The Carb-Sane Asylum

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 int...

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 ...

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 sig...