Superfoods & Taste Of Place

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Several of us scouting in Ethiopia recently have been treated to roasted barley as a snack. It has us thinking about super foods, diet, wellness, taste of place, and lots more to ponder in future blog posts; for now, this catches our eye:

The Skinny Carb

A recent study shows that people who simply ate more fiber lost about as much weight as those who went on a complicated diet. Olga Khazan

…One reason why it’s difficult to lose weight—the most common resolution—is that dieting is so confusing.

For instance, the American Heart Association’s recommended diet is one of the most effective food plans out there. It’s also one of the most complicated. It requires, according to a recent study, “consuming vegetables and fruits; eating whole grains and high-fiber foods; eating fish twice weekly; consuming lean animal and vegetable proteins; reducing intake of sugary beverages; minimizing sugar and sodium intake; and maintaining moderate to no alcohol intake.” On top of that, adherents should derive half of their calories from carbs, a fifth from protein, and the rest from fat—except just 7 percent should be saturated fat. (Perhaps the goal is to keep people busy doing long division so they don’t have time to eat food.)

It’s a lot to remember, and nutritional information is already notoriously contradictory. So rather than put people on a complex diet, a group of researchers recently decided to test whether they could still get people to lose weight and boost their heart health by telling them to do just one thing: Eat more fiber.

Researchers found 240 participants and divided them into two groups. One group was instructed to eat the American Heart Association, or AHA, diet, including shaving 500 to 1,000 calories off of their normal food intake. The other was simply told to eat more fibrous foods. High-fiber foods include fruit, legumes, whole grains, and some vegetables. (It’s recommended that adults eat about 25 to 30 grams of fiber per day, but very few people do this.)After a year, the more-fiber group had lost 2.1 kilograms, or about 4.6 pounds, according to results published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The AHA group, which had been following a much more complicated eating regimen, lost just half a kilogram more, or six pounds. It was a pretty small difference, but the AHA group suffered greatly for it: They were cutting more than twice as many calories per day, around 400, as the fiber group had been. Fiber is also a part of the AHA diet, but the fiber group was eating about twice as much of it as the other participants. There was no difference in blood pressure or fasting glucose levels between the groups at the end of the experiment. In other words, the people killing themselves to meet a raft of rules did roughly as well as the people who were simply eating more beans and apples…

Read the whole article here.