In this article, the author talks a lot about our bodies and how we digest food. He notes that the food labels we see on everyday food items are based on 19th-century laboratory experiments that weren’t able to include certain variables in their research. These variables included things such as the evolution of the food itself, the processing of the food such as cooking, and the amount of energy it takes for a particular person’s body to break it down. Some plants, for example, have evolved to become more appetizing to animals or to avoid digestion altogether and each food is digested in a different way. Age is a factor too; the older the plant, the more calories it provides because of the breakdown of the cell walls. Weaker cell walls give out more calories but when walls remain intact, we don’t get very many and they simply pass through our bodies. Also, cooking ruptures cell walls in some plants but not others, making only certain foods high in calories.
When it comes to proteins like peanuts and almonds, the author states that these types of food digest less completely than others with similar characteristics. With almonds, for example, research has shown that we really only digest 129 calories versus the 170 that are indicated on the label. This is because food labels don’t consider how much energy is needed to break down more complex foods like proteins. Research has also suggested that heat, (ie. cooking), helps with the break down of proteins, which allows us to digest them faster and helps kill any bacteria in the food so that our immune system saves energy by not having to attack pathogens. The author also noted that processing food is believed to have been a huge step in our evolution and that the increased number of calories taken in could be a reason for our larger brains.
Overall, the author suggests that processed food gives much more energy with very little work, but vegetables, nuts and whole grains make our bodies work harder to digest these foods, which allows us to expend more energy so that leftover calories don’t get stored as fat.
Dislikes:
I do not like that labels are not correct and that they do not account for the differences in processing. There should be some research about different foods and how different processing affects the number of digestible calories. I also don’t like that there have been no efforts to change food labels, even though the author states that the Almond Board of California is one advocacy group that supports that change. A final thing I dislike is the fact that according to the author, because processing changes our food’s chemical properties so much, it can have a negative effect on the natural bacteria that live in our intestines. Because of this, it could become harder to get the needed calories from tougher-to-break-down foods such as celery. Perhaps this should become an area of study in order to determine if this is indeed an issue.
Likes:
I liked the fact that the author included easy to understand examples. It made the understanding of the breakdown of calories much easier to understand. I also liked the fact that he mentioned that different people with different body types and levels of gut bacteria digest and absorb calories and nutrients in different ways. I realize that for future studies it would be hard to include all the different factors like weight, but perhaps it could be done with different categories of weights or body types. For example, having one group of people who have the ectomorph body type, one group with the endomorph body type and one group with the mesomorph body type. Or it could be as simple as having three groups with different weight classes, such as thin and lean, average, and obese.
