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Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

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Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#71

Post by kragen »

shpxnvz wrote: post #60
nitrogen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "more refined" mean in this context, and what makes that bad? In other words, is flour simply ground to smaller sizes, chemically altered to remove certain elements, ...?

Wheat germ is removed from white flour in order to increase shelf-life and rising ability, which removes useful fatty-acids, oils and nutrients as well as fiber and protein. Whole-wheat flour is flour that has not had the germ removed.

Wheat germ was removed from white flour in 1914 too, as pointed out in the original article.

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#72

Post by shpxnvz »

chopsueyar wrote: post #69
shpxnvz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a matter of quantity, not quality. An Apple contains something like 7 grams of fructose. One can of soda contains 25 grams of fructose. According to the National Soft Drink Association, average consumption in the U.S. is nearly two cans of soda per day. (One can per day is enough to add 16 pounds of fat per year) That's roughly equivalent to 7 apples, every day of the year. That's way, way above our actual…

Apples also have fiber attached to their fructose.

I was not disagreeing that fiber is important, only pointing out that even when eliminating any other considerations the difference in quantity is enough to account for the trend.

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#73

Post by mdemare »

desigooner wrote: post #59
mdemare wrote: post #53

The trouble with this subject is that everybody, including commenters in this thread, thinks they already know what the solution is, even before they have a good grasp of the problem. I recommend reading Gary Taubes ("Good Calories, Bad Calories", "Why We Get Fat"), not because of what he thinks that the solution is, but to understand the range of facts that a theory of obesity must explain. When Taubes starts to pro…

I haven't read anything recent from Taubes but is he still peddling the Atkins diet or has he moved on to the Paleo diet?! I find it irritating that Taubes ends up cherry picking data to support his hypothesis. But then I subscribe to the Lyle McDonald-Mark Rippetoe line of thought when it comes to nutrition-fitness ideology. . Edit:If it interests anyone, here's a transcript from a Larry King Live episode hosted by…

You cannot explain obese babies by saying they don't get enough exercise.

Also, you're recommending solutions before you understand the problem. Did Americans suddenly lose all self-control in 1980? And if they did, why?

Getting more exercise, and eating more green vegetables and less sugar is clearly a good idea, but the central mystery - why do people get fat - remains unexplained. We should unravel it.

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#74

Post by anamax »

elptacek wrote: post #20

Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take a slice from loaf of bread baked in the home from 1914 and place it next to a slice of bread from th…

> Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other.

The complete ingredients list for my cup of Quaker Oats from 2011 is "100% Whole Rolled Oats". (Yes, you can buy flavored oatmeal packets that contain other things, but your claim is different.) That's what you get in the big round tubs.

What, exactly, is different about 1914's oatmeal?

Note - saying "they've added lots of stuff" isn't an answer unless you can show that "100%" is wrong. ("Rolled" is a mechanical crushing process and doesn't imply that anything was removed or added.)

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#75

Post by elptacek »

kragen wrote: post #35
elptacek wrote: post #20

Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take a slice from loaf of bread baked in the home from 1914 and place it next to a slice of bread from th…

> Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Have you actually done this? Do you really expect someone else to be able to do it? You've managed to come across as really patronizing but I can't tell if you actually have a point. I'm no expert on milling technology, but I imagine today's flour is finer (just…

No, of course not. I was being metaphorical. However, yesterday when I opened a box of flour that I'd ordered from the internet, I realised that it made me feel kinda snobby. Why do I order flour off the internet? Protein content. Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour#Flour_type_numbers

There's a lot more to flour production than the milling. Or the bleaching. We think of flour as just being "ground wheat" -- turns out, there's plenty of kinds you never see, which have a greater nutritional value than what your standard preprepared-from-grains prepackaged food item is made from. Think of it as the difference between the coffee you buy in the supermarket in tins and the beans you pick up at Intelligentsia or Peets. Prepackaged foods are optimized for profit to the manufacturer, using the cheapest available ingredients.

What are your sources of grains? Specifically, if you taped a USDA Food Pyramid graphic to your refrigerator and kept track of how many servings of each as per those recommendations are you consuming a day? Remember that one sandwich is two servings of grain. (I am NOT endorsing the USDA food pyramid. Just using it as a reference point.) You might even get Mr Taubes to admit that not all grains are equal.

As for extending prepackaged foods with fillers, look for ingredients on the label such as carboxymethyl cellulose, carageenan, guar gum, xanthan gum, agar, pectin or maltodextrin. These things are called stabilizers, thickening agents and bulking agents by the food industry. They are cheap, and some of them are not entirely bad for you, as they contain indigestible fibers, but for the most part, they are nutritionally empty. Real, good food that is made the proper way doesn't need to be thickened, bulked up or stabilized.

As a would-have-been pastry chef and baker, this is a topic somewhat dear to my heart. It's somewhat suspicious that I lived on bread, yogurt, cheese and pasta in CH for 19 months and still lost 65lbs. My hunch -- and it's only a hunch -- is that there's something in our food here in the US that's partly to blame.

Also, my great-grandmother would have used groats, not steamed, rolled quick-cooking oats. With no sugar.

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#76

Post by elptacek »

anamax wrote: post #74
elptacek wrote: post #20

Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. Take a slice from loaf of bread baked in the home from 1914 and place it next to a slice of bread from th…

> Take a cup of oatmeal from 1914 and a cup of Quaker Oats from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other. The complete ingredients list for my cup of Quaker Oats from 2011 is "100% Whole Rolled Oats". (Yes, you can buy flavored oatmeal packets that contain other things, but your claim is different.) That's what you get in the big round tubs. What, exactly, is di…

Whole rolled oats are typically made by having the chaff removed from the groat. Then the groats are parcooked by steaming, rolled flat and sometimes baked. These are your "Old Fashioned Quaker Oats." "Quick-Cooking" varieties are made in a similar way, only the chaff AND the bran have been removed. The bran is the nutritious part.

Around the turn of the century, the US imported most of its oats from Scotland and Canada. These would have been "steel cut oats" with the bran left on them. Rolled oats would have been relatively new in 1914. I have no idea when quick-cooking oats appeared.

So the difference is in what you buy. Think 'pig' versus 'pork' -- to a food scientist, there's a word for the grain in every stage of it's processing. But to us, it's just an oat. It's convenient language for Quaker to put "100% Whole Rolled Oats" on the package, because that's what they are. Are they whole rolled groats with the bran still on them? Or are they whole rolled endosperms, which are mostly the high-calorie starch that the germ uses to become a plant?

BTW, if you love oatmeal as much as I do, you will appreciate slow-cooked oats:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/good-eats/oat-cuisine/index.html

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#77

Post by georgieporgie »

robchez wrote: post #47
georgieporgie wrote: post #22

We spend enormous amounts of mental energy thinking about types and combinations of calories, but not much time burning them. We pay huge signup and monthly fees to gyms that we never find the time to visit, meanwhile we never walk our streets.

Diet >> Gym You burn a lot of calories in a day, the extra little you burn from exercise is moot if you are scoffing down the wrong food.

So we agree, then, that a person should dramatically increase his or her activity level throughout the day (e.g. walk the streets).

However, I'm going to nitpick and say that you're wrong about the gym. Currently, I burn about 1,000 calories on each trip to the gym, every other day. That's a 500 calorie deficit that I'm adding each day. In addition, my body is using additional calories to rebuild muscle, and the additional muscle is consuming calories to maintain itself. It's kind of like compounding interest.

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#78

Post by georgieporgie »

thebooktocome wrote: post #67
georgieporgie wrote: post #22

We spend enormous amounts of mental energy thinking about types and combinations of calories, but not much time burning them. We pay huge signup and monthly fees to gyms that we never find the time to visit, meanwhile we never walk our streets.

The gyms have an economic incentive to make people sign up, but not go to them. It's hardly a failure of people to want to go to the gym but stop, if the gym is purposely designed to be as boring as possible.

if the gym is purposely designed to be as boring as possible.

A gym is precisely as boring as the inside of your head.

I recommend audio books.

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#79

Post by Ratufa »

I think that the overall causes of obesity are fairly complex --- there's not some simple cause one can point to that is "the problem". But, threads like this one and the recent HN thread about Western diets remind me of this set of photos on "what the world eats":

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_137366...

Which provides some evidence that how Americans get their carbs in 2011 is likely very different from how they got their carbs in 1914. For example:

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_137369...

and

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_137374...

Re: Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

#80

Post by Evgeny »

mdemare wrote: post #53

The trouble with this subject is that everybody, including commenters in this thread, thinks they already know what the solution is, even before they have a good grasp of the problem. I recommend reading Gary Taubes ("Good Calories, Bad Calories", "Why We Get Fat"), not because of what he thinks that the solution is, but to understand the range of facts that a theory of obesity must explain. When Taubes starts to pro…

prisoners on a forced 10K calorie diet barely gaining weight

That would be very interesting study to read, do you happen to have a link or any other further information?

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