Counting Calories to Stay Fit? There's a Trillion Little Problems With That. - Mother J... - 0 views
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The scientists during Atwater’s era saw the human digestive system as a single engine producing a predictable quantity of energy from a given amount of fuel.
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Yet the human gut contains a multitude of engines, and they interact with each other in ways science is just beginning to unravel. Over the past 15 years, a fast-growing body of literature suggests that the gut microbiome—the trillions of microbes that live inside us—shapes the way we metabolize food and may play an important role in how we gain weight.
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Antibiotics, it turns out, reconfigure your gut’s balance in favor of microbes that help us store food as body fat.
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Antibiotics aren’t the only force shifting our internal ecology. Modern diets are full of processed foods and low in fiber, the kind of hard-to-break-down carbohydrates found especially in vegetables, legumes, and whole grains that are crucial for a healthy microbiome.
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The vast majority of our internal microbes live in the far reaches of our digestive tract, the colon, explains Justin Sonnenburg, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford. Because of their location, these microscopic critters “really only get access to the dregs of what we eat”—the dietary fiber that our organs can’t digest. The microbes have evolved to process that fiber by fermenting it with enzymes.
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feeding this fermentation process appears to be crucial for averting weight gain and diseases like obesity and Type 2 diabetes
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“Right now, the only useful advice I could give somebody would be to eat foods naturally rich in fiber,” he says, like bran cereal and every kind of bean you can think of. Other winners included pears, avocados, apples, seeds, and nuts.
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The Institute of Medicine recommends that women eat 25 grams and men 38 grams of fiber every day, but Americans only get about 15 grams on average.
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The choice of whether to lunch on a cup of black beans or five chicken nuggets—which both contain about 220 calories—just got a whole lot easier.