Quoted message said:OmManiPadmeOmelet said:I'd always considered starches as sugars.....
They're made of sugars, but they're not sugars.
All the "simple" sugars are one sugar molecule. Many common sugars are
made of two simple sugars bonded together. What winds up classified as
"sugars" are the monosaccharides and disaccharides, one-and-two sugar
molecules.
Long, branching polymers of sugar are "starch". Fiber is long,
branching polymers of sugar also. There's a somewhat different
3-dimensional layout to the branches though. Fiber is built "wrong"
for you to digest.
The reason you subtract fiber is because your body doesn't make the
enzymes to break fiber down into sugar. It *does* make enzymes to
break down starch into sugar. This is because the enzymes your body
makes don't "fit" fiber, so you can't digest it. So starch "counts" on
a low-carb diet and fiber doesn't.
The history of the dietary "Calorie" stems from work in the late 1800's
by the USDA using an Oxygen Bomb Calorimeter which measured the heat in
burning foods to vapor and ash. In this way, the fiber burned
completely, adding to the measured heat. This was a relatively cheap
way of measuring the energy in food, much like you would measure the
energy in coal or wood or gasoline.
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The study of nutrition owes a great deal to the year W.O. Atwater
spent in Carl Voit's lab in Germany. Voit's pioneering work focused on
respiration-the exchange of gases between the blood and tissues--and
calorimetry--the measurement of heat. It was Voit who had taken the
first steps toward quantifying the human body's nutritional needs.
Atwater returned to America inspired. Before long he built a room
calorimeter for human studies, as well as a bomb calorimeter for
systematically measuring the energy values in foods themselves. The bomb
calorimeter enabled Atwater to burn foods and products of
excretion--human input and output, so to speak-making it possible to
calculate the body's energy expenditure as the difference.
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Quoted message said:
However, if you were a termite, you'd make different enzymes... so
fiber would "count" after all. So termites *cannot* go on low-carb
diets. (Except it's really bacteria in termite's digestive tracts that
"eat" cellulose, not the termites themselves. But I digress.)
Yes, this is correct. This points out the hundred year old error in the
simplicity of the Oxygen Bomb Calorimeter.... or more correctly, ONE of
the errors in the use of the device.
Quoted message said:
Sugar alcohols are not really carbohydrates. They are counted as
carbohydrates on labels because carbohydrate is measured by difference,
so everything that is not a protein or a fat gets counted as a
carbohydrate. Lactic acid is "counted" as a carb in yogurt, as noted,
even though it is chemically not a carb and not treated as a carb by
the body. Just the way it works.
This may be related to other errors in the concept of the Oxygen Bomb
Calorimeter .... which is not an accurate description of how the human
body actually uses food. We don't convert foods to carbon dioxide,
water (dihidrogen oxide) and ash. Besides pee produced in part from
food idgestion, we [censored], and we don't all make the same [censored].
--
1) Eat Till SATISFIED, Not STUFFED... Atkins repeated 9 times in the book
2) Exercise: It's Non-Negotiable..... Chapter 22 title, Atkins book
3) Don't Diet Without Supplimental Nutrients... Chapter 23 title, Atkins
book
4) A sensible eating plan, and follow it. (Atkins, Self Made or Other)
