Yeah, throwing a bunch of greens into a blender is not a great way to consume them. Boiling/steaming is the way to go. The vast majority of vegetables I personally eat are well cooked and mushy.
I used to make green smoothies all the time, even went as far to by an expensive Blentec blender. If you are following Weight Watchers you actually get penalized for blending/juicing vegetables, so I stopped. Normally these are zero point foods. Their justification makes a lot of sense to me:
Man, I wish that chewing and food volume would reduce my hunger.
The only thing that makes me stop feeling hungry is my blood sugar going back up to a normal level.
I'm truly envious if there's actually anybody out there who can eat low-calorie bulky foods and actually feel satisfied by the meal. I just feel bloated but still just as hungry as before eating.
I don't think that only caloric content matters. How satiating do you find a 150-calorie small bag of Doritos compared to three or four grapefruits, with a similar caloric content? For me the answer is "not very."
Grapefruits aren't a good comparison, since Google says a grapefruit has 104 calories.
But if we compare a 150 calorie bag of doritos with 5 large tomatoes (each one being 33 calories), that feels about comparable in terms of satiating me in terms of giving me a break from hunger for maybe 45 minutes.
On the other hand, just large tomatoes does absolutely nothing for hunger. Which is the indication for me that volume is entirely irrelevant. (And why would volume matter? Your body can't turn volume into calories.)
Only problem with 5 large tomatoes is that it leaves me feeling kind of gross/bloated with that much volume. My stomach will literally feel like it protrudes, which is uncomfortable.
My mistake. I got misled by the “serving size” of half a grapefruit (who just eats half?). But volume mattering is pretty well attested and most people have experience with it. Why wouldn’t it? You physically can only fit so much food inside your stomach before it is uncomfortable to continue, no matter the caloric content.
i know exactly what you mean. I can eat like 4 LBS of cucumbers in one sitting and still feel like I could eat a pizza afterwards. when you consume super low calorie foods like cucs and tomatoes, zuchinni, the body actually keeps on counting the calories with incredible accuracy and adjusts your hunger/appetite accordingly. But, I'll say, it does help a little bit and you do get a bit of discount by going with low calorie veggies, it's just not a silver bullet. at the end of the day you'll still consume less calories than you would have: just don't expect one large salad to fill you up. at the end of the day, you still need to go hungry to loose weight or keep it off.
fats don't all do that well on satiety studies. just look at the holz studies. most of the satieting things didn't have much fats in them: potatoes, apples and oranges.
The fiber factor probably plays a big role too. Sometimes juicers take that out. Fiber can make you feel full and it may also play a role in rate of sugar absorption.
Steaming retains more nutrients. Not only does boiling leach nutrients into water that is often discarded, it's easy and common to boil for longer than is necessary to make the item digestible.
Note that some things must be boiled to become safe; pokeweed greens can be boiled (and the water discarded) to reduce alkalinity. The berries, however, are never safe for human consumption.
I really hate this kind of micro-analysis when it comes to health. The human body is really really complicated and getting fixated on things like oxalates is in direct contradiction to longer term studies on overall health that show that eating mostly plants is a good thing.
Depends on the meat. If it’s western raised pork or chicken, they bioaccumulate omega-6 from their feed that the percentage of their fat that’s omega-6 can rivals or exceed that of “vegetable” oils. Ruminants seem to resist this bioaccumulation.
So the wrong meat give you all the same lovely effects of systemic inflammation, paradoxical immune suppression, metabolism suppression, and the pile of strange effects from the metabolites and free radicals. Which normally don’t matter much, but start to do when modern consumption of omega-6’s end up significantly more than historical exposure, all year long.
This is one thing to watch out for in rodent studies involving “fat”. In addition to having a very different relationship to fat than humans, the fat they are given is generally very high in omega-6, often being lard (from western raised pigs) mixed with some amount of vegetable oil. Thus because “animal fat” was used, the generally negative outcome then gets wrongly associated with saturated fats. If the study doesn’t give a breakdown of the fatty acid profile, then it’s basically worthless. Unless someone feels like trying to track down the researchers and find the chow product they used. Which is sometimes viable.
The key part of those studies is that they were comparing omega-6 fats to saturated fats like butter. They are healthier than saturated fats all else being equal, but that doesn't mean you should have that much of it.
I don't think either are great in the quantities most people consume, but the current evidence suggests saturated fats are worse if you are to simply replace one with the other.
So before I start, I just want to say that I have no intention of trying to properly argue some kind of complete and rigorous position and have this turn into yet another discussion where people throw sources around and nothing gets accomplished. Sometimes that's fun, but that takes a lot of time and effort, neither of which I have the luxury or desire of burning right now. Basically this is ultimately a drive by comment written on a break (now breaks, fuck). I can't commit to anything else, and I am just assuming you genuinely are interested in something you've not been exposed to.
I offer my strong encouragement to reevaluate and look on with suspicion about the standard "health advice" that has ultimately been provided and supported by an industry that has been dependent on products with high omega-6s in order to achieve low costs and strong preservative effects. And when I say industry I don't mean some "the man" boogeyman cackling in the shadows, I mean I work in agriculture and the very boring humans up and down the supply chain have a lot of incentives for certain thoughts and behaviors, and are strongly disincentivized to ever stop and say "hey is this a problem?".
Ask yourself this, if it is true that eating more omega-6 fats than humans have historically been exposed to is healthy, then why has turning away from the high saturated fats found in "traditional" european and american foods (piles of butter and carbs) only resulted in a population level increase in cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes? While you can't make a rigorous conclusion from just that correlation, Chesterton’s Fence definitely seems relevant here. To be clear, I consider there to be multiple causes for all three of those issues and no one single fix, but I do consider the omega-6 called linoleic acid to be a particularly strong one. Unfortunately there seems to be different "metabolic gears" people can be in, so just taking a metabolically compromised person and only feeding them butter and carbs may not help and could even hurt their situation.
The food oil industry is well aware of the problems that omega-6s have, but obviously aren't keen on announcing something they are at fault for. What you will see is a quiet move to new varieties of plants bred/modified to produce higher monounsaturated fats in place of polyunsaturated fats. As a side note, this may actually not be the best move. Linoleic acid can induce a lower metabolism (in fact animals that enter torpor seem to require it) however once that happens it appears that the monounsaturated fats found in body fat stores seem to maintain the cycle. So it's unlikely to help those with compromised metobolisms. Another side note, I've heard that consuming very large amounts of linoleic acid can sometimes do the opposite and raise metabolism though I've not explored that much. Frankly it's a bad idea to try and achieve it that way, but it's another example of a surprising reverse of what you'd normally expect. If you ever wonder why there's so many seemingly contradictory relationships, it's because your metabolic pathways are an impossible clusterfuck of nested feedback loops, like if a hydra fucked an ouroboros. Look at this map and despair of ever trying to make a 100% always correct statement even with well done science: http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1
But shortly put, the only thing (probably) correct in that article is that linolenic acid intake does not seem to correlate with arachidonic acid levels (I'm presuming this is in rats). I can say this because I'm reasonably convinced that linoleic (not to be confused with linolenic) also doesn't seem to correlate with arachidonic acid (in rats). So I find it definitely reasonable to take on it's face. The conclusion that omega-6s are somehow then good, is absolute bullshit though. Arachidonic acid is not the only omega-6 with issues. The most well researched one with a laundry list of negative effects is linoleic acid.
>American Heart Association (AHA)
AHA is a highly biased organization that puts out bad science. They are the Autism Speaks of the health world. If their stamp is on it, be extremely wary.
>"Omega-6 fats are not only safe but they are also beneficial for the heart and circulation," says advisory coauthor Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Jesus titty fucking christ, she couldn't be more irresponsibly and dangerously wrong. Now, there a load of resources one can explore that counter this idea of "heart healthy" omega-6s, but instead of a gish gallop that not even I'm interested in, here's my personal favorites, because it so perfectly illustrates how easily one can walk away with the exact wrong conclusion if the trial isn't thorough enough.
See Figure 2.
Basically Both Normal and diabetic rats were fed a "normal" diet vs one with very high omega-6.
Apoptosis is controlled cell death, in this case measured by caspase-3 activity. The Diabetic rats had their heart cell caspase-3 activity reduced by about half.
So this means, omega6 resulted in less heard cells dying, right? Heart healthy and great for diabetics!
But they also measured something else. Necrosis is uncontrolled cell death (resulting in inflammation and other negative side effects), in this case measured by serum LDH. In Figure 3, they show that serum LDH more than triples.
Basically feeding diabetic rats omega-6 enriched food traded heart cells dying in a controlled manner, with dying in an uncontrolled manner.
P.S. Epidemiology in health research (which the pro-omega-6 crowd is heavily reliant on) is a giant pile of dogshit that can be made to say whatever the author wants, and severely suffers from the replicability crisis that plagues other areas of science where it's hard to actually control and measure everything involved. Beware both the conclusions, as well as the time spent digging through shit to find out that yes, it really was shit.
It's been hard to tease out and more to come but sat fat appears to have a knee curve where small amounts don't cause harm. See Plant Chompers yt for some of the research.
Is there a good overview of anti-nutrients? I feel like this is an elephant in the room among all the even basically nutritionally/biochemically literate in any forum discussing health foods and diet. People act like because plants have seeds that they want you to eat and propogate them that they forget they might have other defenses to deter from consuming them that might be overlooked.
I can't speak for that speaker but the typical answer: meat consumption is associated with affluence, which also is associated with sugar and processed food consumption.
Hmm? Oxalates causing less severe damage (kidney stones) is more common than just one woman. If you are a vegan you know you need to go easy on things like raw spinach and almonds.
Almonds are one of the highest-oxalate foods but I think generally it's fine unless you're prone to calcium oxalate kidney stones. But most people find out they're prone when they get their first stone.
I've gotten two and don't recommend. Things that help, short of the sort of restrictions I'm stuck with: drink lots of water with high-oxalate foods, and eat foods high in calcium with them. The calcium binds with the oxalate in your guts instead of your kidneys and passes right out. Some people dissolve a calcium pill in the water they boil spinach in.
They can see tiny stones in your kidneys with a scan so it's possible to check before you get a real problem, though I don't know if they would without any symptoms.
> Despite significantly more dietary oxalates (254 mg/day) and oxalate-containing foods such as nuts, vegetables, and whole grains, participants with higher DASH scores have a 40–50% decreased risk of kidney stones [68]. This is perhaps attributed to the protective and synergistic effects of phytate, potassium, calcium, and other phytochemicals all abundant in the DASH dietary pattern. Similar findings regarding the protective role of vegetables on urolithiasis risk were reported by Zhuo et al. [69]. While animal protein consumption was associated with higher kidney stone risk, vegetable and tea consumption were associated with a decreased risk of stone formation.
It's possible to eat a DASH diet while leaving out the foods with the highest oxalates. It's what I do myself.
Avoiding high-oxalate foods if you're prone to oxalate stones isn't a meme, it was the advice of my urologist and the printed pamphlets he gave me. Along with drinking plenty of water, especially with meals as I mentioned above. As for calcium, it's mentioned as protective in your quote.
A̶r̶s̶e̶n̶i̶c̶ Cyanide is the thing to watch for I believe. Stay away from bitter almonds, roasted should be fine. You'd have to eat a 25 Kg bag of sweet almonds to get into trouble. Not sure about the cumulative effects though, that might be worth checking into.
Could you bring some empirics to the table for normal people having a common problem with oxalates at normal doses without predisposing issues like kidney disease or the ones the woman had in the case study?
Does "going easy on oxalates" just mean you have fewer than six spinach smoothies per day?
I'm used to these dietary memes cashing out into either trivial claims or nothing burgers.
> Oxalic acid has an oral LDLo (lowest published lethal dose) of 600 mg/kg.[62] It has been reported that the lethal oral dose is 15 to 30 grams.
and
> Frozen commercially available spinach in New Zealand contains 736.6 ± 20.4 mg/100g wet matter (WM) soluble oxalate
while the USDA says about 900 mg per 100 g for American spinach on average.
So roughly 1% of the wet spinach by weight. 1 kilo of high-oxalate spinach probably has 10 - 20 grams of oxalic acid. That's a lot of spinach, but probably chuggable in one day in smoothie format. Far too close to the LD50 estimate for my comfort!
For one large salad, it's unlikely to exceed a couple grams. I'm unsure about the effects of chronic lower dose exposure.
This is what I mean, though. How many people regurgitating "Be sure to watch out for oxalates!" know that we're talking about thousands of grams of spinach?
Looking it up, people generally eat 50-200mg of oxalates per day with 1000mg being the outlier high end.
Eat your spinach. If you're worried, then cook it.