Still More Calories ... And a rant :-)

Probably the most annoying calorie discussion I'd come across recently has to be Stefani Ruper's discussion about this article in Science Magazine, Have We Been Miscounting Calories?, entitled They’re Still Doing It Wrong: Have We Been Miscounting Calories?  Read the article first and then Stefani's take.  I sort of wish I had to know if her take came off as badly in that order, but you can't undo.  

From the article:

In a wide-ranging discussion of how food is digested in everything from humans to rats to pythons, the panel reviewed a new spate of studies showing that foods are processed differently as they move from our gullet to our guts and beyond. They agreed that net caloric counts for many foods are flawed because they don't take into account the energy used to digest food; the bite that oral and gut bacteria take out of various foods; or the properties of different foods themselves that speed up or slow down their journey through the intestines, such as whether they are cooked or resistant to digestion.

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Sweeteners

If you're not sitting down reading this, you might just want to, or grab onto something for support, because I'm going to start this post out doing something I don't all that often: praise Mark Sisson.   The sample menu page on his blog reads:

A typical breakfast for me is a cup of coffee with cream and sugar and an omelet

This page has been around for a good long time and he hasn't changed it, so presumably Sisson hasn't jumped headlong on the stevia wagon.  In the summer, as a kid, we would suck on honeysuckle blossoms for the faint sweetness.  Needless to say, we did this more for the novelty of "hey, this is sweet" than scavenging for every blossom we could find for a sweet kick ... they just weren't that sweet.   If one googles chewing and sugarcane or stevia leaves you will find references to both.    If you are ever in New England in late winter/early spring, you'll see the maple syrup taps on trees.  The dried syrup that may ooze from the tap, etc., also tastes sweet.  We humans tend to like sweet stuff, and when found in nature, we'll chew/suck or otherwise extract the sweet leaving the rest behind.  But the only foods that are truly sweet eaten whole (or at least most) are fruits and honey.  I suppose we could add in the faintly sweet root veggies as well.  

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The New Atkins & Sugar Alcohols

One of my big issues with TNA is the concept of subtracting sugar alcohols from Net Carbs.

IMO, the most fraudulent practice in the LC field is the total subtraction of SA's in the calculation of net carbs.  There are 1.5-2.5 cal/g for most of them (except erythritol which is 0.2 cal/g) and these calories are from carbs!

Here's what TNA says on the subject:

"When it comes to low-carb foods, you subtract grams of sugar alcohols (including glycerin), as well as of fiber, from total grams of carbs to get the Net Carb count."

"Many low-carb products are sweetened with such ingredients as glycerin, mannitol, sorbitol, xylitol, erythritol, isomalt, lactitos and maltitol. ... Because sugar alcohols are not fully absorbed by the gut, they provide roughly half the calories that sugar does, although each one varies slightly. The incomplete and slower absorption results in a minimal impact on blood sugar and insulin response. This means that sugar alcohols don't significantly interfere with fat burning, making them acceptable on Atkins. ... Most people find that they can handle 20 to 30 grams a day without undesirable effects."

I imagine this was quite a point of contention between the powers that be at Atkins Nutritionals and these three respected researchers. There's much to be read between the lines of how it is written.

The veteran low-carber is probably aware that the "missing carbohydrate" on Atkins labels for some of their products is attributed to glycerin (aka glycerine, aka glycerol!).   Apparently AtNu tried, unsuccesfully, to get glycerin classed as a fiber, when, in fact, it is clearly a sugar alcohol and WP&V make a point of identifying it as such.  I may be reading too much into this, but I get the feeling this was a face-saver for these three.  In exchange for going along with subtracting sugar alcohols, they got to inform the consumers of Atkins products and "out" glycerin is a sugar alcohol in hopes the LC community would pick up on this?  That's just my feeling on the whole issue. 

In any case, they acknowledge the caloric content of SA's but not the carb content. If slowed release of carbohydrate doesn't "interfere with fat burning", then what's the point of counting carbs at all so long as they are ingested in very small quantities?   Glycerol is absorbed and metabolized ... and turned into ... drumroll please ... glucose!! These grams are not even accounted for on Atkins' labels (or they weren't last time I looked -- I don't eat these, ever).  We're often talking about 20 or more grams of sugar alcohols in a serving of "product".  Subtracting these completely can result in a 10g or more "error" in your carbs.  That's significant, and if it's not, what's the whole hub bub about counting carbs anyway? 

The authors seem obsessed with the carbs in lemon juice.  So much so that Rung 7 for adding more includes 2T more lemon juice.  I do best on LC lately when I drink cayenne lemonade all day long.   If I have a cup of lemon juice per day (6g sugars, ~20g total carb) or 20g sugar alcohols, which do you think is going to impact weight loss in the right direction??  It's for this reason I harp on this seemingly minor aspect of the book.  They can't have it both ways.  One of the things they advocate to counter stalls is to go back to counting carbs -- Net Carbs of course.  They don't address laying off the sugar alcohols for stalls.  But too much protein, that's the staller!

In such a self-proclaimed "grounded in science" book, they fail to even mention the difference between erythritol and the other sugar alcohols.  Again, perhaps because AtNu doesn't use it much in their products?

In the end, I would like to see a more forthright discussion of the carbohydrate content of sugar alcohols.  If we can't expect that from these trusted scientists, who can we turn to?