THE SCOOP ON SOY

Most of us have heard that Soy protein is the most complete vegetable source of protein with all the 8 essential amino acids needed for proper assimilation and protein synthesis in the body. Also in recent years soy has been touted as a perfect milk substitute under the silk® brand name. Soy also contains isoflavones which are claimed to be beneficial to health. So is Soy really a super food or is it just another food fad headed for demise?

A little bit of history on soy first. Soy was first used as food as early as 1100 BC by the Chinese. The Chinese learnt to ferment soy beans to make tempeh, natto and tamari. Contrary to popular belief the Chinese and the Japanese eat soy sparingly as a condiment and not as a replacement for conventional dairy and meats.

Even though soy has all the 8 essential amino acids it lacks the sulfur containing amino acids, methionine and cystine. Also most soy processing denatures and destroys Lysine which is one of the most important amino acids for protein synthesis. So even thought soy is high in protein content, in most modern soy foods, it is not bio available. Soy foods also contain trypsin inhibitors that inhibit protein synthesis and pancreatic function. Lab animals fed a diet of soy exhibited stunted growth and pancreatic disorders. Soy also increases the body’s need for vitamin D which is needed for strong bones and growth. Also Soy hinders in the absorption of iron and zinc, both of which are essential for healthy brain development. Soy also lacks cholesterol (yeah the dreaded cholesterol!) which is essential for proper brain development in children.

In recent years, phytoestrogens present in soy have received widespread attention. What do these estrogen promoters do in the body? We all know estrogen is the female sex hormone responsible for sexual development in girls. High doses of these estrogen inducing compounds present in soy formulas are implicated in the current trend towards increasingly premature sexual development in girls and retarded sexual development in boys. Also it’s widely known that cancerous cells are very sensitive to the hormone estrogen. That’s the reason estrogen blockers are used in breast cancer therapy in women. So a diet rich in soy should be avoided by women that are predisposed to developing breast cancer. The other estrogen side-effect is the promotion of belly fat deposition. So a soy rich diet has been linked to hypothyroidism and weight gain in the mid section. Also estrogen production suppresses the production of testosterone in men leading to hair growth and a depressed sexual libido. So the men reading this article shouldn’t be disheartened if they love soy. They may not be able to perform but at least they will look good with a head full of hair!

To top it all off most soy products sold in the US are engineered with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in order to increase yields and many studies are now linking GMOs to the production of cancerous cells in the body. So is all soy damned? No, as long as it’s fermented (fermentation process destroys the natural toxins found in soy) and made from organic soy it’s relatively harmless in small quantities.

FAT FACTS

Try saying this 10 times as fast as you can! All jokes apart, in this article I would like to elucidate the difference between the various fat types and show which ones are good and which ones are to be avoided.

Edible fat can be categorized into four main types:

(i) Saturated Fat: The fat that is present in living cells and is derived mainly from animals and some plants. This type of fat has all the carbon atoms bonded to hydrogen atoms. These fats are abundantly present in animal sources and need no special extraction techniques and can withstand high heat without disintegration of free radicals. Mostly derived from milk and other animal sources. Some vegetable sources of these fats are coconut oil, palm oil and cocoa butter. These fats are solid at room temperature. These fats have received bad publicity in the recent decades due to bad research and good marketing by the vegetable oil and the pharmaceutical industry. Contrary to popular belief these fats haven’t been shown to increase long term cholesterol production in the human body. These fats are ideal for cooking at high temperatures due to their inherent stability at withstanding high heat.

(ii) Mono-unsaturated Fat: These fats are missing one hydrogen atom per C-C bond resulting in a double C=C bond. These fats are derived from nuts like walnuts and almonds and require no special processing techniques in order to derive as the nuts are rich in these types of fat. Olive oil is also rich in MUF and is derived by cold pressing olives which again are rich in oil. These fats have been found to be very healthy for the heart and for general well being. These fats cannot withstand very high heats like saturated fats. Best eaten raw or on salads.

(iii) Poly-unsaturated Fat: As it implies this type of fat has many more C=C double bonds and is mainly derived from vegetables and grains sources such as corn. Since these vegetables and grains are naturally low in fat a large quantity has to be processed in order to derive very little oil. These oils require a lot of processing with fancy chemicals and techniques such as hexane and supercritical carbon dioxide in order to remove impurities and prolong shelf life. In the process it loses most of the vitamins naturally present in the oil. These fats suppress immune response and are hence used in organ transplants. Believe it or not these oils were invented before human consumption for use in the paint industry, but after WWII and the post industrial revolution era the vegetable oil industry aggressively started promoting it as a healthy saturated fat substitute (based on an inconclusive study by Ancel Keys). Not suited for high temperature cooking these fats disintegrate to liberate free radicals that are the cause of a lot of modern aging ailments. Best used in salad dressings and low temperature cooking.

(iv) Trans-Fat: The only man-made fat that is derived by pumping hydrogen gas at a high pressure into poly-unsaturated vegetable fats at a high temperature in the presence of nickel catalyst. Contrary to popular belief repeated deep frying in vegetable oil doesn’t yield trans-fat due to the lack of a nickel catalyst to complete the reaction. This type of fat is to be avoided like the plague.

Contrary to popular belief the safest oil to cook in is saturated fat as it withstands high temperatures and doesn’t liberate harmful free radicals and hasn’t been conclusively shown to increase the body’s long term cholesterol production. Since the saturated and MUFs require the least amount of processing they are safest and healthiest to consume. PUFs are also safe to consume if not used for high temperature cooking and if they are balanced by an intake of saturated and MUFs.

Just remember one thing: saturated and mono-unsaturated fats are readily available in nature and have been consumed by humans for hundreds of thousands of years while the poly-unsaturated vegetable oils are a recent creation of the 20^th century. Our bodies have evolved over several hundred thousand years consuming saturated and mono-unsaturated fats and so these are most biocompatible with the human body.

Food for thought: there was little use of edible vegetable oil before 1940s and one person in a million died of a heart attack. Now, 60 years after the rapid adoption of vegetable oil one person in 500 dies from a heart attack. Coincidence? I think not!

AMERICA'S MOST DANGEROUS EXPORT

What do you think is America’s most dangerous export? Is it nuclear technology? Is it weapons? Well, the answer is fast food! Yes fast food is America’s deadliest export in terms of the number of lives it threatens all across the globe. Obesity, especially among children is on the rise anywhere American fast food has penetrated. In Britain, for example, the number of fast food restaurants doubled between 1984 and 1993 and so did obesity among adults. The British eat the most fast food of any western European nation and have the highest obesity rate in the region. In Japan where obesity was unheard of before 1970 the obesity rates have climbed steadily since the introduction of fast food in 1971. In the 80’s the sale of fast food in Japan doubled and so did the obesity rates. India and China suffer the same fate now. Before the 90’s where people ate mostly whole wheat, rice, vegetables and unprocessed meat, they now eat, thanks to fast food, increasing amounts of processed flour, additive laden meats, sugary drinks and hardly any vegetables. This is true mostly of the younger generation in the metropolitan cities that love eating at a McDonalds or a Pizza hut. The result: a steady increase in the obesity rates, especially among children. According to a recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, China has about 92 million (5% of overall population) people with type II diabetes and India has about 51 million (7% of the overall population). Compare that to America which has about 27 million people with type II diabetes (12%). In fact it’s predicted that India and China will soon overtake the west in obesity and type II diabetes rates (in terms of overall percentages). So watch out for the big epidemic of heart disease in these regions by the time we reach our retirement age.

So why is fast food so bad? Simple! Like any other business, the fast food industry is motivated by profit. In order to make a healthy (pun intended) margin they need to use the cheapest ingredients that can last a long time without going bad. The end result is preservative laden fries (instead of freshly cut potatoes), refined flour (instead of whole flour), Margarine (instead of butter) and corn syrup (instead of plain sugar). The result is that the company’s bottom line gets fatter and so does your bottom (no pun intended).

CAN PROTEIN POWDER MAKE YOU FAT?

I have been asked this question several times. First protien and carb only have 4 cals/gram as opposed to 9 cals/gram in fat. So gram for gram protien and carbs have less calories than fat. But there is more to just the numbers. Carbs (esp. the high GI ones) are easy to convert to glucose and then later on (if unused) into stored fat where as protien is hard to convert to glucose and hence has difficulty converting into stored fat. Moreover protien (and good fat) hinder the assimilation of carbs and lower the combined GI of a meal, so it helps keep you full longer. So protein combined with a meal will actually slowdown the process of fat conversion after the meal. So the short answer is, no! Protein powder cannot make you fat, even if you don't exercise, unless it has added sugar. Health food stores sell weight gain protein powders that have protein mixed in with sugars, like maltodextrin and dextrose (pure glucose) and it is these types that will make you gain weight but then its due to the added sugar. Make sure you take a powder with sucralose or some other sweetner. And last but not the least there is always a possibility of overdoing a good thing. So use your own judgement.

Health tip:

I use protien powder mixed with milk, some strawberries, a teaspoon of almond butter and blend it to make a rich strawberry milk shake. It has high quality protien, low GI carbs from strawberries and heart healthy fat from almonds for a complete balanced meal replacement.

SHAPE-UPS: THE REVOLUTIONARY WALKING SHOES!

Just read on MSN about shape-up shoes, so I thought I’ll give my 2 cents on this. These funky looking shoes turn us into human rocking chairs and claim to give us sexy legs and butt and a strong core. Walking in them almost sounds like a new workout with its own warm-up and stretching routine (since when did we have to warm up and stretch before walking). Check them out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71cvCXp8_Tk&feature=player_embedded#!

First of all, realize that the models shown in the commercial or any other fitness commercial don’t get those bodies by solely using the product they are promoting. They get those bodies by following a diet plan and by sweating it out in the gym, period. So then the question is, will you get a body like this walking at the mall, wearing these shoes? I thought I already answered it!

These shoes claim to work your calves, legs, butt and core muscles to give you a better tone and additional calorie burn. First of all to effectively work any muscle you have to work it through the full range of motion (ROM) in order to stimulate the muscle fibers into getting stronger or burning any significant amount of calories. The amount of resistance against which the muscle is working also determines how many calories are spent. So walking at a speed of 3 miles/ hour with a body weight of 150lbs will burn about 270 calories/hour. Running at 6 miles/hour which works about the same ROM will burn about twice that much per hour because you push harder against the ground for the added speed. So looking at the women walking with these shoes it doesn’t seem like there is any increase in the ROM (or resistance) anywhere except perhaps the calves due to the rounded sole. As far as working the core trying to balance, all I can say is no one can ever lose any significant weight by doing crunches which directly hit the core. So while I wouldn’t deny that these shoes would burn some additional calories walking in them, the incremental gain (in calorie burn) wouldn’t be more than 5%.This translates to 15 additional calories for an hour of walking. Now is that enough to justify the $100+ tag on these shoes? I think you are better off walking 5 additional minutes or better even use that money to get a membership to a real gym, because when it comes to building sexy toned legs and butt, these shoes don’t hold a candle to good old fashioned squats and lunges.

P.S. if you have any low-back problems or knee pain I would suggest caution or even a physician’s advice before shelling out the green to get a pair of these.

FAILURE IS A NECESSARY PART OF TRAINING

If you never failed a rep in the gym and if you always ran the distance you said you will and if you always meet your goals in training, then how do you know you have pushed yourself to the limit? How do you know you are achieving the best that you are capable of? Do you get anxious before your workouts? Do you get nervous and sweaty palmed before your workout? If not, then I think you aren’t pushing yourself to the best of your ability. Try pushing yourself to the point of failure and that’s the only way you will know your potential. Don’t let your workouts become perfunctory just so you can get it over with. Keep challenging yourself and keep innovating in your daily workouts and that’s the only way you will endure and persevere in the long run. Don’t be afraid to fail because only then you will truly be your best or as someone put it:

“If you are afraid of being weak you will never truly be strong.”

And remember this applies to all walks of life!

THE OBSESSION WITH LOW FAT DIETS

Every now and then I hear people promoting low-fat diets, assuming that a low fat diet is naturally healthy. If fat in the body makes a person fat then it must be coming from the diet, right? It’s this simple logic that has spiraled much of the developed world into an epidemic of obesity in spite of the steady decline in overall fat consumption in our diets, thanks to the popular media and the high-carb advocates. But this couldn’t be farther from truth. The reason being that it is not the excess fat but the excess carbohydrates in our diets that gets converted to fat and stored in the adipose tissue. I have talked about the fat storage mechanism in my previous articles so I am not going to get into the details of it but I would like to reiterate that a healthy balanced diet must have ample quantities of mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) and omega-3 fatty acids.

Let’s look at why this low fat thinking won’t make people any slimmer. Take for example the raging success of low-fat yogurt parlors these days. I see these low-fat yogurt stores popping up all over the bay area faster than the weed in my lawn and people who have seen my lawn know what I am talking about. Their selling point is flavored low-fat yogurt and everyone seems to be raving about the low-fat aspect of it. So I went online to check the nutritional content of one such store and their offerings. Here is what it reads:

Figure 1.

So a small cup has two servings of these. There is no fat of course but looking at the sugar content it seems like a small cup would have about 4 teaspoons of sugar. And if you were someone like me and went for the large cup of the healthy stuff then you would end up getting about 52 grams or about 10 teaspoons of sugar. Now if you have been paying any attention to my previous articles you would know what eating sugar is going to do to your blood glucose levels and that getting fat has little to do with how much fat you eat but a lot more to do with your insulin response to sugars and high GI carbs. In fact the addition of a little healthy fat to this yogurt would be more wholesome and less fattening because fat slows the glucose response of carbs as illustrated in a study conducted in reference [1]. In this study ten healthy men received a 50-g portion of glucose alone and the same quantity mixed with butter, sunola oil (MUFA) or sunflower oil (PUFA) on separate days. Blood was collected at regular intervals for 2 h. The glycemic index (GI), insulin index (II) were calculated from the blood-work. It was found that addition of fat to a carb meal blunts the rise in blood glucose levels (shown in figure 2) following the meal which means smaller insulin response and less fat storage (remember, insulin is basically a storage hormone).

Figure 2.

So, from the way I see it, adding some healthy fat especially to a high GI carb meal would have the following benefits:

1) As illustrated above, fat slows the glucose spike in your blood from high GI carbs like sugar and starches.

2) Fat triggers the satiety centers in your brain and fills you up so you end up feeling fuller quicker (and you thought it was the guilt of eating fat that made you stop eating sooner).

3) Fat also slows your digestion and keeps your fuller longer so you don’t go for the next carb meal as quickly.

So the next time you go for a low-fat meal read the label closely for the amount of sugar or carb in a serving and even if it’s the most healthiest thing in the world adding some healthy fat from almond butter or such will only make it healthier.

REFERENCE:
Joannic, J.-L., Auboiron, S., Raison, J., Basdevant, A., Bornet, F. & Guy-Grand, B. (1997) How the degree of unsaturation of dietary fatty acids influences the glucose and insulin responses to different carbohydrates in mixed meals. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 65:1427-1433.