What Apocalypse Would It Take To Get You To Stop Counting Calories?
The Food Matrix is much more important to your health and guess what? Calorie counts can be off by *more* than 20%
If restrictive dieting and calorie counting results in more weight gain, what on earth should people do?
The more I learn about food processing, labeling, and nutrition, the more I realize, we can’t count on the printed food label to tell us the most important information: how the food will nourish us, and what effect it will have after we consume it.
I just suffered a now-rare (for me) IBS attack because, I believe, I consumed mislabeled packaged food. I consumed a nut snack from Trader Joe’s that I believe contained un-labeled artificial sweetener: and plenty of it. It wasn’t on the level of a child with a peanut allergy being given a snack that contained peanuts that didn’t appear on the label, but it could have been.
I avoid artificial sweeteners because they are almost certain to knot me up in agony within a few hours.
That’s where I’ve been for the past three days: Happy Mother’s Day! At least today I can walk pain-free.
But …
Ingredient disclosure on packaged foods is one thing. It isn’t accurate and the law allows companies to leave many different potentially harmful ingredients off labels.
We’ve tended to trust basic calorie counts. But are these reliable as well? No, they aren’t.
I had already discovered that, by law, U.S. food manufacturers are allowed to have a 20% variance in calorie counts on every package.
I also thought that calorie counts were determined by combusting or burning the actual food, then measuring the amount of energy that was released.
That may have been true back in 1896 when Wilbur Atwater invented the calorimeter for food and devised the system of calorie counts for basic food groups that has been used worldwide since that time, nearly 130 years.
Today, the amount of energy that Atwater measured for protein, carbohydrate, fat and alcohol (yes, considered an ‘energy producing’ ‘nutrient’) back before the turn of the 20th century is the same formula that’s used to mathematically calculate calorie counts on packaged foods.
According to Anresco, a lab that provides FDA-compliant food labels, “Most labels can be generated using a database calculation method. We use a computerized program called Genesis R&D to calculate the nutrient values based on the recipe we’re provided.”
Genesis R&D says it can “analyze your recipe or formula for 172 nutritional components, including mandatory and voluntary label nutrients, amino acids, diabetic exchanges, and MyPlate food groups.”
Not one of those detailed components gives you the real information you need to know to help you to decide what to eat, when, and how much. The food labeling system along with “calorie counts” misleads us into thinking food can be broken down into components and “recombined” into other foods which are as nutritious or even more nutritious than their original components.
That isn’t true, and it’s a major reason why people read labels and think they are consuming good nutrition when the opposite is true.
The Food Matrix
What kinds of foods don’t come with nutrition labels? Whole foods: fruits, vegetables, and simple proteins.
The form that food takes is its matrix.
For example, broccoli has a fibrous matrix that includes water. An apple contains fiber, fructose, and water. Mayonnaise and hollandaise are emulsions. Jell-O is a gel, and orange juice is a liquid.
As most of us know with common sense, it’s unlikely that anyone would ever become obese eating only broccoli, green beans, and a small amount of lean protein.
But the reason for that isn’t “low calories.” It’s the matrix of those foods and how our bodies digest them, as compared to what happens when foods are processed and recombined.
Eating a whole apple, including the fibrous matrix of the fruit and skin, is not nutritionally the same as drinking the same amount of calories in the form of apple juice.
Processing Destroys Natural Food Matrices
As chefs and nutritionists regularly point out, it’s impossible for home cooks to exactly recreate highly-processed factory foods at home. While “copycat” recipes of favorite fast or convenience foods are widely available, these “copycats” can’t exactly duplicate their mass-produced inspirations.
More importantly for our health and nutrition, home cooks can’t duplicate the industrial food processes that result in shelf stability, transportability, easy packaging, and the myriad other qualities that Big Food imparts to its products.
The motive behind these processes is not to provide good nutrition to customers.
The primary motive behind the entire U.S. food system is to deliver profit to select owners of Big Ag, Big Food, and the banks that invest in their businesses.
It’s doubtful that these businesses or investors deliberately wanted people to become fat, sick, and nearly dead while consuming their food. But when they discovered the rapidly-growing problem in the 1980s and 1990s, these producers were more than happy to invent new products and even new product categories to capitalize on the growing concern about childhood and adult obesity and metabolic disease. The keyword here is “capitalize” on the concern — any time research uncovers a health problem, Big Food and Big Ag are “on it” in the sense they instantly develop products to be marketed to “solve” the problem.
But of course, all of the foods that have been developed and sold in this way don’t solve the nutrition and obesity crisis at all. They just make it worse.
The matrix of food influences how we digest our food.
And, it’s been known for years that when actual foods are consumed by living humans, the calorie counts diverge markedly from Atwater’s 19th century calculations — that form the basis of every calorie count on every label in every supermarket in the U.S. as well as other parts of the world.
In the case of almonds, the difference is significantly more than the 20% variance allowed by the USDA. In 2012, a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that “The Atwater factors, when applied to almonds, resulted in a 32% overestimation of their measured energy content.”
Almonds contain fiber. Some of this information learned by testing various fiber-rich foods has found its way into insidious “net carb” marketing and diet recommendations.
The bottom line is: highly-processed foods cannot form the primary basis of anyone’s nutrition and result in good health.
It can’t happen because our bodies are evolved to consume and get nutrition from real food: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and protein. Traditional food preparation and preservation processes: grilling, broiling, boiling, and fermenting, along with basic food preservation like freezing or canning, can result in nutritious food.
The processes used by the industrial food system, by their definition, cannot.
Fiber isn’t good in food because it reduces carbs so you have fewer “net carbs.” You can’t eat ten packages of Hot Pockets per day and then drink a glass of Metamucil and expect to be healthy.
If you’re tired of counting calories and feel it is ineffective, your body is telling you something.
And that something would be the truth.
Start learning more about the matrices of real food and try as many new, real fruits and vegetables as you can this week. See how you feel.
Your body is a much more accurate measure of nutrition quality than any food label.
Sources
Aguilera, Jose Miguel. “The food matrix: implications in processing, nutrition and health,” Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 10 September 2018, url: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30040431/
Anresco Laboratories. “Nutritional Labeling Services,” url: https://go.anresco.com/nutritional-labeling-2
ESHA Research. “Genesis R&D Food Formulation & Labeling Software,” url: https://esha.com/products/genesis-rd-food-labeling-software
Painter, Jim. “How Do Food Manufacturers Calculate the Calorie Count of Packaged Food?” Scientific American, 31 July 2006, url: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manufacturers/
Shahbandeh, M. “Global health and wellness food market value 2020–2026,” url: https://www.statista.com/statistics/502267/global-health-and-wellness-food-market-value/
Thorning, Tanja, Hanne Bertram, et. al. “Whole dairy matrix or single nutrients in assessment of health effects: current evidence and knowledge gaps,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 17 May 2017, url: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/105/5/1033/4569873