It’s time for a pop quiz, everyone. Don't worry,
it's only one question and it's multiple choice!
What's the smartest thing you can do (foodwise) to
improve your health and maintain and/or achieve a healthy weight?
A) Count calories. If it fits into your measly
budget, you're set. If not, tough luck.
B) Stop obsessing over calories and focus on a
food's actual nutrient content.
If you picked A, we apologize for all the crappy
food you're probably eating and all the stress you're probably dealing with. If
you picked B, congratulations! According to science, you're doing it right.
Writing in the journal Open Heart [4], a group of
high-profile health experts are making the case that, when it comes to avoiding
obesity and reducing your risk for heart disease and diabetes, nutrition trumps
number tallying. Basically, calorically-dense foods like nuts, olive oil, and
fish are doing way better things for your body than 120-calorie snack bars that
are mostly made of sugar.
And they've got the data to back this up. For
instance, obesity is a top risk factor for type 2 diabetes, a disease that
you're significantly more likely to get from drinking just one 150-can of soda
compared to 500 calories worth of nuts or olive oil per day, found one large
study. According to another study, overweight folks with type 2 diabetes were
significantly more likely to get off their blood sugar meds when they ate a
calorie-unrestricted, low-carb/high-fat diet compared to those who stuck to the
usual low-cal/low-fat diet. To top it all off, a recent Nutrition review
concluded that restricting carbs—not calories!—is the single most effective way
to reduce your risk for developing metabolic syndrome.
Plus, even if you did manage to drop pounds and
improve your health on a low-cal diet, you probably wouldn't be successful for
very long. The weight loss industry, which emphasizes cutting calories at all
cost, rakes in nearly $60 billion a year, "even though long-term follow-up
studies reveal that the majority of individuals regain virtually all of the weight
that was lost during treatment," the researchers write. Which might leave
you even worse off than you were when you first started dieting, since
so-called weight-cycling is linked to hypertension, insulin resistance, and a
higher risk of death.
And health claims side, dieticians still agree that
obsessing over calories is probably a lost cause. "In order to figure out
the calories, you need to figure out the portions and how something was
prepared. Which when you eat out, is hard to do," says Lisa Young, RD,
PhD, author of The Portion Teller Plan.
That is, if you can even figure out how many
calories you should be eating in the first place. "What happens when
someone gives themselves a daily budget of 2,000 calories, but then they need
considerably more or less during a certain period [of being unusually sedentary
or unusually active]? The average person doesn't know how to readjust their
needs in these special situations," says culinary nutritionist and special
diets expert Rachel Begun, MS, RDN.
In other words, picking the lower-calorie stuff in
the name of better health isn't just misguided. It's also impossible to do it
accurately—and will probably end up making you so crazy that you quit
altogether. So pick the avocado half over the 100-calorie key lime yogurt and
don't look back.
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