Defeating Dietary Displacement – Part 1 The Food

Defeating Dietary Displacement – Part 1 The Food

By Dr. John M Berardi, Ph.D.

Coffee Anyone?

I’ve got this buddy who seems to love going out for coffee with members of the opposite sex. Wait, let me clarify. He loves going out for coffee with exceptionally good-looking members of the opposite sex. Almost every time I call this guy during afternoon hours, he’s on one of these coffee dates with one of his little hottie “coffee friends.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Going out for coffee” must be some clever euphemism we use for sex. After all, what kind of high Testosterone weight lifter sits around all day drinking coffee when he could be doing the “wild thing” with said hotties? But alas, rather than slowing his testicular production of the male hormone, my buddy assures me these “coffee dates” are components critical to his style of dating—and his success. Intrigued, I decided to give the coffee date a try.

The Origin of Obesity?

So there I am, sitting in my favorite coffee shop across from my “coffee friend.” Things are off to a good start. We’re laughing, she’s playing with her hair, and she’s reaching across the table touching my arm when I make a particularly witty comment. Note to self: “I’m in there!”

I order a green tea, a pitcher of water, and two chicken breast sandwiches (no bread, no mayonnaise, double the vegetables, please). Because it’s my “free” or “cheat” day, I pre-order dessert— a slice of warm apple pie. With mouth agape and that “where do you put it all?” look on her face, my coffee friend orders a chocolate brownie and a double latté. Then it happens: she starts asking the nutrition questions.

Internally, I groan. Only fifteen minutes into the meeting and we’re talking about the subject I usually like to steer clear of when I’m off the clock, especially with new people. It’s better to slowly wean them onto my diet ideas than to launch right into it during the first meeting. Damn my buddy and his “coffee dates”!

But then, during the ensuing conversation, which wasn’t as bad as I’d initially predicted, something else happened. In talking nutrition with my coffee friend, I realized that during this meal I was getting a very clear insight into the very “obesification” of North America.

Now, this girl is definitely not obese. She’s young, thin, and a real hottie. But in ten or twenty years, she will be obese if she continues to regularly dine on rich chocolate brownies and frappaccinos for lunch, bagels and coffee for breakfast (her admitted breakfast of choice), soda throughout the day, and leftover casserole for dinner.

Of course, obesity isn’t imminent in her case. She’s a young, intelligent, and reasonably disciplined woman, and she’ll probably be able to restrain her eating habits (i.e., curtail her total daily energy intake) enough to stave off full-blown obesity. But the fact is, simply moderating ones portions isn’t enough to achieve optimal body composition and health.

Dietary Displacing: The “All-Treat” Diet

At this point some of you might be thinking, “Hold on just a minute, JB, didn’t you order the apple pie? Why are you railing against her when you’re just as guilty of ordering junk as she is?” Sorry, that sort of thinking is flawed.

There’s a big difference between a healthy diet to which treats are occasionally added and an all-treat diet. In the former, less healthy foods are consumed rarely and in addition to healthy foods. In the latter, less healthy or unhealthy foods are consumed often and instead of healthy foods. This is called food displacement and must be avoided if optimal body composition and health are your goals.

Sure, I did indulge in a slice of sugar-laden junk food, this being one of the two “treats” I ate that week. But looking only at the junk food that we ate presents a woefully incomplete part of the picture. The presence of bad food in both of our diets is much less important than the absence of good food in hers.

To elaborate: I ate a small amount of junk food in addition to my antioxidant rich, protein filled, nutrient dense meal, which was just one of seven such meals I ate that day—and that was one of seven such days that week! She ate some junk. Period.

She started her day with junk, ate a lunch of junk, and filled the rest of the day with junk as well. I got all the antioxidants, micronutrients, and protein I needed, while she spent the entire day eating the nutritional equivalent of a cardboard box.

Based on our activity levels and basal metabolic needs, we both probably met our energy needs for the day (in terms of total energy ingested vs. total energy expended), but I actually got some nutrition that day. She just got calories, and her calories came from what we call “displacing foods.”

You see, the bagel, the brownie and latte, the soda, etc. were consumed instead of good healthy choices. So, in essence, their empty calories displaced the good, nutrient dense food she could’ve otherwise eaten. She consumed nothing but empty calories, calories more likely to be stored as fat than burned, calories that actually degrade health or do nothing to improve it, calories that’ll make her hungry and food-obsessed all day, and calories that’ll make her tired just an hour or two after consumption.
I ate 49 healthy meals plus two treats that week. She had all treats. Big difference, huh?

Convenience and Calories: Overfed, Undernourished

Know anyone else like this girl? Chances are you know lots of other individuals like her! In the US alone, there are about 129.6 million overweight individuals and probably many more well on their way, just like my coffee friend. These stats beg the question—how did otherwise intelligent people get to be so bad, exchanging good nutrition for empty calories? While an explanation is probably multifactorial, there are a few simple answers that pop into my mind.

First, I think that North Americans strive daily for nutritional convenience. Sure, when the typical person goes out for a nice dinner at a restaurant, he or she usually gets a decent meal. But, unlike many Europeans (the French and the Italians come to mind), North Americans select everyday meals for speed and convenience.

A nice egg and spinach omelet with oats and pineapple on the side takes some time to prepare and eat. On the contrary, a bagel and coffee can be carried into the car and eaten on the way to work. So in our quest for speed and convenience, we get very little in the way of good nutrition. That’s why we’re overfed and undernourished, and that’s how people can eat so much yet still have nutrient deficiencies.

Secondly, I think we’ve gotten too calorie conscious. Most people who make poor food selections aren’t stupid. They know if they want to be thin, they can only eat a certain amount of calories per day. If they eat more, they either feel monumentally guilty or, much less often, they head to the gym for marathon cardio sessions designed to exercise those extra calories off.

In trying to walk that thin tight rope of energy balance, they realize if they eat good, healthy food (i.e. marinated chicken breast with a spinach salad and a piece of fruit), they’ll be eating a bunch of calories which simply don’t taste as good as the brownies they’re craving. In this sense, the healthy food will displace the tasty junk they often crave.

So in an attempt to get the tasty brownie calories, they choose instead to displace the good chicken and spinach calories, kicking them out of the diet. In their minds, “a calorie is a calorie” and therefore if they simply eat a brownie instead of the chicken, they’ll stay just as thin. Thin, in our society, is synonymous with healthy. Little do they realize they’re setting themselves up for losses in lean body mass, an ever slowing metabolic rate, micronutrient deficiencies, and all sorts of nutrition related health problems including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and syndrome-x (basically insulin resistance).

It’s hard to stay lean when the metabolism is dwindling as a result of insufficient protein intake and a low thermic effect of feeding. The metabolic rate takes another plunge because of deficiencies in essential fatty acids, not to mention decreasing muscle mass.

It’s also pretty difficult to stay lean if you’ve got diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and/or syndrome-x. To support this notion, all we need to realize is that in the last twenty years the incidence of obesity has doubled, yet our average daily energy intake hasn’t increased much at all!

North Americans aren’t getting so darned fat and/or unhealthy simply because of overeating. Often they replace good foods with the super-sized sugars, the trans fats, and the other nasty fast food ingredients. The good foods have the power to negate the effects of these nasty, health-degrading junk foods, but because people become too concerned with energy balance, they simply displace the good stuff.

In fact, if people simply ate a high protein, antioxidant and micronutrient rich diet supplemented with junk food, they’d end up leaner and healthier than those who got the same amount of calories (and often even fewer calories) from empty, displacing foods.

Cheat Meals

People often ask me what I think about cheat meals. Generally, what they want to know is, “Do I really have to eat clean all the time?” The answer is a qualified “yes.” You should plan out your diet in advance, choosing only clean foods, and then eat everything on your plan. One or two days a week, if you so desire, you can eat foods that wouldn’t normally be found on your plan in addition to and not instead of the healthy foods.

Usually I add such foods at the end of the day, when I’m already stuffed with lean meat, EFAs, fruits and veggies. That tends to limit my ability to indulge. Of course, in strict fat loss phases, these calories should be the first to go.
Bottom line: As long as it doesn’t displace the good calories, you can have your cake and eat it too. Chew on that a while and then check back next week for Part II of this article: “Displacing Debates”!

I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of Precision Nutrition, where I’ll show you in great detail exactly what to do.

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About the Author Dr. John M. Berardi PhD, CSCS
Dr. Berardi’s philosophy is simple: people from all walks of life, from soccerstars to soccer coaches to soccer moms, should have access to the most recentdevelopments in health, exercise, and nutrient science. Dr. Berardi and his company,Precision Nutrition, Inc. have one purpose: to take the latest in advanced nutritionresearch and teach it to others in a way that doesn’t take an advanced degree tofigure out. Dr. Berardi has earned a doctoral degree from the University of WesternOntario (2005) with a specialization in the area of exercise biology and nutrientbiochemistry. Prior to his doctoral studies, Dr. Berardi studied Exercise Scienceat Eastern Michigan University (Masters program; 1999) as well as Health Science,Psychology, and Philosophy at Lock Haven University (Undergraduate program; 1997).Currently, Dr. Berardi is an adjunct professor of Exercise Science at the Universityof Texas at Austin. Through his company, Precision Nutrition, Inc., Dr. Berardi hasworked in the exercise and nutrition arena for over a decade, working with individualsfrom all walks of life, from the sedentary to athletes at the highest level of sport.www.Precision-Nutrition.com

View the original article here

Defeating Dietary Displacement – Part II The Debates

Defeating Dietary Displacement – Part II The Debates

By Dr. John M Berardi, Ph.D.

Paralysis by Analysis

In Part I of this article, I presented a few ideas as to why the obesity rate is rapidly increasing in spite of the fact that, on average, our calorie consumption as a society hasn’t increased all that much.

In that article, I discussed the idea of a “displacing” food, a food that provides very little nutrition while simultaneously taking the place of the nutritious foods you might have consumed instead. In my opinion, displacing foods are covering our breakfast, lunch, and dinner tables and it’s this shift toward empty calories that’s making us unhealthy and obese.

In this article, I’d like to discuss another displacement idea. While displacement foods are probably at the root of many of our health and body composition crises, what I call “displacement debates” have also become a real problem. According to my definition, a displacement debate is a debate that, rather than helping people move closer toward healthy nutritional choices, simply acts to confuse and paralyze them.

For example, the average North American barely knows what a carbohydrate, protein, or fat is, yet when they hear well-respected experts at the ADA recommend high carb diets and the highly (though not universally) respected Atkins group recommend low carb diets, they get so confused and frustrated they ultimately do little or nothing proactive to improve their health.

This argument is an example of a displacing debate: an academic argument that pushes the more important problems out of the public discourse. For the average North American, following either the ADA recommendations or the Atkins recommendations would go a long way toward improving their health. But instead of suggesting that people just do something, these groups continue to bicker about who’s right at the expense of an ever-growing obesity rate.

Below I’ve presented six of the interesting displacing debates I’ve heard argued lately. Hopefully by discussing them I can put to rest the idea that these issues are of critical importance to your overall health and body composition.

I’d like you to understand that these represent small, fine tuning details which are only relevant to a small percentage of the population, if that. On the whole, these debates do more to confuse and paralyze people than to encourage them to take their health into their own hands.

1. Fruit is Bad Now?

We all know fruit provides fiber, vitamins, minerals, and low glycemic index carbohydrates, so it should be no surprise that many experts recommend eating a few servings of fruit each day. Heck, this notion has even been turned into a clichéd rhyme: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away!”
Yet some experts out there (short-sighted experts with a real lack of perspective, I might add) actually suggest that fruit might be bad for us! That’s utter nonsense.

So, imagine you’re someone with a lifetime of eating habits that are less than optimal (for some of you, it might not be so hard to do) and you’re exposed to this debate. What do you do? Well, nine times out of ten, you figure that if there’s a chance fruit is bad for you, you might as well stay away from it — probably better to reach for a Big Mac instead. After all, it does taste better.

Verdict: Eat the damn fruit.

2. Raw? Organic?

Speaking again of fruits (and vegetables), it’s recommended that the average person consume two pieces of fruit and three servings of vegetables per day as a bare minimum. Athletes probably need even more, yet most North Americans (athletes included) consume far less than the standard recommendation of five servings of fruits and vegetables.

However, rather than simply recommend more fruit and veggies (no matter how you can get them, for any fruits and vegetables are better than none), experts spend their time fighting about canned fruits and veggies vs. raw fruits and veggies. And then they fight about raw fruits and veggies vs. organic fruits and veggies! Sure, I agree that raw, organic fruits and vegetables are best since they probably have a higher micronutrient count, but let’s face the facts: any fruits and veggies are better than none!

So again, imagine you’re someone with a lifetime of bad eating habits and you’re exposed to all this bickering. What do you do? Well, you’ll probably avoid the fruits and veggies, wait for the experts to finish dueling it out, and reach for a Snickers bar instead.

Verdict: Get sufficient fruits and vegetables in your diet before worrying about whether they’re organic or not. Once you’ve done that, worry on.

3. Raw Milk vs. Regular Milk

What about milk? Most T-Nation readers know my stance on moo juice. In my opinion, it’s not necessary, doesn’t always “do the body good,” and should be minimized in the diet (although I see no need for total elimination unless you’re lactose intolerant).

However, if we could simply get more people to drink milk instead of sugary soda, we’d have less obesity and disease. But instead of focusing on healthy behaviors, experts will bicker on and on about regular milk vs. raw milk. Of course, all this does is serve to draw negative attention to milk and away from the other healthy decisions people could be making.

Sure, if it were possible to get raw milk that was guaranteed aseptic, it would be better than processed, pasteurized milk. But faced with the confusion, what do you, the hypothetical sub-optimal eater, do? Well, nine times out of ten, you avoid both kinds of milk and drink another Coca-Cola instead.

Verdict: Limit milk, and drink calorie-free beverages like water and green tea instead.

4. Tap Water vs. Bottled Water

Speaking of beverage consumption, people are dehydrated because they drink too little water while drinking too many caffeinated, diuretic drinks (coffee, soda, and alcohol). Dehydration leads to all sorts of health problems for the inactive, not to mention the decrements in athletic performance seen in dehydrated athletes.

But rather than simply promoting the heck out of water consumption, experts will bicker on and on about tap water vs. bottled water. Sure, good quality bottled water is usually a better choice, but don’t be one of these people who stay away from tap water, forget to pick up their bottled water, and simply remain dehydrated.

Verdict: Drink sufficient water first; worry about the source later. (Of course, you may want to avoid drinking out of puddles next to pig farms in Uganda.) Put a water filter on your tap or buy one of those filter jugs you store in your fridge and be done with it.

5. Glass vs. Plastic

And how about the bottles the water comes in? That’s right, the glass vs. plastic debate. Just the other day, I was recommending that a group of my athletes pick up some Tupperware so they could whip up all of their meals and shakes in the morning. It’s easy to make a good food choice during the day when you’ve got all your good food with you, pre-cooked, pre-wrapped, and ready to be eaten.

After the talk, one of the athletes came up to me and told me he avoids Tupperware altogether because of the potential leeching of xenoestrogens into his food. When I asked what he uses to store his food in, he told me he doesn’t even preplan his meals. He also told me he needed to lose fifteen pounds and that he was overweight because his nutrition sucked!

Buddy, I agree that glass containers may be marginally better than plastic, but for the love of God, pick up some plastic if it’ll help you plan your meals! And this was a world-class athlete! You can imagine how the average guy fares!

Verdict: Plan your meals in advance, storing them in woven baskets if necessary. Buy the best containers you can afford. If you can get the glass versions, great; if not, the generic plastic ones will do just fine.

6. Free Range vs. Extremely Limited Range Meat

Most weightlifters eat lots of protein and that’s no mistake. I’ve outlined the myriad of benefits associated with a high protein diet in my article, The Protein Prejudice. One of the best ways to get all that protein is by eating a lot of protein and micronutrient-rich lean meat. Protein supplements are okay to supplement your diet, but real food should be your nutritional mainstay and there’s nothing better than good ol’ fashioned meat.

Since eating more protein can increase metabolic rate, improve your weight loss profile, increase protein turnover, accelerate exercise adaptation, and (when replacing dietary carbohydrate) decrease the chance of cardiovascular disease, it should be clear that most people would do well to increase their consumption of lean meat.

So imagine the dismay someone might experience when hearing that the experts are now bickering about the type of meat we consume. Many experts muddy the waters when discussing free range vs. grain fed meat, telling people that grain fed meat (the only kind you can find in many grocery stores in North America) is full of toxins, bad fats, and hormones.

Sure, free-range meat is probably a better choice, although there’s little proof the supposed toxins and hormones actually get passed on to us. But again, imagine you’re someone with a lifetime of eating habits that are less than optimal and you’re exposed to all this bickering about lean protein. What do you do? Well, when you’re afraid of the meat you have access to, you shy away from all types of lean meat and reach for another bagel. Bad choice!

Verdict: Find the best meat you can by going around to various grocery shops and butchers. Owners of health food stores may also be able to help you locate the best stuff. But don’t be afraid to eat the meat you find in your grocery store — the reports of your impending death are greatly exaggerated.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the displacing debates gaining momentum in the nutrition world. Throughout your lifetime, you’ll be inundated with new experts, new nutritional plans, and new “revolutionary systems.” Rather than letting these new ideas be a source of frustration and confusion, do your best to get past the marginalia, to get past the differences between all the new programs, and try to discover for yourself the basic principles all the successful programs seem to be built upon.

Most importantly, when faced with a choice between two good options, one of which may be marginally better than the other, but both of which would be an improvement over what you’re currently doing, just pick one and go with it. You can optimize later, as long as you make an improvement now. There’s no debating that.

I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of Precision Nutrition, where I’ll show you in great detail exactly what to do.

————————————-
About the Author Dr. John M. Berardi PhD, CSCS
Dr. Berardi’s philosophy is simple: people from all walks of life, from soccerstars to soccer coaches to soccer moms, should have access to the most recentdevelopments in health, exercise, and nutrient science. Dr. Berardi and his company,Precision Nutrition, Inc. have one purpose: to take the latest in advanced nutritionresearch and teach it to others in a way that doesn’t take an advanced degree tofigure out. Dr. Berardi has earned a doctoral degree from the University of WesternOntario (2005) with a specialization in the area of exercise biology and nutrientbiochemistry. Prior to his doctoral studies, Dr. Berardi studied Exercise Scienceat Eastern Michigan University (Masters program; 1999) as well as Health Science,Psychology, and Philosophy at Lock Haven University (Undergraduate program; 1997).Currently, Dr. Berardi is an adjunct professor of Exercise Science at the Universityof Texas at Austin. Through his company, Precision Nutrition, Inc., Dr. Berardi hasworked in the exercise and nutrition arena for over a decade, working with individualsfrom all walks of life, from the sedentary to athletes at the highest level of sport.www.Precision-Nutrition.com

View the original article here