Eat Healthy -- Eat More --

Moral of story, calling something healthy doesn't make it so.

Jim wrote:
| ====================== Comment ================
|
| Evidently, it is common to eat more food and calories in a "healthy
| restaurant" -- just because.
|
| Maybe it is like the "Snackwell Effect", because low fat foods were
| said to be healthier, people would eat more of them and consume more
| calories in the end.
|
| I will sometimes buy a snack because it is "Low Carb" and therefore
| healthier.
|
| Surely, others do as well. Good reason to not start "Low Carb" snacks
| in the first place? The ones you can conveniently buy in some
| convenience stores, at least.
|
| ================== End Comment ==========================
|
|
| Cornell Chronicle Online Search Chronicle Online
|
| Sept. 24, 2007
| 'Healthy' restaurants help make us fat, says a new study by Cornell's
| Brian Wansink
|
| By Susan Lang
|
| If you're like most, you eat worst at healthy restaurants.
|
| The "health halos" of healthy restaurants often prompt consumers to
| treat themselves to higher-calorie side dishes, drinks or desserts
| than when they eat at fast-food restaurants that make no health
| claims, according to a series of new Cornell studies.
|
| The research, published in the October online version of the Journal
| of Consumer Research, found that many people also tend to
| underestimate by 35 percent just how many calories those so-called
| healthy restaurant foods contain.
|
| "We found that when people go to restaurants claiming to be healthy,
| such as Subway, they choose additional side items containing up to 131
| percent more calories than when they go to restaurants like
| McDonald's, that don't make this claim," says Brian Wansink, author
| of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think" (Bantam 2006) and
| the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics and
| director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.
|
| Wansink and co-author Pierre Chandon, a marketing professor at INSEAD,
| an international business school in France, also report that by simply
| asking people to reconsider restaurants' health claims prompts them to
| better estimate calories and not to order as many side dishes.
|
| They recommend that public policy efforts help people to better
| estimate the number of calories in foods.
|
| "In estimating a 1,000 calorie meal, I've found that people on average
| underestimate by 159 calories if the meal was bought at Subway than at
| McDonald's," says Wansink. Since it takes an energy imbalance of 3,500
| calories to put on one pound, that extra 159 calories could lead to
| almost a 5-pound weight gain over a year for people eating at Subway
| twice a week compared with choosing a comparable meal at McDonald's
| with the same frequency, he says.
|
| These studies, he says, help explain why lower-calorie menus at
| fast-food restaurants have not led to the expected reduction in total
| calorie intake and in obesity rates.

Jim said:

"In estimating a 1,000 calorie meal, I've found that people on average
underestimate by 159 calories if the meal was bought at Subway than at
McDonald's," says Wansink. Since it takes an energy imbalance of 3,500
calories to put on one pound, that extra 159 calories could lead to
almost a 5-pound weight gain over a year for people eating at Subway
twice a week compared with choosing a comparable meal at McDonald's with
the same frequency, he says.

The bit about a 1000 calorie meal got my attention.

This is what made a big difference for me when I began writing
everything down when I went on insulin. I wrote down the amount of
carbs, protein and calories in each meal in order to learn to dose
insulin - to compare the meal contents with the insulin dose and my
postprandial bg readings to really optimize my insulin use - to get the
lowest bg readings for the lest amount of injected insulin.

I don't EVER need a 1000 calorie meal. And I discovered there were
rather a lot of nicely low-carb meals I was eating that were even above
that! Turns out that even when I'm very, very hungry I can get by just
fine on a 600-800 calorie meal, and when I'm not so hungry, 200-400
calories is fine (I sometimes have to eat when not hungry cause I'm on
meds that have to be taken with food, so can't skip meals).

I didn't come home from the hospital with a goal to lose weight; my
goals were to eat enough protein and micronutrients to speed my healing
and to learn to dose insulin as best possible to maintain tight bg
control. Just... I wrote everything down, so had a bit of "sticker
shock" on the calorie content of some of my meals.

EVERYONE says you gain weight when you go on insulin, but I lost weight.
And it was not exercise, cause I needed help to get in-and-out of bed,
help to shower, help to get up-and-down the stairs, so no exercise was
happening. It was just... deciding I didn't need that many calories at
a sitting.

--
http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/