Clyde, Have you read Barry Sears' book "Enter the Zone"? You and he have many similar recommendations. One major difference, it seems to me, is that he says to cut the "bottom layer of the food pyramid," i.e., breads, grains, and starches, out of one's diet. In contrast, in your book (which I bought on Thursday), it seems to me that you recommend starches pretty heavily. Would you comment on this difference between your recommendations? Ron
ANSWER: A sedentary person does not need any starches. The liver can keep up with the conversion of non-glucose sugars from fruits and vegetables into glucose when a person is not active (either physically or mentally). However, doing serious work with either your muscles or your brain requires more glucose than the liver can produce. For example, during exercise the liver can convert roughly 60 Calories per hour over from fructose into glucose, which is one sixth the amount of total glucose muscle can absorb and less than one tenth the amount of fuel that muscle is burning. At even two times this production rate, it would take the liver over 4 hours to produce enough glucose to recover your muscle glycogen from each hour of exercise. Eliminating all starches in an effort to lose body fat is to misunderstand how muscle and body fat take in fuel: It is dependent on the RATE that carbs enter the bloodstream. If fuel enter the blood at 10 Cal/minute or less, active tissues (everything other than fat cells) get the calories, but faster rates lead to fueling body fat instead because active tissues simply can not absorb calories that fast. Slowing down digestion with vegetable consumption is the centerpiece of a diet targetting muscle fueling. Not because vegetables fuel muscle directly (they do not), but because they slow down the digestion of the starches so that the starches go to muscle. To eliminate starches as the bad guy is to over-simplify what is happening in the body and ignore that the foods you eat WORK TOGETHER to achieve optimum performance and health. The Zone goes to great lengths to show complex interactions between macronutrients, but it does so with a complex description of eicosanoid production and function that is not only inaccurate (scientifically incorrect) but fictional (no basis whatsoever) as shown by two recent scientific reviews published in peer-reviewed journals. While many of my recommendations may overlap with Barry Sears' recommendations, it is my sincere hope that I maintain a constant vigilance towards refreshing my perspective each and ever day that I see new nutrition research come out in the scientific literature. I strive to do this in all my courses, seminars, books and in my own personal life. Dogma, or coming up with complicated theories that are based on fiction, wishful thinking, or marketing is what I think lies at the heart of fad diets in the United States. In fact, I would say that most of the diets on the market agree with my recommendations to some extent. I do not know that I have ever seen a dietary approach that lacks merit altogether. Making sense of what is "right" and "wrong" if you were to read all the books out there would be a daunting task. That is why I do not read any of these books and, instead, focus on reading research papers so that I can tell people what the research and medical community are finding out on an ongoing basis. Note that my book that you obtained recently is on the topic of Endurance Sports Nutrition, which is why it discusses eating starches in balance with other macronutrients (athletes are active and therefor must eat starches in balance with other macronutrients in order to stay healthy and perform well). I would only classify my suggestions in this book to eat whole grains in balance with other macronutrients as being "carb heavy" relative to low-carb diets. My carb recommendations in regular meals actually comes fairly close to those in the recipes in the Southbeach Diet (the recipes that include starches; half of them do not), which I have never heard referred to as a carb heavy diet. The dietary approach I most often recommend is the one developed by Walter Willet at Harvard; do a search for the "Harvard Food Pyramid" and you will see a simple eating scheme based NOT on eliminating or loading up on any one macronutrient, but rather DISTINGUISHING between tye TYPES of carbs and fats (refined carb and saturated fats being worse than whole grain carbs and unsaturated fats).
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