase the amounts.

In one experiment, I ate dried fruit and nuts (and the occasional coffee or banana with cream) and nothing else for a week. I wanted to see how far I could push the quantities. The carb counts per day were 199, 529, 286, 166, 182, 323, and 246. Calorie counts ranged from 2145 to 3640. At the week’s end I weighed 0.25 lb less than at the beginning, effectively the same as before. By now this didn’t surprise me–in fact, if I hadn’t expected it, I wouldn’t have risked it--because I’d already experimented safely with single days of fruit and nut. But it showed I could add dried fruits to my diet with confidence, despite their being packed with natural sugary carbs. Apart from dried apricots, my favourites are dates, dried figs, and dried pears. Raisins are OK with peanuts. Prunes, dried apple, and dried peach I can happily live without. Fortunately, I can buy these foods cheaply at a warehouse in a nearby town.

*

The discovery of my second "magic food" marked the moment I first allowed myself to become optimistic about maintenance. Against all expectation, I was now free to eat two of my favourite snack foods, nuts and dried fruit--the one stuffed with fat, the other with sugar. Had the world turned upside down?

Eating what doesn't rot

What happens when fruit is dried? In my opinion, its sugar crystals are rearranged in some way when divested of liquid, just as a portion of starch in some foods--potato, for example--becomes less digestible (retrogrades) when dried. You can’t heat, dry, or freeze plant matter without affecting its chemical structure. Dehydrating fruit removes the potential source of its decomposition—that’s why we do it. For the opposite reason, we cook food in water. A food that's dissolved or partly dissolved in water before we consume it, such as fruit juice, will digest much more readily, as Heaton’s experiments, among others, showed. And food will digest more quickly the softer it is, as Wrangham’s experiments showed.

“Don’t eat anything that doesn't rot,” warned Michael Pollan. Were I less concerned about weight, I might agree with Pollan that fresh is best. But fresh fruit also oxidises quickest--that cut apple left on the plate--and ripe fruit the quickest of all. When we eat a fresh fruit, the sugar in its juice will be absorbed straight into our bloodstream, though fibre will modify the effect. The sugars contained within the fabric of fruit do not give themselves up so easily: the fabric must be broken down before that sugar is released. Dried fruits do not contain juice; drying or dehydration serves to more tightly trap the sugars inside the plant-cell walls.

A piece of dried fruit is a tough little customer: he enters our digestive system determined to resist all attack. Cut open a dried date and regard its inner lining–it looks almost like bark. That lining is made of fibres such as cellulose and lignin, which take considerable chewing just to get down the throat (I eat hard dates, not the soft sticky ones). So I believe the drying process makes fruit more resistant to digestion. If we look at the grams involved rather than the density of the carbs, dried fruits are light compared to fresh fruit. Five dried apricots are lighter than five fresh apricots; and if a substantial part of the former’s fibre is so resistant to digestion that the body has no choice but to excrete it, the weight-loss advantage of fresh fruit over dried is obliterated right there.

When we preserve dried fruit by dehydrating it or treating it with oils or sulphurs, etc., we add to the fruit’s defences against decomposition. Perhaps such preserving counts as food processing, but if it helps me with my weight, it’s a process I welcome.

*

Sugar is meant to be part of the human diet, which is why we enjoy it so much. My discovery that, for me at least, dried fruit is not fattening allowed me to reintroduce the pleasure of sweetness to my diet, making life a notch more worth living into the bargain.

I don't eat till I'm full; if I did I'd eat forever, because I'm hard to fill up.

I eat most things in standard quantities: nuts are usually 68g, because three lots of that used to add up to my daily calorie limit. Even when I am not self-experimenting, I stick to quantities whose effect I can predict from experience.

*

It would be fun to see you do an experiment and post the results here. You have to control the variables tightly, though, or the conclusions will be foggy. It would be confusing to alternate salted, roasted, raw nuts, or whatever, because they all have different variables and you wouldn't be able to be sure what caused the result. Best to stick to one alternative all week.

I love experimenting, but it's very slow, because once you seem to have proved something, you then have to redo the experiment several times to be sure. And real life intervenes, because life isn't a laboratory.

Cheers. Well, it's not really research, just reading a few things. Of course, I tend to be biased in favour of my own views, so I am not that objective.




Hopefully, I will be able to unfold a theory that will apply to a lot of food, not just nuts.

Nut oil experiment

One of the reasons I included nuts in my weight-loss diet from the start was that John Briffa recommends them in Waist Disposal as an excellent low-carb food. From Briffa, Mackarness, and others I'd learned not to fear fat itself, which they assured me was not fattening at all. So when it turned out that, as Briffa had argued, nuts do help with weight loss, I never assumed the explanation ends with the passing of entrapped fat in the stool. What about the fat I did metabolise from nuts? What effect did that have on my weight?

*

I decided to experiment by consuming a day's calories in peanut oil. On my diet, I always tried to eat below my gain line of 1450 calories. The nearest to that in spoonfuls came out at 155ml--1395 calories of the best cold-pressed organic virgin peanut oil. I drank four spoons for breakfast, four for lunch, and three for tea. The next day the scale dropped by 1 lb.

The result pleased me in two ways. Firstly, it confirmed my hypothesis that there's more to nuts' weight-loss effect than the crude passing of lipid fractions in the stool. Secondly, it gave me the option of a healthy cooking oil that doesn't add much calorie value to food.

I have to say, though, that drinking neat peanut oil wasn't the most pleasant experience of my life. Interestingly, it was extraordinarily filling for the quantity, which struck me as a useful characteristic for a dieter's cooking oil; however, in those doses, its repletion factor bordered on the nauseating.

*

A few days later, I repeated the experiment, but with organic virgin walnut oil. 7 spoonfuls (155ml) this time gave 1280 calories. To avoid being sickened, I gulped it down quickly in one morning and one afternoon nose-holding session. Satiety impact was the same as for peanut oil--almost oppressive. The next day, the scale was down by 0.75 lb.

By the way, there was no guarantee I'd lose weight at 1280 calories. 1450 calories may have been my gain line, but I didn't always lose below it, and often I would even gain. So this was a second pleasing result, though walnut oil isn't a cooking oil, and I've not touched the bottle since.

I shall definitely be enjoying my fair share of pistachios on my forthcoming trip to Spain.

Fats experiment

Of course, the weight-loss on the nut oil experiment could have been down to random daily weight fluctuation. Or to the possibility that the amounts involved were physically tiny compared to the usual grams of food I eat in a day.

On the last point, I'd wondered all my life how fats and oils could logically be compared, gram for gram, with bulkier foods for potential weight-gain effect. I could see that butter and toast together might have a weight-gain effect, or deep-fried chips, or cream cake; but could the quantities of fat involved in those stimulate a weight-gain effect on their own, unmixed with carbohydrates?

*

I decided to experiment on the fats I consume most often in my diet, by eating them on their own for a single day and seeing if my weight went up.

I started with butter. I ate three lots of Anchor butter over the day, amounting to 202g, which is 1448 calories. The next day the scale was down by 0.5 lb.

I started the experiment day with gusto, because I love butter; but half-way through the first 68g lot, all pleasure ebbed away, and it became a struggle to finish the butter, as I cut smaller and smaller bits off. A few hours later, I sat down to the second lot with gritted teeth, and only with a sense of physical repulsion did I force myself to finish it. I left the third lot till late as possible and then swallowed it in one gulp in melted form. That triggered a violent shudder, followed by what felt like the pressing of my stomach against my tonsils. I was learning something else on these experiments: that the satiating effects of natural fats are such that the body will physically fight to prevent us eating too much of them. Even I, who am never sick, found myself oppressed by a sense of impending nausea when consuming fats on their own.

*

Next, I drank olive oil. 155ml of cold-pressed extra-vigin olive oil with 1364 calories. The following day, I was 0.5 lb down on the scale.

I had hopes olive oil might be easier to take than the other oils, as there are people in Italy and France who drink a cup of it for breakfast. The first cup wasn't too difficult, but, as the day wore on, the same resistance as before built up in my body. By the time I finished the last shot, the attractively flavoured oil had transformed into a nightmarishly revolting concoction at which my taste buds and very innards cried out in protest.

*

The coconut oil experiment was a disaster. I failed to get through the 155ml and 1336 calories of it that I planned.

The day started out very well. I ate flakes of the coconut in unmelted form, and with great pleasure; they reminded me of the coconut candy nougat that I loved as a boy. However, an hour after the first lot, something close to nausea arose in my chest and refused to go away. I somehow forced down the second lot at midday, but it totally finished me off. From then on, the eating of one flake more coconut oil was out of the question. I hoped that the obstinate sense of oversatiation would die off, but it never did. I physically couldn't finish the experiment.

This was remarkable to me. I am someone who is never full, who can eat just about anything. In terms of ingestive resilience, I have a stomach like a blast furnace. The experiment showed me that the body has its own means of controlling consumption, even that of someone like me, who has boasted that if he went on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, he would knock back fish guts, live grubs, and kangaroo penises without the blink of an eyelid.

I can see that those who put coconut oil in their morning drink to suppress appetite might be onto something.

*

Cream, of course, was quite different. I love cream and was disappointed how little double cream I got for my 1394 calories--a mere 300g. I drank it in three cups over the day, and very nice too. The scale was down the next day by 1.25 lb, giving cream the gold medal.

*

To summarise, my results were as follows:

1394 calories double cream -- down 1.25 lb
1395 calories peanut oil -- down 1 lb
1280 calories walnut oil -- down 0.75 lb
1448 calories butter -- down 0.5 lb
1364 calories olive oil -- down 0.5 lb

My conclusion is that fats are not fattening in themselves. The reason is probably a simple, physical one: they are too low in weight to add much weight to the human body on their own, however calorie-dense. For I cannot imagine a scientific principle on which a food could increase a grown man's weight by more than it weighs itself.

Fat has a fattening effect, I believe, when mixed very intimately with small particles of refined food, as in bakery products. The fats used are probably frankenfats, anyway--not the nice natural ones I eat. If I want to cook with fats or put cream in my coffee, I may do so with little fear for my weight. And the natural fat in foods such as meat and nuts needn't bother me.

I don't eat pistachios much, though they're tasty. Don't like picking them open, and they're quite expensive shelled.

To be fair, there's a lot of good research about nuts: it doesn't seem to matter which nuts, the whole family appears good for us.

I bought my DH a large bag of pistachios last week. He loves them for a snack after dinner. He has been losing along with me, but with all his travels sometimes comes to a stall for a short time. He was home all last week, and with his pistachs after dinner, he lost two pounds and was happy. He does not weigh or measure, just eats until he is done.



I will go to my health food store and find out what kind of nuts I can get raw, eat those for a week and stay on the same kind for the rest of the trial through the salted, etc.

We have peach, nectarine, apple and plum trees in back yard. Now going to get a dehydrator!

This thread is such a fantastic read. This last point is something I've often wondered about!