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Thread: Why You're Addicted To Bread, and The Myth Of "Complex Carbohydrates"

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    Arrow Why You're Addicted To Bread, and The Myth Of "Complex Carbohydrates"

    Ever wonder why bread is so delicious? Almost...addictive?

    Ever wonder why, even though you know a thick, juicy steak is coming to your table, you can't keep yourself from demolishing the bread basket (often stuffing yourself with more calories than are in the steak)? It's because metabolically, bread is equivalent to Skittles...and it's addictive in the same way candy is addictive.

    So is cereal. Did you know that Grape Nuts and Bran Flakes give you a bigger sugar rush than pure white table sugar?

    Check out this series of articles:

    Part 1: Why You're Addicted To Bread
    Part 2: Cereal Addiction: Consider Eating The Box Instead
    Part 3: Fat and Glycemic Index: The Myth of "Complex Carbohydrates"

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    Good stuff, Spats. I take it you've read Cordain, Van De Lay and Wolf?
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    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post
    bread is equivalent to Skittles.
    Mmmmm, Skittles.....
    This is the worst pain EVER!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post
    Ever wonder why bread is so delicious? Almost...addictive?

    Ever wonder why, even though you know a thick, juicy steak is coming to your table, you can't keep yourself from demolishing the bread basket (often stuffing yourself with more calories than are in the steak)? It's because metabolically, bread is equivalent to Skittles...and it's addictive in the same way candy is addictive.

    So is cereal. Did you know that Grape Nuts and Bran Flakes give you a bigger sugar rush than pure white table sugar?

    Check out this series of articles:

    Part 1: Why You're Addicted To Bread
    Part 2: Cereal Addiction: Consider Eating The Box Instead
    Part 3: Fat and Glycemic Index: The Myth of "Complex Carbohydrates"
    I like how he compares the bagel to the skittles as if there isn't anything else in there besides the carbs/sugars. Yeah, they have a similar glycemic index, which is worth noting, but he seems to imply that the bagel is no more "healthy" than the skittles, which I would argue with. Not that a bagel is chock full of goodness, but the skittles are pretty much nothing but sugars, whereas the bagel could contain other things such as fiber, a little bit of proteins, or other nutrients useful to your body's function. This guy's articles come off as another example of an oversimplification of a complex system. Whereas he is not completely wrong on any particular point, he neglects to consider the whole picture.

    "My theory, which is supported by the research I’ve seen, is that by maintaining such a diet, our ability to metabolize body fat simply atrophies—because it’s never used! This is why dieters feel so desperately hungry, and why it’s hard to reduce ‘carbohydrate’ (= sugar) intake: we’ve got plenty of energy available in the form of body fat, but our body’s ability to metabolize it has atrophied—so we are metabolically starving in the midst of plenty. It’s like having a pantry full of canned tuna and discovering you’ve lost the can opener."

    This argument wouldn't be necessary if one never got fat in the first place. If we teach moderate carb consumption with a balanced intake of protein, fat, and other dietary needs that matches a person's lifestyle (dictated by caloric consumption based on daily activity levels) starting at an early age, much of our obesity problems would diminish. People just eat way too much in reference to their activity levels. If you were eating in a way to match your activity level, your body wouldn't be converting carbs/fat intake to stored fat to begin with.

    EDIT to add: My last paragraph is an oversimplification as well, but it is a place to start, then choose which types of foods that match your needs once you've determined your caloric needs. There are many different successful diets out there, which is evidenced by the lack of consistency in the field of nutrition and why the field is changing so much and has been debated forever. Before we could ship foods all over the world and process them in so many different ways, people were surviving locally on the foods that were available in their regions just fine and it could be highly variable from region to region. I think part of the problem is that there are so many choices in our time which makes it so easy to overeat and choose unhealthy diets.
    Last edited by jon turner; 01-11-2011 at 04:05 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rontele View Post
    Good stuff, Spats. I take it you've read Cordain, Van De Lay and Wolf?
    I've read Cordain's scientific papers. I stay away from nutrition books, because the field is changing so quickly right now that anything in a book is in grave danger of being obsolete. I base my research primarily off of Google Scholar.

    (Note: Some blogs occasionally have good pointers to studies I'd miss otherwise, and interesting syntheses of knowledge. Off the top of my head I'm thinking of the amazing Denise Minger at rawfoodsos, Natural Messiah, Animal Pharm, Whole Health Source, and Free The Animal.)

    And the paleo guys aren't immune to bullshit reinterpretation either. Here's my favorite example: "Even Loren Cordain Whiffs It Sometimes."

    There's a lot more at gnolls.org besides articles on diet, which is only the first step in reclaiming our human heritage: I have no interest in doing another paleo blog about "Look how much weight I've lost, see, here's me with my shirt off." But I'm on a dietary research kick right now, so that's what you're getting

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    Quote Originally Posted by jon turner View Post
    but the skittles are pretty much nothing but sugars,
    There is fruit juice in skittles, thank you...

    INGREDIENTS:
    SUGAR, CORN SYRUP, HYDROGENATED PALM KERNEL OIL, APPLE FRUIT JUICE FROM CONCENTRATE, LESS THAN 2% - CITRIC ACID, DEXTRIN, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL FLAVORS, GELATIN, FOOD STARCH-MODIFIED, COLORING (INCLUDES RED 40 LAKE, BLUE 1 LAKE, YELLOW 5 LAKE, YELLOW 6 LAKE, RED 40, YELLOW 5, YELLOW 6, BLUE 1), ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C).
    This is the worst pain EVER!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post
    Ever wonder why, even though you know a thick, juicy steak is coming to your table, you can't keep yourself from demolishing the bread basket (often stuffing yourself with more calories than are in the steak)? It's because metabolically, bread is equivalent to Skittles...and it's addictive in the same way candy is addictive.
    No, it's because I'm out, at a restaurant, to eat food that they serve me, and I'm fucking hungry. If they put a basket of roasted broccoli in front of me, I'd eat the shit out of that before my steak came. It just so happens they put bread out, so that's what I eat.
    "fuck off you asshat gaper shit for brains fucktard wanker." - Jesus Christ
    "She was tossing her bean salad with the vigor of a Drunken Pop princess so I walked out of the corner and said.... "need a hand?"" - Odin
    "everybody's got their hooks into you, fuck em....forge on motherfuckers, drag all those bitches across the goal line with you." - (not so) ill-advised strategy

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    I agree about saturated fat being paleo and have a hard time believing that our ancestors didn't gnaw on bones like it was nobody's business.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post
    which is only the first step in reclaiming our human heritage
    Eat a fucking sandwich and get over yourself.
    Quote Originally Posted by Downbound Train View Post
    And there will come a day when our ancestors look back...........

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    Quote Originally Posted by jon turner View Post
    I like how he compares the bagel to the skittles as if there isn't anything else in there besides the carbs/sugars. Yeah, they have a similar glycemic index, which is worth noting, but he seems to imply that the bagel is no more "healthy" than the skittles, which I would argue with. Not that a bagel is chock full of goodness, but the skittles are pretty much nothing but sugars, whereas the bagel could contain other things such as fiber, a little bit of proteins, or other nutrients useful to your body's function.
    Wheat is full of anti-nutrients like WGA and phytate, which binds to vitamins and minerals and actually decreases the nutritional value of what you eat along with it! The only meaningful nutrients in flour are there because the government requires them to be added ("enriched flour") -- because otherwise people die of deficiency diseases like pellagra.

    As far as the rest of your post, you need to read the third article. The first commenter raises exactly your points, and the author responds to them

    Quote Originally Posted by jon turner View Post
    This argument wouldn't be necessary if one never got fat in the first place. If we teach moderate carb consumption with a balanced intake of protein, fat, and other dietary needs that matches a person's lifestyle (dictated by caloric consumption based on daily activity levels) starting at an early age, much of our obesity problems would diminish.
    We've been teaching that for nearly forty years -- and it has been a miserable failure. That approach doesn't work, period. America is fatter and more diabetic than ever despite decades of anti-fat and pro-"complex carb" propaganda -- and the trend started right about the time we decided fat was evil.

    Quote Originally Posted by jon turner View Post
    People just eat way too much in reference to their activity levels. If you were eating in a way to match your activity level, your body wouldn't be converting carbs/fat intake to stored fat to begin with.
    But why do they eat way too much? It's not like people don't know that eating lots of food makes them fat...but they can't help themselves, because they're HUNGRY.

    And why are they hungry? I'll quote the article, because it's spot-on:

    High-GI 'carbohydrates' (sugars), simple or complex, are digested far more quickly than we can burn them for energy, whereupon our bodies convert them into fat and store them as fat—leaving us hungry, even though we are gaining weight!

    Then, we get a transient serotonin high before our blood sugar crashes—meaning that we are chemically as well as metabolically addicted to sugar ('carbohydrates').

    [...]
    Does this situation sound familiar? You're told to take those 'unhealthy' fatty foods out of your diet—and suddenly you're either hungry and miserable, or you're gaining weight uncontrollably. Ever wonder why you don't feel full no matter how many plain bagels, glasses of skim milk, cups of low-fat yogurt, and boxes of fat-free Fig Newtons you eat...yet you still have the compulsion to keep eating?

    Even worse, if this vicious cycle of goes on long enough, you become insulin-resistant, and then diabetic. Isn't this what's happening to all of America? Our 'obesity epidemic' started once we told people to avoid fat at all costs...

    ...and now you know why. It's because by removing fat from your diet, you're turning everything you eat into candy.
    -The Myth Of Complex Carbohydrates

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    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post

    We've been teaching that for nearly forty years -- and it has been a miserable failure. That approach doesn't work, period. America is fatter and more diabetic than ever despite decades of anti-fat and pro-"complex carb" propaganda -- and the trend started right about the time we decided fat was evil.
    I am generally woefully misinformed and only think so far as to not be an alarmist and assume moderation is a decent policy, but I think the trend started about the same time that people stopped doing shit. Our country was built by hard-working, hard-eating men. They spent 14 hours a day actually moving around and ate a ton of food to fuel their work. Technology led to apathy but we kept the same habits. What used to be consumption became overconsumption. Wanna eat biscuits and gravy? Burn it up. Sure, you won't be in marathon shape like a lot of dopes who are only in shape in order to be in shape, but you can plow a field and bang your wife at the end of the day.

    Long story short, I am less concerned with the nuances of food properties and more concerned with what I believe to be a less dubious nexus between health/weight and life choices: exercise.

    Sarcasm aside, am I to believe that if I ate skittles and water for a week, I would be as healthy/unhealthy/feel the same as if I ate bagels and water? It's fun to unlock certain mysteries that one would not find intuitive, but really?

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    I'm always a little concerned when someone comes along and tells me that a staple of the human diet for the past several thousand years is actually bad for me. It seems that, regardless of what I want to eat, some expert on the subject can tell me why its horrible for me and that I'm going to die an unpleasant and probably obese death. Example: This guy warns about how drinking too much water is dangerous.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lonnie View Post
    There is fruit juice in skittles, thank you...
    Nor did he mention the rainbows...

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    Bread doesn't turn my tongue purple like skittles do.

    I eat bread, potatoes, pasta. I don't store them in my body for perpetuity, I destroy it in 2 hours and reload.


    Meat rotting in your colon for days, well that's another topic.


    What's for dinner?
    Johnny's only sin was dispair

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    Fats GOOD.
    Butter GOOD.
    Bacon GOOD.
    T-Bone GOOD.
    Mhhhhhhh.

    (Not pokin fun, I follow a very anti-processed-foods diet. Meat & whole eggs every day, cheese and veggies and fruits. The whole anti-carb/anti-sugar craze is overhyped IMHO, yet it's spot-on for the average fattie. Paleo goes to far against grains imho, are there even any solid human studies that show those evilz 'antinutrients' actually hurt us? That's besides my point though, I do try to keep grains to a minimum just because grains are usually part of highly processed foods. It's the processing that's evil, rather than the product itself. Processing is what strips nutrients from everything we touch, reducing it to its chemically simplest form. We're then forced to fortify with vitamins, minerals, and other crap, but we still don't understand how everything works, so we fortify with the wrong things, remove the healthy nutrients, and add unhealthy aberrations back in. Hmmmm... where do I even want to go with this? Just sayin, eat meat, eat eggs, eat products straight from the farm and you'll be healthy!)

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    I like pizza and beer. I'm not obese or dead. I also like bourbon. I'm still not obese or dead. Spats sounds like he needs to get laid more. Getting laid more is better for you than not eating bagels. I've done the research on this. True story.

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    ^^^

    This
    Johnny's only sin was dispair

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    Quote Originally Posted by toast2266 View Post
    I'm always a little concerned when someone comes along and tells me that a staple of the human diet for the past several thousand years is actually bad for me. It seems that, regardless of what I want to eat, some expert on the subject can tell me why its horrible for me and that I'm going to die an unpleasant and probably obese death. Example: This guy warns about how drinking too much water is dangerous.
    Here's the problem.

    Whole wheat bread IS NOT whole wheat bread.

    The crap you buy at the store labeled "whole wheat bread" is maybe 10% whole wheat, full of sugar, leavening & softening chemicals, fortified with shit we aren't sure we need, not fortified with other shit we most likely need.

    Then there's Whole Wheat Bread, baked at home from 100% whole wheat flour & bran straight from the stone mill, with wheat germ & a bunch of seeds mixed in and water & yeast.

    One is called whole wheat bread, the other IS Whole Wheat Bread, and there's a difference in nutrient profile which makes a difference in health.

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    Bread consumption in France is declining as fast as obesity rates are rising.
    What does that tell you?

    Processed shit is the evil. Bread is fine. I'll keep eating my baguettes thank you.

    (good) Bread, (good) cheese and (good) wine. That's all you need for a healthy diet

    By the way if it has more that 4* ingredients it's not bread

    * Flour, Yeast, Salt, Water

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    My recommendations for good health:
    1) try to have the majority of the food you consume be produced locally (or at least be able to be grown in the local environment with as little additional input as possible - i.e. not hothouses, GMF's, etc);
    2) favour plant proteins over animal proteins, consuming as varied a diet as possible, with consideration to #1;
    3) of #1 and #2, cook it as little as possible, just enough to make it palatable/safe/digestible;
    3) exercise every day. Just walk the dog for a hour, it doesn't have to hurt;
    4) enjoy your treats. Nothing wrong with skittles, or a dram of whiskey, or herbal aroma therapy, now and then;
    5) have fun. Engage in something for that makes you sweat and laugh as often as possible. At least a couple times a week. Preferably for an entire day. Ski, screw, ride, piggy-back your child, etc.

    One size does not fit all, health and beauty execs can blow me, all 'ism's are schisms designed to divide and conquer for some else's benefit.

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    Quote Originally Posted by PNWbrit View Post
    Eat a fucking sandwich and get over yourself.

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    Read the 4-hour body by Tim Ferriss.

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    Quote Originally Posted by gameface View Post
    Read the 4-hour body by Tim Ferriss.

    My rapid weight loss came at 24 days straight of skiing in December, so I already broke one of those rules.





    The 'just say no to drinking carbs' is just wrong. It totally eliminates beer.
    Johnny's only sin was dispair

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    I think the variable is how different people react to different foods. If I ate a bag of skittles I wouldn't feel good, it would make my stomach upset. If eat a bagel I feel good and I dont experience that empty sugary feeling.
    Hello darkness my old friend

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    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Downbound Train View Post
    And there will come a day when our ancestors look back...........

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