I’m generally of the belief that if one gets the quality of their diet right, the quantity will generally look after itself.  Some people do of course require some guidance with regard to amounts of foods they should perhaps start with.  This could be giving people the confidence to add more sources fat, more starches, less fruit, etcetera, than their social conditioning might otherwise allow them to do.  Even then, I generally advise people with fairly gross amounts – a can of this, a piece of that… I try to avoid getting people bogged down with the likes of grams, percentages, indices, and so on.  I find that level of analysis of what I eat incredibly tedious, and if I wouldn’t do it myself, I certainly wouldn’t expect anyone else to do it.  Besides, there is nothing ‘paleo’ about that level of dietary accountancy.  People shop for and eat a chop, a breast, an egg, a can of coconut cream, a piece of fruit, a stem of broccoli, and so on, not a block of protein, medium chain triglycerides, saturated fat, fructose, or starch.

I wasn’t always this way, however.  I used to calculate everything – food, riding distances, the lot.  One of the tools I used to use was the glycaemic index and glycaemic load.  I would set up spreadsheets to calculate everything for me… 5-7g/kg body weight of carbohydrate per day (375-525g per day), broken into 20g blocks (19-26 blocks), trying to achieve a glycaemic load under 20… It sucked.  And I sucked at trying to achieve anything with it, both for my own personal eating and for many of the people I would work with (I certainly didn’t try to apply this sort of quantitative approach to everyone.

These days, I am far more relaxed.  Quality rules my approach to both my own diet and those who I work with (groups and individuals).  There wouldn’t be many times, now, where I reflect on my own eating and I have to think about things quantitatively.  If I have slipped, it simply becomes a case of eating too much of one thing and perhaps not enough of something else.  No calculator required.

Along these lines, I was happy to see this media release from the nutrition department that I studied at;

Otago study questions value of glycemic index
Press Release: University of Otago

Tuesday 11 October 2011

Potatoes and other reportedly high-GI foods might not be the dietary villains that recent publicity, books and health-based programmes would claim them to be, a new University of Otago study suggests.

The study, of 30 healthy adults aged from 18 to 50, by Hayley Dodd, Dr Bernard Venn and colleagues from Otago’s Department of Human Nutrition, found that it was difficult to predict the actual Glycemic Index (GI) values of mixed meals for individuals eating them, even if the GI values of the individual parts of the meal were known.

The Glycemic Index is a measure of the effects of carbohydrates on blood sugar levels.

Normally, individual foods are tested for GI and it is less usual to test the GI of a whole meal. However, in this study, the GIs of three meals were tested – the meals all contained chicken, peas, carrots, kumara and gravy, together with a starchy staple food varying between potato, white rice or spaghetti.

The researchers found that the GI for each meal was not as high as anticipated.

From the GIs of the foods used the researchers expected that the potato meal would have an overall GI of 65, which falls within the medium range; instead at 53, the meal fell just within the low range. Therefore, although potato is a high-GI food, a meal containing potato is not necessarily so, Dr Venn says.

“I don’t think people should be too afraid of putting high-GI foods into their meals – our work suggests that having a small amount of potato with a meal isn’t going to drive your blood sugar crazy,” he says.

The research has been published in the October issue of the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The abstract from the above link throws a bit more light on the actual numbers;

The mean (95% CI) meal GIs determined from individual food GI values and by direct measurement were as follows: potato meal [predicted, 63 (56, 70); measured, 53 (46, 62)], rice meal [predicted, 51 (45, 56); measured, 38 (33, 45)], and spaghetti meal [predicted, 54 (49, 60); measured, 38 (33, 44)]. The predicted meal GIs were all higher than the measured GIs (P < 0.001). The extent of the overestimation depended on the particular food, ie, 12, 15, and 19 GI units (or 22%, 40%, and 50%) for the potato, rice, and spaghetti meals, respectively.

The formula overestimated the GI of the meals by between 22% and 50%. The use of published food values also overestimated the measured meal GIs. Investigators using the formula to calculate a meal or diet GI should be aware of limitations in the method.

This highlights one of the problems with trying to quantify what you are eating in such a highly analytical way.  How accurate are the numbers you are using?  We can see from the above that most of the GI’s of foods are analysed individually, not as part of a mixed meal – as you would typically consume it in the real world.  Any tables or computer-based dietary analysis programmes, the labels on food, etc., are going to give you ball park figures based on an average, at best.  If you happen to be the type of person who is terrified of eating too many carbohydrates in case you get knocked out of ketosis, then having a variance of 50% on the values you are trying to juggle is going to make things rather stressful for you indeed.  Relax, don’t do it.

Sticking with the quality vs. quantity theme, I read a few reports last week that stemmed from research showing that a moderate level of protein intake helped individuals control their appetite better.  From the Science Daily report on this research;

Researchers found that, when subjects were fed a 10% protein diet, they consumed 12% more energy over four days than they did on a 15% protein diet. Moreover, 70% of the increased energy intake on the lower protein diet was attributed to snacking.

…the results show that humans have a particularly strong appetite for protein, and when the proportion of protein in the diet is low this appetite can drive excess energy intake.

On this bit alone, we can take a qualitative approach.  The macro-term of “protein” is a bit useless to people.  Gluten is a protein.  Should we encourage people to consume more gluten to get their protein levels up in a (misplaced) hope that this will help you moderate your appetite?  This is exactly what some cereal companies do – they will tell you their cereal is high in protein and as a result will help keep you fuller for longer and will thus lose weight.  Of course, their corn flakes haven’t been coated in steak, or dipped in eggs to increase the protein.  And of course, they don’t tend to keep you full and you invariably end up snacking and feeling like a failure… it is, after all, all your fault you can’t control your appetite.  But I digress.

No – people, again, should be eating real food, and should have a strong appetite for meat, fowl, fish, eggs, nuts…  We shouldn’t be telling people to take their protein intake from 10% to 15%, but we should be telling them to just eat the goddamn little lamb will ya…

A report in a UK newspaper played with the numbers even more;

Want to cure that snack habit? Eat more protein as too little makes you hungry

Too little protein in your diet makes you feel hungry and reach for fattening snacks, an international study shows.

Eating more than the average amount of foods such as meat, fish, eggs and nuts can stop you gaining two pounds a month.

Researchers found that those whose meals were ten per cent protein consumed 260 more calories a day than those on 15 per cent protein.

Not only did they eat more but 70 per cent of the extra calories they ate were between snacks between meals rather than at mealtimes…

…People who consumed ten per cent protein a day ate on average an extra 1,036 calories over a four-day period compared with those who ate a 15 per cent protein diet. Over a year that would be enough to gain two stone.

The researchers and the journalists are all caught up in the numbers… eating X protein will lead to an excess of Y calories, and when we convert those calories to fat by dividing by Z grams per kilogram of fat and adding the square root of the number of years the Australian rugby team will need to wait to have a crack at becoming world champions again (2), you end up with 2 more fat rolls.

What you do get, when you eat less real food, is a hungry person eating more crap food.  In the study above, the subjects ate 70% of their additional calories as “snack” foods.  This invariably means bars, biscuits, crackers, confectionary, etc.  Yes – additional calories, but calories that are coming from grains, fructose, and linoleic acid.  I have every confidence that we aren’t talking about additional calories that can increase body fat levels, but that we are talking about the quality of the ingredients supplying those calories and their individual and combined effects on your metabolism.

If you can honestly say, hand on heart, that you have the right quality dialled in for YOUR CONTEXT, and you are still having issues, then a) check your context again, b) get someone else to check your context, and if all that stacks up, then sure, c) have a crack and a quantitative approach.  But I’m sure you won’t need to.  Now go and hit replay on Frankie… you know you want to.