From: Gary Barnes, President of WellnessMax, Inc.
June 28,2006
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A couple of years ago my wife, Sheila, bought me an espresso maker for Valentine’s Day. The first thing I wanted to make with it was a latte. I waited until the little green light came on and steamed the milk for what was to be the first of hundreds of lattes. However, I was disappointed at how badly the milk frothed. We were using 2% milk at that time because we were trying to cut down on fat and calories. After some time on the internet, I discovered that the less fat in the milk the better it frothed. Changing to fat-free milk made all the difference. As it turns out, the 2% milk we were using may have been helping us consume less fat but it was not really helping us reduce calories. Here is the breakdown: fresh whole milk has 150 calories in a cup; that low-fat 2% we were using has 120 calories; 1% has 105 calories; 1/2% has 90 calories; and fat-free/skimmed has 85 calories. Purely by accident, because we wanted a frothier latte, we not only reduced the fat, we reduced our calories by 65 per cup. By the way if you make your latte with Reindeer milk, it will cost you 580 calories. …but what about those calories? Eliminating fat from our diet had been a desire of ours for quite a while. Working at a medical practice and seeing people’s lab results everyday made our quest more imperative. We didn’t eat fried foods or lots of red meat, yet our cholesterol levels were always a little high. Grocery shopping became all about reading food labels. I am one of those people who thinks peanut butter is a daily requirement. Better yet, it should be a food group all of its own. My wife has a different opinion and purchased reduced-fat peanut butter for my lunches. The logic was that reduced fat would also mean reduced calories. After all, the logic taught to us by advertisers is that fat contains calories, reduced-fat products contain less fat, therefore they contain fewer calories. It turns out all the hype is not 100% accurate. Two tablespoons of reduced fat peanut butter contain 187 calories. Two tablespoons of honest to goodness stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth peanut butter contain 191 calories. My logic tells me if I eat a tablespoon of peanut butter on a low-sodium reduced-fat cracker, I can reduce the same number of calories every 47.75 crackers by eating just one less. Now that would be silly, but the point is one of the great food myths is reducing fat does not significantly reduce calories. Here’s another example. A friend of ours was dieting but not losing any weight. He had followed the same logic that led us to buy reduced-fat peanut butter. Snacks were his biggest downfall. He thought if he ate nonfat frozen yogurt instead of whole milk frozen yogurt, he would reduce his calories. Since he thought he was saving calories, he actually indulged in more yogurt than usual. The fact is his nonfat yogurt contained 100 calories in each half cup, while the whole milk half cup contained 104 calories. So when he added on an extra quarter of a cup, he was really adding on 50 calories. At WellnessMax, we use a large database program called Food Processor—which includes nutritional information on fresh, packaged and fast foods—to analyze a client’s dietary habits. It is helpful to look at the information for a complete week to better understand what you are eating. More importantly, it helps to understand the myths about reduced-fat foods. You can actually input a nutritional plan that includes reduced-fat foods, see the fat content and the calories from fat on a pie chart; and then you can do the same thing with a plan that includes no reduced-fat products. It really takes the guesswork out of meal planning. So read those labels and pay attention to the portion sizes as well as the calories and the fat. And remember that too much of a good thing can ruin your nutritional plan. |
