Nutritional Research: This Much I Have Learned

I've been mentioning several times recently that I've been avoiding polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), including omega-3's, and overcoming carbophobia to increase starch. I've promised to talk more about it and hope that in doing so I will start some interesting conversations, gain some insights myself, and also hold myself accountable to experiment on myself in a sane way and not as a back door to more restrictive behavior.

So, since rule number 1 in nutritional research is: For any assertion out there about the benefits or detriments of any individual food or macronutrient, there will be an equally vehement claim to the contrary (kind of like Newton's third law), I wanted to start by stating baldly what my research and personal experience has shown me so far. I'll be talking mostly about macronutrients.

Finding #1: All Proteins are not created equal. That's the one piece of information about macronutrients that everyone knows, and is responsible for that pesky 'where do you get your protein from?' question that plagues vegetarians. Proteins, with the extra Nitrogen and Sulphur molecules, are formed of a dizzying number of amino acids, not all of which we can synthesize ourselves, and therefore are obviously different.

Finding #2: Protein in whole food is almost always found together with either fat or carbohydrate. Protein isolates and concentrates take work to produce, and it's not always work in a lab or factory. Plant proteins from the greens, grains and legumes come with carbohydrate and from the seeds/nuts and some fruits, they come with fat. Animal proteins come with a lot of fat (eggs, meat) or both fat and carbohydrate (organ meats, milk/cheese) and if they don't have a lot of fat with them, it's because they've been skimmed or skinned, and are therefore not whole foods but 'isolates' or 'concentrates.'

I'm not hereby saying that there's anything wrong with isolates/concentrates: just pointing out that that can of tuna is not a counterargument to this statement that protein is not found all alone. Tuna is actually a fish (despite the illusion of the can) and contains plenty of fat.

Therefore,
Finding #3: Most tweaking of macronutrient ratios pivots on carbohydrate versus fat, with protein in the fulcrum. And I have to say, I have experimented with a high-protein (i.e. high-isolates/concentrates), low-carb, low-fat macronutrient balance, as well as high-fat and high-carb, and felt the worst, experienced the most physical problems and the least muscle response on it than on anything else. And that's aside from the fact that I hated eating meat/dairy. You need protein to build muscle, but on high-protein and low-everything else, my muscles (unimpressive to begin with) dissolved.

Finding #4: All fats are not created equal. I used to think that fat was fat and that was that, and the root of all evil to boot. Nowadays, I understand that the much-and-erroneously-maligned saturated fat is a whole different player in our bodies than are monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. I understand that the differently structured fat molecules fit differently in our bodies and have much different susceptibilities to rancidity and other damage. Different fat molecules are also more or less likely to be stored. And of course there's the scary trans fats that the body simply doesn't recognize and that wreak havoc.

Finding #5: All carbohydrates are not created equal. Well, at first glance, this seems almost as obvious as the variety among proteins. Middle school biology taught us about monosaccharides, disaccharides and polysaccharides, right? They're worked upon by different enzymes in different places. Sugar and starch, right? And not even all sugars are equal among themselves, nor all starches either. (I.e., some are better than others. But for a while, I swallowed the orthodoxy of the Low-carb movement, perhaps mostly influenced by my insufficiently critical reading of Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories, and believed that a spoonful of sugar, an apple or a sweet potato amounted to the same death-trap within the body. They all trigger massive insulin release, which drives fat into the cells and causes insulin resistance and a host of health problems. Lately, I've been learning, from wide reading but more impressively from my own experience, that this is not the case. Starch in the body doesn't feel or act the same as sugar. Of course, all starches are not created equal either. As a celiac, I don't do well with grains and have had periods of time when I haven't been able to handle any starch at all. But it seems like the ability to handle them is a sign of healing that brings good things with it.

Finding #6: Attempting to exclude completely either carbohydrate or fat will not yield good long-term results. I've done both. I used to be an ardent lipophobe. I swallowed everything that the 80-10-10/Natural Hygiene diet folks say about fat being the root of all evil. It would be quite comical sometimes, even as a 'believer,' to hear someone troubleshooting their diet with one of the 'gurus' of this movement, and the guru triumphantly condemning whatever infinitesimal gram of fat the person had eaten in the past month for whatever the problem was. I ate mostly fruit, some greens and occasional 'potluck' nuts/seeds/avo for years. I could never gain any muscle, ended up with pretty terrible candida, was extremely thin but also very accident prone and neurotic.

Then, more recently, I went to the other extreme. Fruit-only had clearly not sustained me or allowed me to thrive, and now I had candida into the bargain, and started reading all the research about insulin and carbohydrates, and so any kind of carb, even veggies, which I've always loved, became strictly limited and worried-over. At first I lost a lot of weight: too much, eventually, because my absorption and digestion got so bad and there were a few months where I hardly ate and didn't digest what I did eat. Then, not surprisingly, my metabolism got even slower. Over the past several months I've gradually been working more vegetables back in, and the more carbohydrate (not sugar, but including a little fruit) I eat, the more energy I seem to have, the more stable my mood, the better my digestion.

Finding #7: If you read a lot exclusively about how good/bad something is for you, you're likely to feel that way when you eat it. Bodies are so suggestible.

One last point: The only 'food group' that I've never made a staple, bizarre and perverse as it may sound, given the history of humanity, is STARCH! I've always avoided it, because of my misapprehension that all starches were equal. I supposed that since I can't digest gluten grains, I can't digest anything else either. Even when I was high-carb, it was fruit that I was eating. As a raw-foodist (but still anorexic), I was actually scared away from carrots by a self-proclaimed Natural Hygiene guru who told me that eating carrots (=starch) would make me gain weight but that I could eat all the sugar I wanted and stay skinny!

So, lately I've been loving yams and parsnips and really 'digging' the effects of them on my system. I'll talk about that more soon. And here's my reminder to myself--and to anyone else making such experiments--that even if I'm eating more starch, I need not to cut out fat completely: I already know that that doesn't take things in a good direction.

What are your most useful findings about food, nutritional research, and our minds' impacts on our bodies' experiences? Please share!
much love