A Question of Nutrition #2
by Dr. Jonny Bowden
A noted nutrition guru tackles the topics of food allergies,
fasting, bulking diets, and that crappy weight-loss supplement your
wife wants to try.
Bulking Diets: Bashed!
Q: Most strength coaches agree that you need extra calories to
build muscle. The question is, how much extra? On one side you have
those who say to eat a few hundred calories per day over
maintenance levels. Others say to just eat a ton and train hard.
What do you think is best for the bodybuilding male?
A: "Train hard and eat a ton" sounds like a great
philosophy ... if you're training to be a Sumo
wrestler.
I think the "eat a ton and train hard" school is kind
of like practicing skeet shooting with a blindfold on. You might
hit the target, but you might also pull a Dick Cheney.
I think it's way smarter to start with a controlled amount
of extra calories and see if that's enough to do the trick.
Ask yourself how you're performing, what your energy is like,
and if you like the results in the mirror. If you're not
coming up with positive answers, adjust the calories some more
until you do.
If you're a bodybuilder, you're going to train hard
anyway, so all that's on the table here is how much to eat so
that most of that extra food goes into making muscle as opposed to
fat. "Eating a ton" is way too unscientific for most
bodybuilders these days.
'Eat a ton and train hard" isn't too
scientific.
The Scoop on Fasting
Q: What do you think of intermittent fasting? I've read
about some plans that involve fasting for 24 hours every so often.
Some plans call for alternate-day fasting. It's said to
improve insulin sensitivity and increase longevity, among other
benefits. Any thoughts?
A: Many, actually. Are you surprised?
Fasting as a strategy to enhance health has been around since
the days of Hippocrates, the dude considered to be the father of
modern medicine. It's used by religious orders as a spiritual
discipline, and many high-end spas have some form of a fast —
often called a "detox" program — as part of their
rejuvenation retreats.
"Fasting and detoxification is the missing link in Western
nutrition," says my pal Elson Haas, MD, author of The New
Detox Diet.
Haas has been running detox programs as part of his medical
practice for more than 30 years.
"Fasting is the single greatest natural healing therapy I
know," he told me. "People need to take a break from
their substances. A fast or detox can give the body a rest so it
can rebalance."
But a true fast — even for one day — can be really
hard on the body. "A more common and liberal definition of
fasting would include the juices of fresh fruit and vegetables as
well as herbal teas," says Haas. "Fresh juices are easily
assimilated, require minimum digestion, and still supply many
nutrients. They also stimulate our body to clear wastes. Juice
fasting is safer than water fasting since it supports the body
nutritionally while cleansing and maintains your energy
level."
You probably heard about the whole "alternate day"
stuff because of some mice experiments done at the University of
California at Berkeley. The researchers basically fasted (read:
starved) the poor mice on alternate days, and then allowed them to
eat whatever they wanted on the non-fast ("feast") days.
"We found that fasting can reduce cell proliferation rates
in skin and breast," lead researcher Krista Varady told me.
"That's equivalent to a decrease in both breast and skin
cancer risk."
I won't bore you with the details of the research, but they
actually found out that you didn't need to do a full-blown
fast on the "fast" days to get measurable benefits. You
could still consume about 25 percent of your normal food intake on
those "fasting" days — about the equivalent of one
meal — and still get value.
But
don't use fasting as a weight-loss strategy. It
never works. Even in the mice experiments, the mice overcompensated
for their fast days by overfeasting on the eating days, so that at
the end of the week they had consumed the same amount of calories
as they normally would.
Since the only strategy that's ever worked to extend life
in the lab is calorie restriction, and since some theorists reason
that downregulating insulin signaling may be part of the reason,
eating fewer calories within the context of a high-nutrient diet
makes sense in general.
If you want to take a day off from regular eating every so often
and give your digestive system a rest, it's not a bad
idea.
Food Allergies and the Elimination Diet
Q: Is it true that if you eat a certain food all the time, you
can develop an allergy to it?
A: It's true that both allergies and food sensitivities
(which are much more common) can develop later in life, even with
foods you've been eating for a long time without any apparent
reactions.
The problem tends to be more common with what I call
"ubiquifoods"— foods or food ingredients (like
wheat) that are everywhere and that we consume in far greater
quantities than were ever in the human diet before now.
One great low-tech way to see how your body reacts to a food, or
to identify a possible "suspect", is to do an Elimination
Diet, which I discuss in my book, The Most Effective Natural
Cures on Earth.
It's real simple — detective work 101. You simply take the
potential offender out of your diet for a few weeks. If a symptom
— like a headache, brain fog, or tiredness — goes away,
bingo, you've discovered the culprit. It's often
possible to "rotate" that food back in by eating it, say,
once every four days.
An Alternative Sweetener?
Q: I recently heard that something called Xylitol powder can be
used as a sweetener. What is it and do you suggest it?
A: Xylitol is often called birch sugar because it's made
from birch tree bark. It's my favorite sweetener, not counting
a real food like blackstrap molasses, which has a very specific
taste. Xylitol has no real downside (unless you count knowing how
to spell it).
It tastes like sugar but has 40 percent fewer calories, you can
use it in hot beverages like coffee, and it has almost no glycemic
impact. Plus it has the added health benefit of helping to prevent
bacteria from adhering to tissue, making it the perfect sweetener
for a "healthy" chewing gum.
You can also bake with Xylitol, using it in the same quantity as
you would sugar. This makes it a perfectly healthy sugar
replacement for diabetics and low-carb dieters.
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