By Dr Michael Fenster | Published on October 28, 2017
You put in the time and endure the pain of exercise because it makes you feel and look better. You do it today to create a longer life tomorrow.
And a big part of this is the belief that expending more calories than you eat will improve your exercise prowess and the lean muscle mass you need to achieve your goals.
However, this simple quantitative formula could be wrong, no matter how trendy it is, because nature’s delicate balance is much more complex than just simple arithmetic, and there’s no telling how your body will treat the same stimulus, be that exercise or foods.
You need only look at research in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, which found that rodents that didn’t react positively to exercise had 360 unique genes that were responding differently in their heart-muscle cells alone. These genes provide the code for many of the same proteins found in your heart, so it’s clear that the interplay of genes, environment and nutrition is far more complex than adding up and subtracting.
So despite the nutritional chessboard in front of us, many people continue to try to solve the problem with the draughts approach by reducing health to the sum of calories taken in versus the number of calories expended. Sadly, for true health, not all calories are created equal.
– RELATED: Does Counting Calories Really Work? –
How your food has changed
Back when KFC was nothing more than a glint in Colonel Sanders’ eye, a chicken was a chicken the world over, but that’s not the same today. Chicken can be a highly-processed, reconstituted, artificially-flavoured nugget or a free-range, organically-raised heritage breed bird, and these minor details make all the difference to your health. But it doesn’t stop there because the differences between diets can be just as troublesome.
A paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at three popular diets that were all very different, except for the total number of calories eaten, which was the same for all of them. The results were shocking.
Each of the diets had varying effects on the basal metabolic rate (metabolism), markers of inflammation and risk factors for the development of metabolic syndrome (a precursor to diabetes). The net result might be the same: weight loss, but on the inside you could be considerably worse off.
But what happens if you eat mostly healthy organic foods and switch to the zero calorie offerings, like fizzy drinks and sweeteners that are so popular on today’s supermarket shelves? Well, research in the journal Nature found that artificial sweeteners profoundly impact the bacteria that live in your digestive tract and can lead to low-level inflammation, obesity and a significant risk for developing diseases like diabetes. So even though these chemicals have no calorific value, they do have a huge effect.
What we are learning through science today is what great chefs have known since the first mammoth burger was grilled – the quality of the ingredients counts. Fortunately, science is showing us the dark side of ignoring this code of culinary conduct. So make sure you choose wisely.
Dr Michael Fenster is a chef and admired cardiologist who wrote The Fallacy Of the Calorie.
