Calorie Density Explained and More | Dr. Neal Barnard on The Exam Room Podcast

i'm just [Music] [Music] welcome to the exam room live brought to you by the physicians committee hi i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll and this this is the healthiest half hour anywhere online today and we appreciate you joining us right here on facebook and on youtube today we are going to be talking about calorie density what is it can we use it to lose weight once we understand it well that's just one of the questions that are in the doctor's mailbag today and so school of superb nutrition is in session and the man with the answer to all of your questions dr neil barnard is here with us so make sure that you get your question in right now as a matter of fact you can submit your question anything related to health and nutrition just go ahead and drop that in the comments or the chat you can even tweet it to us using the hashtag exam room live now as we come on the air speaking of twitter it is saint patrick's day wearing green obviously and i put up a poll on my twitter page at chuck carroll wlc asking what your favorite green is and as of this very moment when we record this spinach nearly half of the vote kale is in second and then it's kind of a hodgepodge so if you want to get in on that head over to chuck carroll wlc or just go ahead and leave your favorite green in the comments as well but make sure that you get your question in for dr neil barnard here as we open up the doctor's mail bag and dr barnard uh welcome to the show my friend happy st patrick's day great to see you chuck let's start with the question if you're going to cast your vote for favorite green are you going for spinach are you a kale guy an arugula guy yes i'm at all of you when it come when it comes to foods in general and vegetables in particular i'm going to vote for variety you might love spinach but it shouldn't be spinach spinach spinach and spinach it should be spinach and broccoli and brussels sprouts and kale vary them around because that way you're going to really be getting the nutrition that you like and also is you're going to keep it fresh and fun now there's never a need to bring the animal products back into it but when you're looking at plant-based foods go for a wall go for variety yeah i'd like that idea and that way you're eating green every day doesn't that mean make every day kind of st patrick's day you're always celebrating with a pint of brussels sprouts or spinach or kale and you can do this for breakfast um i know it sounds funny because americans aren't kind of in the tradition of doing that but you can steam up some broccoli spray a little brags on it or something like that and it can be a part of your breakfast outside i am not kidding i'm not kidding give it a try somebody a lot of people on staff here are are big fans of doing salads and greens for breakfast that was a foreign concept to me until i came aboard now i'm a huge fan myself so you are definitely onto something sir uh let's go ahead and open up that doctor's mailbag right now again get your question in by posting it in the comments or the chat box and we will do our best to get to as many as we possibly can before the end of the show dr barnard first question that comes to us from a viewer on youtube wants to know about calorie density first of all what is it and once we understand it how can we use it to lose weight okay calorie density just means how many calories are there per unit of food that you're eating and it's usually measured by how many calories there are per gram of food and to give you an example let's say you pick up some sugar uh sugar has four calories in every gram that sounds like it's got a lot of calories but it's really not as high as chicken fat let's say i take chicken fat how many calories per gram does it have not four not five not six it's got nine calories per gram and as a general rule carbohydrates and sugars have four calories per gram fats have nine so what that means is if you are eating more carbs and less fat most people are going to be are going to more easily lose weight because there aren't so many calories in there however people get a little more a little fancier with it and so yes fattier foods pack a lot of calories their calorie dense um foods that are rich in you in carbohydrates starchy foods like grains and beans and vegetables less calorie dense but foods that are rich in fiber get some special benefits so white rice that carbohydrate has four calories per gram just like brown rice but the brown rice has the fiber around it and that fiber has more or less no calories at all so if you have high fiber foods they fill you up but they don't have calories and that reduces the calorie density even more and lastly water how about water zero calories so if i take my vegetables and i chop them up um if there's carbohydrate and fiber less calories than if it was uh a cream of chicken soup where the cream of the chicken had a lot of fat a lot of calories but if i chop up my vegetables and i eat them as vegetables i can reduce the energy density even more by turning them into soup because the water has no calories at all so the whole idea of calorie density is for weight loss that's what it's usually used for uh i want to go to the foods that have the least calorie density and that's obviously fiber and water but it really means vegetables fruits whole grains beans the ones that are not so fatty and that's that's how you use it next question is one that really a lot of people can probably use this particular information because nearly everybody has at least one can of beans in their pantry and so this viewer on youtube wants to know when it comes to canned beans is it better to get them with or without salt they're asking because the ones without salt actually contain calcium chloride whereas the ones with salt do not um first of all i'm glad you're eating your beans however you're getting them that's good um even if they have the salt in them beans beat the heck out of spam so it's always a good thing good thing to do um they're high in fiber they're high in healthy complex carbohydrates they're very nutritious zero cholesterol um but the fine point is wait a minute you get the no salt added ones or the ones with added salt generally speaking if your salt intake is getting over about two grams a day that's going to be in the range where it's going to start affecting blood pressure for many people so goings low salt is good so generally speaking yes it's worth it to choose the no salt added ones or reduced salt ones but if you are nervous about cooking your beans you might give it a try i felt that way too i thought life's too short to spend in my time soaking cooking beans and then i realized something really important they soak themselves they don't require supervision so you take your beans dried beans put them in a in a big tub of water um and just leave them overnight and you actually don't have to supervise them and then the next day drain that water away replace it with fresh water and boil them for an hour or give or take until they're nice and soft they should not be al dente and once again you can do something else while they're cooking and you will discover it's extremely cheap it tastes a little bit better than the store-bought ones because they're so fresh and then you are completely in charge of whatever goes into them salt no salt uh spices no spices whatever you want and one thing i like to do is take those cooked beans this is more than you ask for a chuck isn't it sorry okay just one last tip um get your black beans cooked up or pinto beans or whatever and get one of these little do you know those immersion blenders oh yeah oh yeah the kind you take in your hand you go whiz down the beans and then spoon them into those little tiny tupperware uh portion type containers and freeze them and you can bring them to work run it under a little hot water the beans break out like an ice cube you can nuke it in your microwave and you've got a whole serving of beans that you can have with rice with vegetables with little salsa whatever you want costs pennies is extremely convenient and you just throw them in your freezer you've got one whenever you want it all this talk kind of gives me an idea for your next book i think it should be barnard's book of beans and i'm telling you that that could help out so many people fantastic nutrition info that the recipes i mean good gracious you could write volumes of them you just took that one away uh these are good food they're healthy food i'm a big fan big fan all right rebecca wants to know about nuts she wants to know we know that high fat diets often can clog arteries but what about the fat found in nuts can that also clog the artery the fat that's in nuts is um it's high in calories just like every other kind of fat but the qua so in other words if you're trying to lose weight you might want to go easy on the nuts but the effect on your cholesterol level is it's going to be a not guilty verdict the fat in nuts is much lower in the saturated fat that you'll find in in butter for example or in chicken fat um that saturated fat is the one that raises your cholesterol nuts don't have that nuts don't have cholesterol either so as far as your cholesterol level goes nuts can get a green light let's talk about diabetes this is a follow-up question to a conversation i had recently with cyrus combata from uh mastering diabetes lots of great questions came in that day we couldn't get to them all but i really like this one somebody asked flat out is there a single study showing that sugar directly causes diabetes instead of fat you know there have been a number of studies that seemed to show that at first glance and there was um a quite a good seeming meta-analysis where researchers looked at at sugary foods and risk of developing diabetes and in fact um it's it seemed that that sugary sodas were a particular problem but then researchers discovered something else non-sugared sodas did the same thing in fact they were as bad or worse and what that suggested was it wasn't so much the sugar in the soda is the fact that the soda is consumed with hamburgers and cheeseburgers and fried chicken and that kind of thing so then when you when researchers have looked further they have found that by and large sugars sugar intake is not associated with diabetes this doesn't mean that having a lot of refined sugar is health food it's not but diabetes itself type 2 diabetes the common type begins as insulin resistance in your muscle and liver cells they're not able to get sugar out of the blood into the cell because they're not responding to insulin normally and that comes from fat in the foods that you eat packing fat inside fat inside your cells so bottom line sugar is not really health food but it's not the cause of diabetes that's way too simplistic diabetes comes from eating unfortunately a typical western type diet that packs the fat into our cells that leads to insulin resistance that leads to diabetes let's stick with the s train here from sugar let's go over to soy monique is wondering is there a low-fat way of eating soy uh great question um you will the soybean is a little bit different from other beans in that black beans pinto beans very very low in fat the soy just by a fluke of nature has a little bit more fat in it the fat in soy is what we call good fat it's not going to affect your cholesterol level things like that to any degree but if you're really trying to cut down on the amount of fat you eat you might have soy but have it perhaps you could have more modest amounts if you have a little slice of some grilled tofu or something for breakfast you can have about three grams of fat in in one serving that's really not very much and not something i would really worry about you all you will also see different brands vary in their fat content and just look some of some of them are reduced fat and you can choose those if you'd like here's a question from forrest adopted a whole food plant-based diet lost about five kilograms definitely watching us from across the pond uh congratulations on your success four says that they have lost about five kilograms but have since stalled they have another ten to go what advice can you offer okay well first of all congratulations on making the change congratulations on losing five kilos what's that eleven pounds something like that that's great with that yep uh you want to lose some more um what i would do number one maintain your completely plant-based diet if there's any animal contraband in there get that out no chicken no fish nothing and then do a search and destroy for fatty foods this is back to what we were talking about earlier where oils nuts the fat that they contain is not as bad as the fat that's in animal products for your cholesterol level but for your waistline all fats are about the same they're all loaded with calories that's that calorie density thing so stick with the vegan diet but go really low oil what does that mean it means don't use oils when you're preparing foods if you're buying a salad dressing get the non-oil types and be really modest with nuts peanut butter avocados those are the fattier foods and what you'll typically see is your weight loss then picks up again let's talk about cooking methods we have a couple of questions in the mailbag about those we'll start with microwaving someone wants to know is microwaving food safe and if so does it lock in the nutrients or does it kill them off um microwaving is probably fine and when microwaves were first introduced i was with you i was nervous about it i would go into the kitchen wearing my lead apron push the button and race out just kidding um but we did wonder if microwaves were safe and and the data that have come in seem to suggest that they are quite safe um assuming that your machine is relatively recent and is not emitting microbes around your kitchen um and then with regard to its effect on foods uh it does not remove the nutrition it does not destroy it to any substantial degree so microwaving is perfectly fine and from a microwave to an airfryer juliana wants to know is food cooked in an air fryer actually healthy yes uh thumbs up for air frying yup you can go for it and you know what's your alternative you know deep frying or something like that no air air fryers are great um and it's kind of a new thing but people are really coming to enjoy it all right question from denise it is colorectal cancer awareness month she's got a great question she wants to know do the guidelines for colon cancer screenings after the age of 50 change if you've had a parent who has had colon cancer if you have a parent with colon cancer that means two things it can mean that you may be at slightly higher genetic risk but it also might mean that you picked up some habits from your parents that might have stuck with you for a while and maybe you're on a healthier diet now but if we picked up not such good eating habits from our parents um earlier in life then our hair our health will be influenced to the same extent that their health was influenced by their eating habits what does that mean that means that let's say my father mother had colorectal cancer they were immediately all their life they gave that diet to me and for half my life i was a meat eater too my risk is higher beauty is that if you change your diet now your risk does gradually diminish and it gets lower and lower and lower but it but for colorectal cancer it doesn't get to zero so when you speak with your your caregiver talk with talk with your caregiver about how often you should have um a colonoscopy or other kinds of screening um it varies a lot and there there are uh gastroenterologists who recommend them every x number of years every every five years for example would be typical um however there are others who will say no don't have them that often if you're following a healthy little fat vegan diet and you're attentive to your bowel patterns and so some some uh encourage having them encourage people to have them much less frequently because they're concerned about adverse events uh where i come down with this is that i i really think that the benefits are are substantial particularly for people who haven't been on such a healthy diet and the risks are really very very small but do talk with your caregiver about how often you should have one dr barnard the last time you were on the show you and i spoke about iodine and that has been actually really a conversation that's carried over for a number of months now so we have a follow-up uh from rm12 rm on here at 1209 wants to know are nori sheets okay as a source of iodine or should you be supplementing instead okay great question uh nori sheets are fine and for people who don't know what we're talking about you go into the sushi bar and they give you your cucumber roll or your asparagus roll the green seaweed that it's wrapped in is nori and they sell it at health food stores and it looks like an 8 by 11 sheet of paper but it's all green that's seaweed nori is has a lot of iodine in it but not too much so it's not dangerous and you can have it every single day but you might want to vary it have some nori have some wakame wakame is the one that's in these little kind of like sticks and you break it up and put it into your miso soup which is super easy to make you might try another one that many people are not aware of called arame a-r-a-m-e and arame is really fine and if you take some cucumbers slice the cucumbers as thin as potato chips lay them out salt them a little bit and put some arame on top and a little seasoned rice vinegar and you will have the most delightful light salad you've ever had and all of these have abundant iodine in them and if that's part of your daily routine then i wouldn't bother supplementing next question comes to us from italian prankster i like that name i bet they have a lot of fun in life italian prankster can eating pasta or potatoes or bread clog arteries or cause other problems lots of starch there the starch doesn't what you put on the starch mic the potato goes into the oven with no cholesterol and no bad fat but it comes out of the oven and we put the butter cheese doodles baco bits on top that's the problem um the spaghetti comes out of the pot zero cholesterol virtually no saturated fat really healthy food and what do we do we put on the alfredo sauce you know um and the the ground beef sauce that's really the problem not the starch frankly the more starch you eat or the more the more it's part of your healthy diet frankly that's that's fine that's what uh powers your muscles that's what power your powers your brains the danger is what you're putting on top of it carrie carroll is watching right now i want to say hi i don't think that we're related but i appreciate you tuning in um sheena this is a question that we get quite often but always worth and ask is extra virgin olive oil actually healthy keep in mind what you're doing um you're taking 10 000 olives and you're squishing out all that oil and throwing away the fiber and all the pulp you're throwing away the olive and just using that extract which is the oil and it is better than b fat or chicken fat when i say better it's much lower in saturated fat which is the one that that will clog your arteries so b fat about 50 of the fat in beef is the saturated form that raises your cholesterol chicken fat pretty high too about 30 with olive oil down to about 14 percent so it's better uh it's a lot better and if a person switches from butter to olive oil that's a healthy choice but what you'll discover is when you start using non-oil cooking techniques and you've got other ways of dressing up your salad then you find that that last bit of saturated fat that was in the oil is all gone and your calorie density your energy density goes down too and that means when you stand on the scale it's smiling at you more than it was before all right so we talked olive oil now let's talk coconut oil take a question from karen she says i don't actually eat coconut oil but i do use it as moisturizer for my skin rather than using a commercial moisturizer with a laundry list of ingredients is that still bad for our bodies i guess she's talking about absorbing fat through osmosis i'm not quite sure yeah that's what she's asking i think and and that's fine you're not going to absorb it through your skin but i'm glad you asked that because that gives me a chance to once again say that when people go to a vegan diet um don't skip the products that have coconut oil and palm oil in them because they're really really high in saturated fat but if you use it externally i'd say okay uh we have a question from a viewer wondering about fat in menopausal women she says that she's been told that it is critically important she wants to know whether or not that is accurate every person needs a little bit of fat in the diet but that you the amount that you need is so small that everybody is is eating way more than that what i mean is two or three percent of your calories should come from fat if you ate nothing but broccoli you would be getting probably more than two or three percent of your calories from fat because vegetables have tiny traces of natural oils that your body needs you don't need more than that and you said that you're a woman after menopause if you're thinking about gee how do i deal with weight gain now how do i deal with minimizing my heart risk how do i deal with hot flashes let me encourage you to follow a diet that has no animal products in it and keeps the oils really really low you you don't need those those uh added oils question regarding uh the diet with diabetes we have a viewer at 12 23 kingdom living wants to know can you eat oatmeal if you have diabetes as much as you want oats a source of healthy complex carbohydrates but they have very little fat in them so the fat is the part that drives that insulin resistance so oatmeal is great and oats have a special thing that you probably heard about in their tv commercials they say it'll lower your cholesterol it does not a lot but a couple of percentage points might come down on your cholesterol and that's because of the soluble fiber that oats have so knock yourself out okay so we talked about the healthy fats that are found in nuts earlier and we have another viewer now who's wondering about the fat that is found in avocado says that a doctor told me that avocados aren't necessarily the same as other fats she says that you can eat an unlimited amount of them is that true can you eat as much guacamole as your heart desires you can it's just a question of what your health goals are if you're trying guacamole is delicious you know avocados are delicious but if you're trying to lose weight one of the really sad things is that there are a few uh fruits of nature that happen to have enough fat to sink ship and avocado is one of them um nuts are the other um so if if weight loss is not a goal for you then i wouldn't worry too much about the fat that's in an avocado or in a nut but if weight loss is a goal for you you'll discover that you do better when you set the guac aside melma is making the transition over to a plant-based diet and one of the foods that a lot of people first making that step look at are those beyond burgers she's wanting to know whether or not they are healthy they are methadone is what they are um meaning if you are a meat addict i i'm a little tongue-in-cheek with you here if you're addicted to meat then your methadone in other words your replacement drug is going to be the beyond burger or the impossible burger and that's why those products were made when they made the impossible burger or the beyond burger those kinds of things they wanted to make sure that they would really appeal to meat eaters and so it's kind of a transitional product that has the mouth feel that meat has and they get that by having them be a little fattier than you're going to want to be over the long run so go ahead and have them have them in your dietary transition nutritionally they are way better than me and from the standpoint of the environment or or ethical issues way better however i encourage you not to stay at that stage for very long because you can do a whole lot better there are other brands like engine 2 and and you'll see boca burgers and others that have much less fat than you'll see with those brands and your taste will adjust to the lower fat content of the diet and sooner or later you'll discover that you're into really simple foods like beans and grains and vegetables and things like that this is an interesting question from apis they posted it at 12 27 wants to know can salt increase your appetite wow 12 27 it's only 12 28 right now isn't it that's you're right up to the up to date yes um salt can entry in influence your appetite in the following way um that if you have food that has just a normal sodium content on it you'll eat it and when you're fin when you're full you'll stop sodium does drive the the appetite a little bit and you can taste it you want things that are salty you want potato chips you want pretzels and things like that um and it might even drive the release of dopamine in the brain which causes which which relates to drug seeking behavior overeating all kinds of stuff and yeah the more you salt things the more you're gonna tend to eat them um and then just to punish you a little further when you've eaten that salty food um what'll happen is that you'll gain a couple of pounds of water weight also so the next day the scale will not look so good we've got time for a couple of more and this one is going to speak to the heart of a lot of people all right here we go this one is from dance and they write i enjoy a little dark chocolate every single day would that add up though to being unhealthy in terms of saturated fat sorry to break your heart again yes um it does um chocolate has some saturated fat in it and so many people will just say well i'm just going to have one little taste and not more than that and it's impossible really to say that that affects your health in any negative way um but on the other hand you're a person who goes to the 7-eleven and you get a couple of chocolate bars and have a a binge at night that's a substantial amount of saturated fat that you're having and that will show up both on the scale and on your cholesterol test all right uh let's go ahead and grab one it's from laura she writes we are a vegan household and that includes her children who are four and 19 months old she's wondering if an omega-3 supplement for them is essential because they already consume chia seeds walnuts and ground flaxseed pretty regularly is that enough or should she be looking at supplements as well first of all uh your kids are really lucky to have you as as a parent that's if every family would raise their kids the way you're doing that's just fantastic um kids do so well on vegan diets not only do they grow normally and grow very well and are healthy as kids and you'll hear a lot of parents saying that the kids don't have the ear infections and things that their dairy eating friends have but even more importantly than that they grow up with understanding what healthy foods are and having taste for healthy foods as opposed to the 45 year old meat eater who never had a healthy meal until after his heart attack was trying to rewind the clock so praise you for what you're doing so the question is about omega-3 omega-3s are naturally in a great many plant foods you mentioned some like chia but they're also believe it or not in in green leafy vegetables and traces of them and beans and if you're getting these as part of your routine and if you're not getting a lot of competing fats other fats like fryer grease what you discover is that your body can handle the omega-3s perfectly fine without any kind of extra supplement so most people are not recommending omega-3 supplements for kids or for anybody and i'm in that category i have to say but i would uh strongly recommend that your kids have a b12 supplement which is in it's in all the pediatric vitamins like a flintstones vitamin or any others they have vitamin b12 and that's not negotiable that's essential for kids and adults and and everybody they've got to have their b12 all right let's try to knock out a couple of these rapid fire as we close up uh this is from van zanth wants to know can i drink black coffee is that healthy you can um why the research on coffee is um is one of these puzzling things because it's partly fueled by the fact that people love coffee so they're trying to find ways to rationalize their their habit but the alzheimer's disease data do seem to show that coffee drinkers have an advantage but they only get it once they're drinking about five cups per day which is a lot um the downsides of coffee are number one it does affect your personality um it will affect your mood um and it will it is caffeine is clearly addictive and so we wake up in the morning you are in physiological withdrawal um and so you go into this kind of caffeine caffeine roller coaster which can also happen to people who like tea or like sodas same story the biggest issue with coffee is what goes into it uh the creamer if it is not if it's a plant-based creamer and it's pretty low in fat not a big issue if it's cream or half and half it's a substantial source of saturated fat all right and then corrine wants to know does refined sugar cause arthritis is there a connection there short answer i don't know but when we have looked at triggers for arthritis so we've looked specifically at sugar um it it's not a common trigger um the real common triggers are things like dairy products um eggs and for some people even some things like citrus fruits and tomatoes might play a role um but with sugar it has not risen very high on that list meaning we're not seeing a lot of people for whom it appears to be a trigger that said sugar is not necessary you don't need to sprinkle sugar into things you eat and if you want to give it a try uh just go sugar free for four or five weeks and see if your joints don't feel better and if if they do then you can stick with it all right and final question comes to us from aruna wants to know are still cut oats any better than the old-fashioned rolled oats not really um they're they have a name that sounds trendier but um even instant oats still have fiber in them it hasn't been removed although sometimes they add sugar and other things that you don't need but what they've done with the oat is found just different ways of cutting it and smashing it so that it cooks more rapidly um and so old-fashioned notes are it's a whole oat but they kind of ran over their steamroller over it so that it's nice and flat and it cooks more rapidly and then to make it into one minute oats they cut each one a couple more times and then to make it instant they powder it but it's still the same it's still the same mode all right and with that we are going to go ahead and close up the doctor's mailbag if we didn't get to your question don't worry we will save it and do our best to get you an answer on an upcoming episode also if you missed any portion of today's show you can catch an immediate replay as soon as we wrap up here or make sure that you head over to apple podcast or spotify or whatever your favorite podcast provider is look for the exam room by the physicians committee hit that subscribe button and first thing tomorrow morning you will get an audio replay delivered right to your phone nice and easy and as we conclude here in case you were wondering the st patrick's day favorite green pole spinach still in the lead with 43 followed by kale but dr barnard as you said variety is indeed the name of the game here you bet exactly enjoy the greens any way you get them all right and if you want to take charge of your health you want to do it in a more one-on-one private fashion why not go ahead and make an appointment today at the barnard medical center the doctors and dietitians there really put a premium on what is on your plate can really help take your nutrition iq to the next level take help you take charge of your health so make that appointment today telemedicine visit call 202 527 7500 or log on to barnardmedical.org for a full list of states where services are available and indeed insurance is accepted and with that we are fresh out of time my friends i want to say thank you one more time to dr neil barnard for fielding so many of your great questions today and also to the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen thank you as always my friends and to you my exam roomies thank you so very much for spending a little bit of your day with us it means the world and for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again soon but until then stay safe take a stand and keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

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Length: 35min 10sec (2110 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021