What gives?

Well researchers such as The Nutrition Academy’s Dylan Olver are continually unraveling the inner workings of our metabolism and in his latest conference presentation, he explains how excess body fat contributes to disordered glucose metabolism. Let’s listen in:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sadly, we conveniently forget that it took us 20 years to accumulate an extra 30 lbs on our frame, and that the likelihood we can shed all the weight after just a couple of weeks of dieting is slim to none.

So what is the secret to getting (and staying) lean? I think we can all agree the best health and physique results come to those people who take full ownership of what goes into their body and eat clean, day in and day out.

Unfortunately, sticking to a clean diet is much easier said than done. Eating properly is particularly challenging in today’s day and age when we, as a society, are increasingly placing convenience ahead of making the right choices. And our collective health is suffering as a result.

That being said, we can take solace in the fact that although long-term body transformation requires a diet consisting of predominantly whole, natural foods, there is a time and a place for convenience foods.

But how can you tell how much or what types of convenience (ie. pre-packaged) foods are appropriate? By understanding these 2 powerful aspects of progression.

1. The rule of displacement

Basically, this rule is concerned with whether your convenience food is better than what you previously would have been eating. A perfect example of this are commercial protein bars. For argument’s sake, I will compare Supreme Protein Caramel Crunch to a Cadbury Caramilk Bar.

Supreme bar: 390 kcal, 15 g fat, 36 g carbohydrates (4 g of sugar) and 30 g protein
Caramilk bar: 260 kcal, 13 g fat, 33 g carbohydrates (23 g sugar) and 2 g protein

Clearly, the main differences between these two products are that the protein bar contains far less sugar and a good dose of protein (which explains the higher calorie count). Therefore, if your current afternoon snack is a chocolate bar, swapping it for a protein bar will result in a positive change in your health.

Now let’s be straight, commercial protein bars do contain a number of less than ideal ingredients (ie. high fructose corn syrup, sugar alcohols and soy protein isolate). Therefore, commercial protein bars should never be considered a true health food.

However, when attempting to institute a massive change in your approach to eating, using protein bars as a bridge to help wean you off of sugary-treats and onto ultimately healthier choices is often a step in the right direction.

2. Attempt progress in stages

This rule builds off the former. Perhaps the biggest mistake made by dieters everywhere is expecting we can go from having poor nutrition habits to 100% compliance to a perfectly clean meal plan.

Uh hello… don’t you think that if we instinctively found foods like spinach or tuna more appealing than chips and chocolate, we might actually already be eating them?

What do you mean french fries aren’t really a vegetable?!?

Although it’s great to have an idea of where you’d like to take your nutrition habits, the reality is that only a tiny fraction of all people can leap from terrible eating to clean eating overnight. Harbouring the “perfect meal plan” expectation is akin to a personal trainer expecting a new client to be able to learn and execute a powerclean during their initial visit; it’s just dumb, dumb, dumb!

Instead of continuing to berate ourselves for failing to adhere to meal perfection, let’s be realistic about the stages of behaviour change.

Let’s revisit our protein bar vs. candy bar example. Imagine a young male who enjoys having candy bars as a snack. Unfortunately, his daily candy bar habit keeps him sitting around 25% body fat. Now a reasonable goal might be for him to try and get that number down to 15% over the next 6-8 months. But how will he go about making the necessary dietary changes?

A reasonable place to start could see him swapping the candy bars for protein bars. Definitely a step in the right direction. However, this strategy might only get him down to 22-23% body fat. Remember, commercial protein bar consumption is not a habit that is conducive to optimal leanness.

To get down to below 15%, he’ll need to eat the way really lean people do (ie. tons of veggies, proteins and healthy fats). But jumping from candy bars to apples, almonds and tuna isn’t something that most people can buy into right away.

A more reasonable (and ultimately, far more successful) approach would be to approach it in the following manner:

As we can see, each step moved this young man forward in the quality of his food choices. We went from purely processed crap (month 1), to less crap (but still processed foods in month 2-3), to incorporating natural foods (in month 4-5) and finally ended up at month 6, with zero processed foods. Success!

Attacking nutritional change in this manner always makes for far greater compliance and ultimately, a far greater likelihood the end behaviour takes root. Humans are creatures of habit and comfort, which is why convenience foods are so appealing. Although it’s tough to argue for any processed food as being optimally healthy, they can be used to improve someone’s diet.

The key when using processed foods is to ask yourself if they are moving you “closer to” or “further from” your goals. If you ask yourself that question, deciding what to eat becomes relatively straightforward.

Notice, nothing about this approach suggests that results will magically appear overnight. But when you consistently make diet selections that involve making a better choice today than you made yesterday, everyone can ultimately attain their goals!

Guess again Einstein, I am a researcher, which means a) I have an overwhelming appreciation for cool experiments, and b) I’ve done lots of homework.  Thus, the mushy gushy intangible stuff is not my cup of green tea. But I digress, getting back to the point of this rant, what is it you see beyond the food? Stare at your chili diligently for an hour and consider what lies beneath. The plate of course, or rather a bowl, perhaps you are eating directly from pot? Now your thinking “wait, is he serious?” I sure am. Have you ever considered how much help or hindrance your dishes can dish out, because researchers from the Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab have.

I’ll spare all the details, but essentially there were 2 groups allowed to eat some snacks (not a main course) from a buffet table. Group I had small bowls, whereas group II had large bowls. The two groups had similar BMIs, age, education and had waited equally since their last meal.

After self serving, here is what happened:

~ data presented as mean (range)

On average, those with bigger bowls consumed ~ 142 kcal more than those with smaller bowls.  This 56% increase in consumption compounded over the number of meals you eat from oversized place settings (let’s not get started on how restaurant portions have more than doubled in the last 30 years) may be a significant factor in weight gain.

1980′s to Today

The size of a serving bowl or plate acts as a consumption cue, that suggests the proper amount to eat.  However, bigger place settings have no physiological relationship with energy needs. Therefore, regardless if it is the Denby dish set you got as a wedding gift, or the IKEA dishes you bought on sale, they could be helping or hindering your body transformation depending on their size.

So next time you choose to look beyond the food, prior to an internal philosophical examination as to why we eat the foods we eat, literally look beyond your food at the vehicle it came in on, would it be considered the smart car, sports car, luxury car, mini van, or bus of place settings.

Most people can dramatically improve the quality of their diet by including more “green items”: broccoli, spinach, peppers, kale, romaine lettuce, etc all provide tons of high quality nutrition for a minimal caloric impact.

Although most people understand the positive impact of including more green vegetables, today I’d like to spotlight another great “green” product to boost your body transformation efforts: green tea.

Who says it isn’t easy being green?

What is tea?

Although many beverages are marketed as tea, most are actually “herbal teas” or tisanes. Real tea must come from the Camelia Sinesis plant. This means that only white, green, oolong and black teas are actually beverages that can be labelled as tea.

Since all teas come from the same plant, what makes them have different health properties and taste?

It boils down to how the plant is processed. Shortly after being picked, the leaves of the tea plant begin to wilt and oxidize, if not dried immediately. Tea leaves turn progressively darker as their chlorophyll breaks down and tannins are released. This enzymatic process represents a kind of semi-fermentation. By heating the leaves at a predetermined stage, oxidation is halted as certain enzymes become deactivated.

This leads to the production of 4 major classes of tea:

• White tea: wilted and unoxidized.
• Green tea: unwilted and unoxidized.
• Oolong tea: wilted, bruised and partially oxidized.
• Black tea: wilted and completely oxidized.

Although all varieties of tea have some similar properties (they do come from the same plant after all), each method of preparation results in a product with specific health benefits. And our interest today is to look at green tea.

Green Tea Composition and Health Benefits

Before we get too far, let me just state that a cup of tea DOES NOT contain more caffeine than a cup of coffee. A standard 8 oz. serving of coffee provides 80-120 mg of caffeine whereas a typical cup of tea contains 25-40 mg. Pound for pound, tea contains more caffeine than coffee, but we don’t drink a pound of tea every time we sit down for a cup.

That being said, green tea does contain two caffeine-like compounds: theophylline and theobromine. Both of these compounds have properties similar to caffeine. However, in contrast to using caffeine, neither theophylline nor theobromine tends to produce the “crash” that can accompany caffeine ingestion.

Green tea also contains a number of polyphenols with contribute to its purported health effects. There is a body of research that suggest green tea can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, various cancers, kidney stones, while improving bone density and dental health as well as enhancing cognitive function.

An impressive list to say the least, although I’m not about to suggest that green tea is some magical “cure for what ails ya”. Obviously the impact of green tea consumption will vary between individuals but with so many potential benefits, green tea seems like a valuable addition to your diet.

The Mirror Test

Even after extolling the myriad health benefits of green tea, many of you still won’t be convinced to start drinking it with any regularity. However, if you knew that becoming a regular green tea might also help you drop a few extra pounds… would you suddenly take up a keen interest?

Although tea contains a number of chemicals, it is one of the polyphenolic compounds in green tea, epigallocatechin 3-gallate (EGCG), that may play a particularly potent role in fat loss.

In a study published recently, researchers investigated the potential for EGCG to produce fat loss. Over 12 weeks researchers compared the effect of a beverage containing 625 mg of catechins + 39 mg caffeine to a control beverage containing only 39 mg caffeine and no catechins.

Participants (generally healthy, sedentary individuals BMI ~32 m/kg²) were asked to maintain constant energy intake (which they did) and engage in ~180 min/wk moderate intensity exercise, including at least 3 supervised sessions per week.

Basically, they were asked to workout 3 times a week for about an hour, quite a realistic, albeit sub-optimal, amount of training for the average individual.

After 12 weeks of drinking one of the beverages every day, what did these researchers find?

Maki et al. (2009). J. Nutr. 139: 264–270.

Surprisingly, even with this modest amount of exercise and no instructions to reduce caloric intake, both groups lost weight, which was good. However, the catechin/caffeine combo was far more effective in helping people lose abdominal fat, which is viewed as the most dangerous fat from a health perspective.

Overall, the catechin/caffeine group lost 1.2 kg more kilos (2 ½ pounds) than did the caffeine alone group. This isn’t an earth shattering difference by any stretch of the imagination, but given how little effort it takes to add green tea into your daily routine is there any reason not to adopt this habit?

What was particularly intriguing is that this extra weight loss was produced despite no actual diet advice or intervention being a part of the study. Kind of comforting to know that adding a simple habit like drinking green tea can significantly enhance the benefits of even a poorly designed exercise protocol.

Frankly, given how challenging it can be to produce sustainable fat loss, incorporating regular green tea seems like one of those “small change, big benefit” lifestyle modifications that make a whole lot of sense.

Green Tea Recommendations

The 625 mg of catechins in the aforementioned study provided about 215 mg of EGCG. But how much green tea is that in real world terms?

Tough to say with any certainty, since within green teas there is a wide variety of types and processing methods. A cup (8 oz) of most loose leaf green teas should provide anywhere from 60-180 mg of EGCG. This makes drinking 2-4 cups per day seems like a reasonable goal to shoot for.

A word of advice: not all green tea is created equally. Loose leaf green tea contains far more EGCG than does the green tea found in tea bags. Frankly, the green tea found in bags is of a vastly inferior quality and taste and I recommend only using it as a last resort.

Your best bet: delicious and nutritious loose leaf tea.

The same avoid warning goes for decaffeinated green tea. It’s got about 1/3 the amount of EGCG per serving as does regular green tea, so unless you are extremely caffeine sensitive, I’d advise opting for the real deal and just making sure you consume it well before bed time.

One of the best ways to markedly increase your green tea consumption is to brew up a large batch of green tea, then chill it and drink it as iced tea. You can tote around a 1 L water bottle full of green tea and drink it throughout the day.

Although flavoured, bagged green teas are garbage, flavoured loose leaf is not. I highly recommend picking up a mango/lime/cherry flavoured green. These teas are amazing both hot or cold.

Another point in favour of green tea, a 100 g bag costs about $7 and will make at least 20-25 cups. This amounts to only $0.28-$0.35 per serving, which is far, far cheaper than a can of coke, cup of coffee or bottled water.

Give loose leaf green tea a try; your taste buds, wallet and waistline will thank me.

Till next time, train hard and eat clean.