Calorie counting assumes that food is simply energy, the reality is that food is much more than that.
As an example a calorie from an Oreo is not the same as a calorie from broccoli.
Sure when it comes to the energy they release when burned maybe but in terms of downstream effects on the body they are totally different.
Take any of the following:
- Inflammation
- Blood Sugar
- Toxic Load
- Hormonal Cascade
- Nutrient Value
- Addictiveness
And Broccoli Wins (I’m sorry to say!)
Let’s take just two of these and show you why this is such a huge deal.
Toxic Load
Contrary to popular belief the main purpose of fat isn’t to store energy but to act as a storage place for toxins which the liver cannot deal with. So if you’re eating a high toxin diet the liver becomes overwhelmed. At which point rather than have an overload of toxins rampaging round the body causing all sorts of carnage, the body decides to encase the toxins in fat somewhere they can’t do any harm, until such a point in the future when the liver has cleared its backlog and can go to work clearing them out. At which point the body gets rid of the fat, releasing the toxins and allowing the liver to do its job.
So the higher toxic load the food you’re eating has, the more fat you are going to store.
Blood Sugar
When you eat something which spikes your blood sugar the body releases insulin, which tells the body to store any energy from what you’ve just eaten as fat.
So if you’re eating something which spikes blood sugar, you’re literally telling your body to store fat.
Most people at this point ask me, “Does That Mean I Just Have To Eat Broccoli?”
Not at all, I’m just trying to show you why only counting calories is often a waste of your time.
But it doesn’t end there…Even between different types of broccoli, a calorie is not equal to a calorie!
I’m sure you heard the fear mongering in the newspapers… Bacon more carcinogenic than smoking…etc…etc. (Often these days related to meat products.)
What they fail to take into account is…
Food Quality
Broccoli grown in nutrient depleted soil and treated with pesticides its entire life will be almost a different food to broccoli grown in nutrient dense soil with the natural pesticides provided by being grown in its true habitat.
The same is true for organically raised chickens which live off the land, eating their natural diet, moving around all day in natural sunlight and as a result are highly nutritious. As opposed to battery raised birds which never see the sun, live in terrible overcrowded conditions, are injected with all sorts of antibiotics to keep them alive in such horrendous conditions and as a result, suffer with poor health themselves.
Which would you rather eat?
Simply by understanding this key principle you can understand why it’s actually possible to eat a huge range of delicious foods which the media and many well known diet programs tell us we can’t, if we just focus on quality.
We don’t need to be afraid of our food we simply need to understand it better.
