A recent article came out reporting on a study that found no link between saturated fat intake and heart disease. The study they are referring to is a Meta-Analysis, where researchers find a number of studies on a topic and come up with a general consensus on the major findings  the chosen studies have in common. This particular analysis involved 21 studies, looking at a total of 347,747 subjects, followed for 5 to 23 years. Basically each of these studies followed these people for many years, tallied how many of them died from heart disease, and then checked to see if those people ate more saturated fat than the others. In other words, they looked to see if saturated fat intake was associated with heart disease. The authors said that in this specific study, there is “no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD (coronary heart disease) or CVD (cardiovascular disease).”

These findings are interesting but don’t really say much. First of all, when researchers do a meta-analysis, how do we know what studies they excluded from their analysis. Surely there are more than 21 studies looking at the relationship between saturated fat and heart disease. Secondly, we must assume that the studies chosen were critically analyzed for common flaws in the designs of these experiments, and those with errors in their design were not chosen for the meta analysis.
Finally, and most importantly, the study simply looked for an association. Not a cause. If  this study did in fact find a relationship between saturated fat intake and heart disease, it means nothing about what caused the heart disease. People who eat more meat may be less educated or exercise less; they may eat less fruits and vegetables or smoke more cigarettes. Identifying saturated fat as the culprit is not possible.

Which brings us back to the article. How is the average person supposed to know what is healthy  when daily articles give conflicting advice. And who knows what obscure study a researcher chose for a story, and whether the researcher is qualified to analyze the story accurately. The Doctor in the article says “the thinking on diet and heart health is moving away from a focus on single nutrients and toward ‘dietary patterns.’” Maybe this advice is more practical, since after all, foods are made of many nutrients, and focusing on one of them may lead to trouble.

When using PhotoCalorie to monitor your diet,  focus less on the individual nutrients and more on the pictures. Maybe try increasing your fruits and vegetables, and decreasing your big macs and lollipops!

Larry Uncategorized

I just enjoyed reading Michael Pollan’s new mini-book entitled Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.  I will save you yet another review of the book—Instead, I’ll just mention that it is always helpful to have a two-hour refresher course in age-old common-sense eating practices.

Pollan’s book is divided into three sections, based on his oft-quoted mantra: “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.”  Among the sections, there are 64 two-paragraph rules of thumb, including:

• “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,”
• “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle,”
• “Eat only foods that will eventually rot,”
• “Eat mostly plants, especially leaves,”
• “Don’t overlook the oily little fishes,”
• “Eat all the junkfood you want as long as you cook it yourself,”
• “Buy smaller plates and glasses,”
• “Server a proper portion and don’t go back for seconds,” and my favorite
• “Break the rules once in a while.”

Pollan is careful to not come off as dogmatic or prescriptive: as you can see in the last rule of his book, following the rules includes breaking the rules, as long as you are conscious of how you break them and how often you break them.

Given how short Food Rules is, it is worth the read.  Before jumping into the book, however, equip yourself with tools that will help you gauge yourself.  Spend a week building a food journal in PhotoCalorie.  Once you have a record of your eating habits, take the quick read through Pollan’s book.  If you find any inspirational rules, take a quick look at your food journal for the past week: do you see anything concrete in the pictures you took that you would like to do more of or avoid in the future?  After completing the book, spend the next week reflecting as you keep your PhotoCalorie food journal.  Hopefully, combining the rules with a regular food journal can help you move toward or maintain a healthy diet.

Adam Nutrition and Weight Loss, iPhone app

Ever wondered what to eat before heading to the gym for your daily workout? The answer to this question depends on what your goal is as well as who you ask. Looking to run the next Boston marathon? You should probably eat a balanced meal, high in complex carbs, to try to build up your stored glycogen. But for the rest of us, does it even matter what we eat?

Before we answer this question, we must first review some basic physiology. Let’s look at carbohydrate metabolism. When a person eats carbs, whether they drink a Coke or eat some brown rice, the starches and sugars are broken down into glucose, eventually increasing the glucose present in your blood. Cells all over the body can use this glucose for energy and nutrition. Shortly after this spike, your pancreas notices this change in blood sugar and releases a hormone called insulin, which essentially causes the liver, muscle and fat tissue to take up the glucose, and brings the blood sugar back to healthy levels. The speed with which this happens is based on the glycemic index of the food, which measures the effect of carbohydrates on blood sugar. Coke would cause a larger, more immediate rise in blood sugar, leading to a speedier release of insulin. Brown rice on the other hand, has a lower glycemic index. The glucose would enter the blood stream at a slower rate, leading to a more gradual release of insulin. Protein also leads to an increase in insulin, but to a much smaller extent.

When insulin is released, the body goes into storage mode. Glucose from the blood is being stored in your fat cells, your liver cells, and your muscle cells. This is precisely the opposite of what you want to happen in your fat cells while you are exercising. Ideally our fat cells will release their stored energy into the blood stream as fatty acids and glycerol. The fat cells  would shrink in size, causing us to shrink in size as well.

In an article published last month, German researchers tested this hypothesis. They looked at the effect of exercise during a fasting state and 30 minutes after a carbohydrate-rich or protein-rich meal. During each scenario, the researchers measured the blood glycerol and insulin levels in each subject. As illustrated in the figure below, when the subjects ate bread 30 minutes before exercising, their insulin spiked, inhibiting the fat cells from being broken down and used as energy (the line with solid squares). When they ate pork 30 minutes in advance (line with empty triangles), there was also an insulin spike, but a much smaller one.

The researchers explained the results saying fat cells being broken down during exercise is “virtually abolished by a small carbohydrate-rich meal when ingested shortly before exercise.” In summary, to burn the most fat during moderate intensity exercise, try not to eat anything a few hours before you head to the gym, but if you do eat, stay away from those Cheetos!

You can use PhotoCalorie to help monitor this. If you exercise around the same time every day, check out your journal to see if you have been eating carbs right before your workouts, as they can decrease how much fat you burn while you are exercising, and may lead to less weight loss overall. Hope this helps you lose weight more efficiently!

admin Exercise

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, weight loss is the result of following a simple formula. To get rid of excess body fat, all you have to do is “use up more calories than you take in. Since one pound equals 3,500 calories, you need to reduce your caloric intake by 500—1000 calories per day to lose about 1 to 2 pounds per week.” In other words, if you eat as many calories as you burn, you will maintain your weight, and if you tip the scale either way, your weight will fluctuate. But how do we know when we are in “energy balance?” How do we know how many calories we burn, or eat, and how do we know the estimates are precise enough to keep us in at or below our energy balance?

First of all, how is anyone supposed to know if they are eating 500 less calories every day? If you eat at a restaurant, how do you know how many tablespoons of oil are in the soup you ate? One extra tablespoon of oil is already an extra 120 calories. You can use various online tools to help you, but that implies that the portion size you are eating is the same as the one online, or that you can figure out the difference. A cup of pasta with a quarter-cup serving of alfredo sauce according to caloriecount.com is 320 calories(spaghetti, alfredo sauce) . If we change the portions slightly, to 1.2 cups of pasta with .4 cup serving of alfredo sauce, we end up cosuming 445 calories. Even the most experienced dietitian would have trouble determining if their lunch had these extra 225 calories in it.

One can argue that when you are on a weight loss diet, you should limit the amount of times you eat at restaurants and focus on home cooked or pre-packaged foods or places that offer nutrition information to make sure you know what you are eating. However this may not help either. According to an article in the New York Times, menus in fast-food restaurants or on the packages of frozen foods are sometimes not accurate. When researchers tested food served in 29 chain restaurants and 10 frozen meals, they found that their calorie contents averaged significantly more than was listed. Some differences were startling: Denny’s grits, listed at 80 calories, turned out to contain 258.

The Food and Drug Administration allows a 20% margin of variation in the calories listed to the actual calories. So that 390 calorie Lean Cuisine Jumbo Rigatoni with meatballs you just bought may allowably be closer to 470 calories, not to mention the recent findings that the discrepancy may be even larger. It seems nearly impossible to accurately maintain this recommended 500 calorie reduction.  Perhaps setting more measurable goals is in order.

We think there is value in using pictures to keep track of what you are eating.  PhotoCalorie can help you estimate the calories and nutrients you are consuming, while keeping a photographic journal as well, allowing you to set more concrete goals, such as ‘reduce the number of fast food meals per week from 5 to 2.,’ or ’stop eating dessert on the weekends.’

There is no substitute for keeping track of your approximate caloric intake.  When setting goals, however, it might benefit you more to take measurable steps in directions that you can control.  We hope that PhotoCalorie can help you do this–let us know how we can help!

Larry Nutrition and Weight Loss, Uncategorized

We’ve been amazed with the number of downloads since releasing PhotoCalorie. The 10 most popular queries are (in order from most to least): Banana, Bread, Apple, Chocolate, Coffee, Peanut butter toast, Spinach, Special k fruit, Orange juice, and Glass of Coopers Pale Ale.

Vince iPhone app

According to this recent article from Reuters Health menus with calorie information causes people to eat fewer calories. The article references this recent study from Yale. In this study, they randomly divided 303 people into three menu groups: 1) no calorie information, 2) calorie information, and 3) calorie plus recommended daily total (2,000 calories/day) and tracked their calorie intake for a single day. They concluded that “Calorie labels on restaurant menus impacted food choices and intake; adding a recommended daily caloric requirement label increased this effect, suggesting menu label legislation should require such a label.” Although, they acknowledge that this is a research setting, it’s not clear how these results would translate into the real-world given the small sample size and that they only tracked people for a single day. The results do not appear particularly compelling to warrant a change in the law. In my experience, usually the large population diversity will simply wash out small differences between different groups (250 few calories in the group with calorie plus daily total – that’s less than two Oreo cookies!).

A bigger question is what if you don’t care about tracking calories, because you are following the Atkins diet and instead need to track carbohydrates? What if you have high blood pressure and need to cut out excess sodium? What if you are diabetic and care about the sugar content? Even if the menu labels prove to be a good idea, they won’t contain all of the information that people might want to see.

That’s where we think PhotoCalorie can help. You can take a “fake” picture and enter the description of what you are thinking about eating and see the basic nutrition content for that meal. If you decide not to eat the food after learning the facts, then you can always delete it from your journal.

Give us some feedback – do you think menu labels would change what you eat?

Vince menu labels

Happy New Year! With that comes the typical New Year’s resolution which is often to lose weight or try to be healthier in general. We think that PhotoCalorie can help you easily keep a food journal and who knows – maybe you’ll see an interesting pattern in what you eat, which will inspire you to make a change.

We hope you enjoy the app – you can get it for free here.

Vince iPhone app

After only 5 days, our first app was approved by Apple.  I was expecting at least a two week review process based on everything that I’ve heard, so hopefully this is a good sign that Apple likes the app.  We are releasing the app on 1/1/10 for free.  We have drastically simplified the process of keeping a food journal by incorporating a Google-like search of our vast database to calculate the nutrition content of your diet.  While we strive to be as accurate as possible, some values may be off (if you find an error – please let us know!).

We hope you enjoy it and, by all means, please let us know how you are using it and what you think by emailing us at: info@photocalorie.com.

Vince iPhone app

What a ridiculous, naive question that is. Does exercise help you lose weight? Common sense tells us it does, but the scientific literature seems to have difficulty confirming this. Gretchen Reynolds of the New York times’ well blog wrote an article about this exact question.

The first study she cites is one published in the British journal of sports medicine . For 12 weeks 58 sedentary overweight/obese subjects underwent supervised aerobic exercise at 70% of their max heart rate 5 days a week, for 12 weeks. They were instructed to not decrease their food intake.

Since a pound of fat contains about 3500 calories, these people should all lose about 8.5 pounds (12 weeks *5 days a week * 500 calories burnt per day = 30,000 / 3500 calories per pound). At the end of the study the mean loss in body weight was 3.3kg, or 7.2 pounds, which is almost what we predicted. But this value is misleading. After the results were compiled, the researchers divided the subjects into 2 groups: responders and nonresponders. The nonresponders (45% of all the subjects) only lost an average of 0.9kg or 1.98 pounds, including some who gained weight. Therefore, and I quote, “based on body weight alone, exercise could be regarded as ineffective and futile for the non-responders (and even counterproductive for the weight gainers).”

As you can see, for some of these people the exercise program worked beautifully. But for 46% of them, they lost less than 2 pounds, and 17% gained weight burning 500 calories a day.

Since each exercise session was monitored and measured, the results can not be blamed on poor adherence.

But they can be blamed on the diet. Throughout this entire paper, they only mention diet once, and all it says is “Subjects were instructed to not restrict their energy intake during the study.” No self reporting. Nothing. These results would be so much more intriguing if we knew they were eating similar amounts. Maybe the “non-responders” simply ate a lot more than the responders.

The New York times reported this study as support for the idea that exercise does not help you lose weight, which, according to a plethora of studies, may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. However in my opinion this study provides no evidence one way or the other.

Despite not losing weight, the non-responders did improve their blood pressure and reported a more positive mood throughout the study.

Larry Exercise

A few days ago I posted a more recent study by Chris Gardner comparing various popular diets. It was a big study and done very well, but it was based strictly on self reporting. Ideally all the subjects should live in a metabolic ward and be monitored 24 hours a day and fed exactly the right amount. But as you can imagine, that would be extremely expensive. A more affordable way to check for low-carb diet adherence can be found in your toilet.

When someone goes on a very low carb diet, their liver produces something called ketone bodies which can provide energy in place of the depleted glucose source from your diet. Ketones can be detected in the urine (called ketonuria) and therefore provide a reliable way to ensure that someone is following a low carbohydrate diet.

In a study published in Nutrition and Metabolism in 2004, researchers compared an energy restricted low carbohydrate diet to an energy restricted low fat diet monitoring ketonuria every day to make sure the low carb dieters were not cheating. The low carb diet was supposed to eat less than 10% of their diet from carbohydrates and the low fat diet was supposed to follow the national recommendations (%carb:fat:protein = 60:25:15).

Since there is a lot of variation in response to diet, the researchers also decided to compare each persons response to both diets. This is called a crossover trial. This approach allows them to compare the diets in 2 ways: between groups, and within each group between the individuals of that group. They then did further analysis to see if the order of each diet mattered.

Each group was given a detailed list of what foods they could eat and ordered to keep a food diary, and their urine was tested each day for ketonuria.

The men followed the diet for 50 days and women for 30. Between groups, men lost more weight and fat. Within groups when each individual was in their low carb phase of the diet, both men and women lost more weight and fat as well when compared to the low fat phase. All this despite the low carb group eating reportedly more calories!! (1855/day vs 1562/day in the low fat group).

Despite this being a short term study involving only about 30 people, i think it provides powerful support for the efficacy of a low carb diet for weight and fat loss. The researchers took every precaution possible to make sure that the low carbohydrate group stuck to their diet. The fact that they reported eating more calories per day is also astounding. One can claim the low carb group inaccurately reported their calorie consumption. But without any evidence that this is true, you cannot assume that their reporting was any less accurate than the low fat group.

These results also beg the question: is a calorie actually just a calorie? Most nutritionists will tell you a calorie is a calorie and you cannot disobey the 1st law of thermodynamics, but this study (along with many others to come in the future) beg to differ.

Larry Nutrition and Weight Loss