SHR

If you were change the number of meals you ate tomorrow, but otherwise kept your food intake and diet the same, would you be more or less hungry? This question was recently investigated by Perrigue et al, who recruited 12 healthy young men and women to undergo two 21-day intervention periods in a crossover design. For seven days prior to beginning the study, the participants recorded everything they ate and drank. The researchers used these foods logs to create individually tailored meal plans for each participant that kept food items, calories, and macronutrients constant. The researchers provided the participants with all their food for the 21-day intervention periods, which was to be consumed under free-living conditions. The single difference between the two intervention periods was that for one of them the food was provided as 3 meals, and for the other the food was provided as 8 meals. The meals were...

At the dawn of the 20th century, a researcher by the name of Wilbur Olin Atwater developed a system for measuring and estimating the energy content of food. This was later expanded upon by Merrill and Watt, who proposed that different macronutrients contribute different amounts of energy to the caloric total and developed Atwater specific factors that are still in use today. These proposed heats of combustion average 4 kcal/g for protein, 4 kcal/g for carbohydrates, and 9 kcal/g for fat. There is little doubt that these values for food are very accurate estimates. Yet, our bodies are highly complex biological systems, not bomb-calorimeters that combust food until only ash is left. This is clearly evidenced by the work of Baer et al from the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center, who recently published a study examining the metabolizable energy of walnuts when consumed as part of a typical American diet by...

No, you will not live longer if you are a vegetarian If you were wondering how eating meat can impact your risk of 18 common causes of death, then you’re in luck. Appleby et al from the University of Oxford, UK just published an analysis of over 60,000 adults answering this very question. Based on data from food frequency questionnaires, the participants were classified as regular meat eaters (>5x/week), low meat eaters (<5x/week), fish eaters, vegetarians, or vegans. 5 times per week). Data labels indicate a statistically significant difference from regular meat eaters." data-popup="//superhumanradio.com/images/easyblog_images/1717/b2ap3_large_SHRoundup_vegandeath_fig1.jpg" data-style="clear" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"> For all causes of death combined, there was no significant difference in risk between diet groups. However, compared to regular meat eaters, low meat eaters had a significantly reduced risk of dying from pancreatic cancer (-46%) and respiratory diseases (-30%); fish eaters had a significantly reduced risk of dying from...

Sarcopenia has a number of underlying mechanisms, but the primary nutrition-related one is inadequate protein intake. Although it is becoming increasingly recognized that the RDA of 0.8 g/kg is not sufficient, with other authoritative bodies such as the PROT-AGE Study Group giving recommendations of 1.0 to 1.5 g/kg, there is a distinct lack of focus on how that protein is distributed throughout the day. As pointed out by the PROT-AGE study group, older individuals appear to have a higher per-meal protein threshold to promote anabolism (i.e., 25 to 30 g protein per meal containing about 2.5 to 2.8 g leucine). Additionally, although there appears to be no additional benefit of consuming more than 30 g of protein on muscle protein synthesis, evidence suggests that consuming more protein can further reduce protein breakdown so that net protein balance improves. The average protein intake of elderly individuals is about 80 grams per day,...

If you are someone who has adopted a low-carbohydrate diet or reduced intake of sugar in its various forms, was there a point where you realized that you no longer care for sweet foods and beverages? It was as if your body became accustomed to eating less sweet foods and over time this led to a change in sweet preference. Thanks to funding by PepsiCo, whether lowering dietary sugar intake affects sweet taste intensity, pleasantness, and preference was recently investigated in a small group of healthy, overweight, middle-aged men and women who all habitually consumed at least 2 sugar-sweetened sodas per day and did not regularly use zero-calorie sweeteners. The participants were followed for 5 months under free-living conditions with complete control over their diets. Rather than strictly controlling food intake, one of the study authors met individually with each participant to discuss individualized dietary guidelines. The first month served as...