cool post! i will say i suspect that not having meat in the diet is a pretty substantial caveat if you want to generalize this. although it's less ethical, there's pretty good evidence for meat-eating since early hominids, and i'd really like to see the same experiment from someone who ate meat before and after it.
I put my ulcerative colitis into remission by removing grains from my diet (and then a whole bunch of subsequent but less dramatic alterations). I'm convinced that for people with a healthy baseline gut, eating moderate amounts of ultra-processed foods is unlikely to be problematic. I've actually found that fats work better than fiber for motility, so the majority of fiber left in my diet is green bananas that I freeze and blend up into delicious smoothies.
I have a weird relationship to processing b/c the more I heat and pulverize foods before they enter my body, the less likely they are to disagree with my gastrointestinal system (by and large, ofc)
Super interesting post. My question to you is: isn't 2/3rd of a kilogram within 2 standard errors of your usual mean weight? (I'm just guessing! it depends how often you weigh yourself and how much your weight usually fluctuates of course, but i wuld be surprised if the SE of your mean weight over time was less than 1 kilogram, and from the graph you showed the movement looks overall negligible relative to the uncertainty.)
On a probably slightly more interesting (?) note: " I started to have bizarre reactions when I saw someone eating bread. It went beyond envy to something bordering on contempt. Who are you to eat bread? Why do you deserve that?" this is hilarious, and i think the emotion you are describing is resentment, which is a form of... acrimonious jealousy? a rage-envy combo? something like that.
Do you really mean standard error? I'm a bit confused because I think only estimators have standard errors, not quantities?
More broadly, though, I think the point you're making is that 2/3 of of kg isn't that big and could be noise? That could certainly be true, but in principle the confidence interval for the line should account for that. Toward the end of the second diet period, the upper end of that confidence interval does dip below zero.
Of course, I don't trust that confidence interval that much...
Ah, let me explain: because any mean you could compute here would be from a relatively arbitrary sample of observations it makes sense to think of it as an estimator, for the "true mean" over some period of real interst, imo.
while the end of the CI dips below zero, the certainty on that zero is an artefact (ie its computed off your previous mean, which is estimated)
(and as perhaps your last sentence hints at, time series means are hard to compute uncertainty on very well...)
OK, so the reason you don't trust the confidence interval is just because of the uncertainty about my long-term baseline weight? That seems a little strange (although not wrong) but I don't think I'll argue, because I don't fully trust it either. Though more for general reasons, e.g. that if I changed the parameters of the smoother, I'd get a different confidence interval.
In any case, I lean towards Bayesian thinking. And even if I just look at the dots, it seems to me like they are probably going down. Not for sure, but probably!
Above all: I only claimed "decent" evidence for weight loss. Better than "weak" but worse than "good".
ah, i'm inclined to bayesianism as well, just trained to expect everyone else to be frequentist! my first (perhaps overly bayesian) thought on your post was "2/3rds of a kilo is under even a daily fluctuation for the majority of people, this can't be evidence of anything." take that revised comment for whatever you will.
Right... but that 2/3 of a kg isn't a single measurement, it's a smoothed average. The whole point of the smoothing is to remove the extra variability from daily fluctuations?
I realize this is a slightly off topic and stupidly broad question, but are there any interventions that have been definitively shown to generally increase "energy"? Other than, you know, good sleep.
I haven't specifically looked into RCTs but I'd think that the obvious ones are exercise, avoiding blood sugar spikes, and stimulants? Or if you want to cast a wide net, perhaps stress management, creatine, correcting nutritional deficiencies, bright lights during the day, napping?
I only eat unprocessed food, which is why I start my morning with a healthy dose of 10 eggs, shell and all. As de-shelling, salting, or peppering them would count as processing, I have developed an immunity to the gag-reflex normally presented when consuming an egg - by swallowing them whole.
Your resting heart rate is 40-45 bpm and your systolic blood pressure is 110, which suggests you're already very healthy. At that point I'd be surprised if you saw any noticeable short-term change in biomarkers from improving your diet. At a blood pressure of 110, it doesn't really have room to go down any further.
Glucose and blood pressure are greatly improved by exercise which means if you exercise regularly, your body can tolerate eating more "unhealthy" food.
I'm fairly healthy, although apparently my blood glucose isn't awesome (though not bad). I would have hoped to get some effect on that, although the evidence from RCTs seems ambiguous at best.
Very cool, I'm a huge fan of these n=1 experiments! Alright, I have some thoughts about this, hope any accidental unsolicited adviced is received in the way it's intended - with love!
I think the terms "processed" and "ultra-processed" are huge misnomers and very unfortunate. The way I think about the NOVA system, where "ultra-processed" is the fourth category, NOVA 4, is that in the same way that "The Big 5" (to the extent that you believe in modern psychology as a field of study) is a largely empirically discovered categorization, as opposed to invented; "ultra-processed food" is the same. And also similar to Big Five, it is the strongest predictor of [stuff] that empirical science knows of, even stronger than fat or sugar consumption, or whatever else you might think would be a good predictor of health / BMI / whatever. And that's really impressive! But of course it comes with all the caveats, which is that this doesn't prove that any particular thing in that very large category, is "unhealthy" by itself, or at all. As you say, it's correlated, but it doesn't go beyond correlation and it doesn't say anything about why.
But as I said, I have opinions, also on "why". And also as I said, I think "ultra-processed" is a terrible _name_ for the fourth category! The reason is simple: it leads to the natural intuition that "processing" surely means milled, cooked, chopped, washed; and as you note, this is both broad, and surely not bad, right? But "ultra" processed doesn't mean just "more processed", like it sounds like, really what it means "a few basic ingredients like corn or wheat or soy, decomposed using chemical processes to their essential building blocks on a molecular level and composed back together into never-before-seen molecules, which are then composed into food-like substances". A better name would be "synthetic foods"! Or even "synthetic food-like edible substances".
The reason I bring this up is that a lot of people in my circle (and I'm sure yours), when the topic comes up, bring up the same objection that "what does it even mean" and more importantly "everything is processed", and they refer to the naturalistic fallacy, that things aren't bad for you just because they're not natural. And I agree! I am a Rational person and I know very well what the natural fallacy is; things aren't good just because they're natural, and bad just because they're unnatural. But I also think that when you realize exactly how ultra-processed food is made, it becomes clear that there is good reason to believe it's not exactly good for you -- or rather, we would need very strong evidence to convince us that it isn't bad for us. Like, why should we assume that the human metabolism is capable of metabolizing fats in molecular forms it has never seen in its evolutionary history? That it doesn't kill us outright is itself a stroke of luck!
(trans-fats are a perfect example of how wrong this can go, and how slow the food establishment is to react to this knowledge -- it took fifty years from it was known to be killing people before it was outlawed; anything that doesn't kill you immediately like transfats are likely to never be removed or at least allowed to exist in our foods for a very, very long time)
Also I would mention that even though I don't have much personal experience with this low-fat vegan stuff, a lot of vegan stuff on the market is highly ultra-processed, simply because that's the easiest and cheapest way to make stuff that's not animal based, and especially when you have to make stuff low-fat, you usually compensate by using modified starches to simulate the "mouth feel" of fats.
(also a straightforward hypothesis to how this would mess with your metabolism: simulating the feeling of fat while actually being a carbohydrate seems like a bad idea)
So my personal opinion (and here comes the unsolicited advice) is that stuff like bread is perfectly fine as long as it's "processed" -- we've been milling wheat for millenia! But the terrible part is that most bread you can reasonably buy in stores, is "synthetic food-like edible substances" (or "ultra-processed" for short), so this is only half-actionable advice. I also think the studies bear this out, it is the fourth category that is predictive of bad health outcomes, not mere "processed". So eat bread! And lots of other stuff that's processed. But try to get it from a baker that actually makes bread, and not a supermarket that sells hydrogenated oils and modified starches that look like bread.
I guess my instinct is also that the difference between "processed food" and [edit: "ultra -processed food"] (or between "food" and "non-food" as I think Michael Pollan would call it) is probably more important than the difference between "processed food" and unprocessed food. At least I hope that's right, because that's the diet I've followed before and after this experiment. :)
I do expect that some day we'll understand nutrition enough that we can actually create some "synthetic food-like substances" and be confident they're fine. But I don't think we're there yet.
I too, in accordance with my disbelief in the naturalistic fallacy, think that's *possible*. But that will require people to do science on how these things affect us, and now we are basically not even considering the question!
(Consider how everything from maltodextrin and modified starches to partionally hydrogonated oils have not only been given to humans without testing, but made into the majority of the majority of people's diet!)
Actually I think this is because nutrition scientists (and people in general) are falling for another fallacy, where they believe it would be "unscientific" or irrational that anything other that the macro-scale fat, carbs and protein content of food could have any effect on people. It's like a reductionist fallacy(?), where you think reductionism is *so* true that you abstract away the entire world. Nevermind that different fats have different molecular structures, or in the other direction, that bigger scale structures could be important.
Urf, yeah, sorry. I meant the difference between "processed" and "ultra-processed" not between "processed" and "unprocessed". Which, unfortunately, completely changes the meaning!
Oh, the pulse measurements are all taken rested. (If my pulse was 50 while exercising, that would really be something.)
My baseline diet is pretty healthy, but not extreme. So more like bread. I do occasionally eat fried foods and desserts, but I try to treat those as "sometimes foods", and only eat perhaps 1-4 servings per week. If I had to give a number, my best guess is that my diet would probably be around the 90th percentile of healthiness, relative to people in the Anglosphere?
I don't know but it tastes great. You should try the Barillo spaghetti or pasta if you haven't had any whole wheat pasta in a few years. I was staggered by the improvement.
I haven't tracked my progress with bp or cholesterol or even getting on the scales, but the difference is extremely noticeable in terms of how I feel. N=1 but for me it was the 1 that counts.
Good study! The high level summary seems to be *maybe* 1 to 2.5 IQ points based on how you measure, though it's not super clear if the effect is real. (Honestly, I think that's about all you could hope for from creatine...)
"In terms of raw scores, the effect size for BDS was 0.41 additional correct items, i.e. a 0.2-digit longer digit span, because there were always two-digit spans of the
same length. For RAPM, the effect was 0.23 more matrices solved (Fig. 2). If these were IQ tests, this increase in raw scores would mean 2.5 IQ points for BDS (using
the standard deviations of a normative study [47] or our own baseline gives the same result, see Appendix). For RAPM, the improvement would be 1 IQ point (using the standard deviation of our own baseline, see Appendix)."
I’ve used it on and off a few times and not noticed any obvious gainz or cognitive effects. Some fitness folks swear by it as part of the Bro Science Stack, but idk.
With glycine I notice a clear effect on my sleeping, so that’s easy.
The most obvious effect for me is a big increase in water weight. (Which I actually like.) I think the evidence that it makes you a little bit stronger is pretty immense, but the effect is small.
Given that there's so much creatine in meat, I mentally classify it more as a "nutrient" than a "drug". I tend to think that it could plausibly have some mild cognitive benefits (especially if you don't eat much meat) but there's no clear evidence to that effect as far as I know.
An experiment you might consider is just change to 100% whole grains -- that is pretty easy these days, you can buy 100% whole grain bread that tastes great (Dave's !). Ditto bagels. Barillo has a 100% pasta that doesn't feel grainy. They've got both spahetti and rotini. You can buy whole grain rice that is 'quick rice' -- it is a lot more expensive than buying brown rice and cooking it yourself but it is really fast, and comes out perfect every tme. Kodak even has delicious muffin mixes etc that are 100%.
For me just switching from white italian bread to Dave's Good Seed cause a dramatic decrease in blood sugar spikes. It was like overnight. So I got the Kodiak muffins and they taste better than the white flour ones and also don't cause problems. Then I changed over to Barllo's spaghetti. Used to be that whole grain spaghetti was a serious sacrifice, but this stuff is better tasting that the spaghetti made out of white flour, and I've never noticed any graininess at all.
So I've been really happy with the whole process. I don't feel like I'm on a diet at all.
Stupid question, but is whole grain bread actually better? My impression was that the glycemic index was only a tiny bit better? I love whole grain bread FWIW but I hate hate hate whole grain pasta. :)
But it looks like Dave's Good Seed bread has a GI of ~53, which is much better than "normal" white bread. How do they do it?
I've been married to a diabetic for many years, and the plain fact is that the official glycemic index doesn't always have any relationship to a specific individual's blood glucose. Stuff that isn't supposed to spike my spouse's bg will send it soaring. Fat isn't supposed to spike bg, but it does for my spouse. I believe you just have to test stuff out on yourself. It's really irritating!
Interesting! According to the AI I asked, Dave's bread achieves this through "whole grain content, high fiber, and significant amount of seeds" while Ezekiel does it because it's made from sprouted grains. (Why sprouted grains have so much lower GI seems extremely complicated and confusing though.)
cool post! i will say i suspect that not having meat in the diet is a pretty substantial caveat if you want to generalize this. although it's less ethical, there's pretty good evidence for meat-eating since early hominids, and i'd really like to see the same experiment from someone who ate meat before and after it.
I put my ulcerative colitis into remission by removing grains from my diet (and then a whole bunch of subsequent but less dramatic alterations). I'm convinced that for people with a healthy baseline gut, eating moderate amounts of ultra-processed foods is unlikely to be problematic. I've actually found that fats work better than fiber for motility, so the majority of fiber left in my diet is green bananas that I freeze and blend up into delicious smoothies.
I have a weird relationship to processing b/c the more I heat and pulverize foods before they enter my body, the less likely they are to disagree with my gastrointestinal system (by and large, ofc)
Super interesting post. My question to you is: isn't 2/3rd of a kilogram within 2 standard errors of your usual mean weight? (I'm just guessing! it depends how often you weigh yourself and how much your weight usually fluctuates of course, but i wuld be surprised if the SE of your mean weight over time was less than 1 kilogram, and from the graph you showed the movement looks overall negligible relative to the uncertainty.)
On a probably slightly more interesting (?) note: " I started to have bizarre reactions when I saw someone eating bread. It went beyond envy to something bordering on contempt. Who are you to eat bread? Why do you deserve that?" this is hilarious, and i think the emotion you are describing is resentment, which is a form of... acrimonious jealousy? a rage-envy combo? something like that.
Do you really mean standard error? I'm a bit confused because I think only estimators have standard errors, not quantities?
More broadly, though, I think the point you're making is that 2/3 of of kg isn't that big and could be noise? That could certainly be true, but in principle the confidence interval for the line should account for that. Toward the end of the second diet period, the upper end of that confidence interval does dip below zero.
Of course, I don't trust that confidence interval that much...
Ah, let me explain: because any mean you could compute here would be from a relatively arbitrary sample of observations it makes sense to think of it as an estimator, for the "true mean" over some period of real interst, imo.
while the end of the CI dips below zero, the certainty on that zero is an artefact (ie its computed off your previous mean, which is estimated)
(and as perhaps your last sentence hints at, time series means are hard to compute uncertainty on very well...)
OK, so the reason you don't trust the confidence interval is just because of the uncertainty about my long-term baseline weight? That seems a little strange (although not wrong) but I don't think I'll argue, because I don't fully trust it either. Though more for general reasons, e.g. that if I changed the parameters of the smoother, I'd get a different confidence interval.
In any case, I lean towards Bayesian thinking. And even if I just look at the dots, it seems to me like they are probably going down. Not for sure, but probably!
Above all: I only claimed "decent" evidence for weight loss. Better than "weak" but worse than "good".
ah, i'm inclined to bayesianism as well, just trained to expect everyone else to be frequentist! my first (perhaps overly bayesian) thought on your post was "2/3rds of a kilo is under even a daily fluctuation for the majority of people, this can't be evidence of anything." take that revised comment for whatever you will.
Right... but that 2/3 of a kg isn't a single measurement, it's a smoothed average. The whole point of the smoothing is to remove the extra variability from daily fluctuations?
Ah! you dont say anywhere in the post that it's a smoothed average.
I realize this is a slightly off topic and stupidly broad question, but are there any interventions that have been definitively shown to generally increase "energy"? Other than, you know, good sleep.
I haven't specifically looked into RCTs but I'd think that the obvious ones are exercise, avoiding blood sugar spikes, and stimulants? Or if you want to cast a wide net, perhaps stress management, creatine, correcting nutritional deficiencies, bright lights during the day, napping?
Ooo! Great job on the experiment. Best way to find ground truth for you.
For blood pressure, yours is already great. It will be difficult to lower further.
Studies show refined grains to be neither good nor bad for all-cause mortality. Enjoy your bread!
Yes, processed foods is a useless category, mixing the bad (sugary beverages) and good (whole grain cereals). https://newsletter.unaging.com/p/beyond-broad-categories
I only eat unprocessed food, which is why I start my morning with a healthy dose of 10 eggs, shell and all. As de-shelling, salting, or peppering them would count as processing, I have developed an immunity to the gag-reflex normally presented when consuming an egg - by swallowing them whole.
Your resting heart rate is 40-45 bpm and your systolic blood pressure is 110, which suggests you're already very healthy. At that point I'd be surprised if you saw any noticeable short-term change in biomarkers from improving your diet. At a blood pressure of 110, it doesn't really have room to go down any further.
Glucose and blood pressure are greatly improved by exercise which means if you exercise regularly, your body can tolerate eating more "unhealthy" food.
I'm fairly healthy, although apparently my blood glucose isn't awesome (though not bad). I would have hoped to get some effect on that, although the evidence from RCTs seems ambiguous at best.
Very cool, I'm a huge fan of these n=1 experiments! Alright, I have some thoughts about this, hope any accidental unsolicited adviced is received in the way it's intended - with love!
I think the terms "processed" and "ultra-processed" are huge misnomers and very unfortunate. The way I think about the NOVA system, where "ultra-processed" is the fourth category, NOVA 4, is that in the same way that "The Big 5" (to the extent that you believe in modern psychology as a field of study) is a largely empirically discovered categorization, as opposed to invented; "ultra-processed food" is the same. And also similar to Big Five, it is the strongest predictor of [stuff] that empirical science knows of, even stronger than fat or sugar consumption, or whatever else you might think would be a good predictor of health / BMI / whatever. And that's really impressive! But of course it comes with all the caveats, which is that this doesn't prove that any particular thing in that very large category, is "unhealthy" by itself, or at all. As you say, it's correlated, but it doesn't go beyond correlation and it doesn't say anything about why.
But as I said, I have opinions, also on "why". And also as I said, I think "ultra-processed" is a terrible _name_ for the fourth category! The reason is simple: it leads to the natural intuition that "processing" surely means milled, cooked, chopped, washed; and as you note, this is both broad, and surely not bad, right? But "ultra" processed doesn't mean just "more processed", like it sounds like, really what it means "a few basic ingredients like corn or wheat or soy, decomposed using chemical processes to their essential building blocks on a molecular level and composed back together into never-before-seen molecules, which are then composed into food-like substances". A better name would be "synthetic foods"! Or even "synthetic food-like edible substances".
The reason I bring this up is that a lot of people in my circle (and I'm sure yours), when the topic comes up, bring up the same objection that "what does it even mean" and more importantly "everything is processed", and they refer to the naturalistic fallacy, that things aren't bad for you just because they're not natural. And I agree! I am a Rational person and I know very well what the natural fallacy is; things aren't good just because they're natural, and bad just because they're unnatural. But I also think that when you realize exactly how ultra-processed food is made, it becomes clear that there is good reason to believe it's not exactly good for you -- or rather, we would need very strong evidence to convince us that it isn't bad for us. Like, why should we assume that the human metabolism is capable of metabolizing fats in molecular forms it has never seen in its evolutionary history? That it doesn't kill us outright is itself a stroke of luck!
(trans-fats are a perfect example of how wrong this can go, and how slow the food establishment is to react to this knowledge -- it took fifty years from it was known to be killing people before it was outlawed; anything that doesn't kill you immediately like transfats are likely to never be removed or at least allowed to exist in our foods for a very, very long time)
Also I would mention that even though I don't have much personal experience with this low-fat vegan stuff, a lot of vegan stuff on the market is highly ultra-processed, simply because that's the easiest and cheapest way to make stuff that's not animal based, and especially when you have to make stuff low-fat, you usually compensate by using modified starches to simulate the "mouth feel" of fats.
(also a straightforward hypothesis to how this would mess with your metabolism: simulating the feeling of fat while actually being a carbohydrate seems like a bad idea)
So my personal opinion (and here comes the unsolicited advice) is that stuff like bread is perfectly fine as long as it's "processed" -- we've been milling wheat for millenia! But the terrible part is that most bread you can reasonably buy in stores, is "synthetic food-like edible substances" (or "ultra-processed" for short), so this is only half-actionable advice. I also think the studies bear this out, it is the fourth category that is predictive of bad health outcomes, not mere "processed". So eat bread! And lots of other stuff that's processed. But try to get it from a baker that actually makes bread, and not a supermarket that sells hydrogenated oils and modified starches that look like bread.
I guess my instinct is also that the difference between "processed food" and [edit: "ultra -processed food"] (or between "food" and "non-food" as I think Michael Pollan would call it) is probably more important than the difference between "processed food" and unprocessed food. At least I hope that's right, because that's the diet I've followed before and after this experiment. :)
I do expect that some day we'll understand nutrition enough that we can actually create some "synthetic food-like substances" and be confident they're fine. But I don't think we're there yet.
Did you forget an "ultra" somewhere in there?
I too, in accordance with my disbelief in the naturalistic fallacy, think that's *possible*. But that will require people to do science on how these things affect us, and now we are basically not even considering the question!
(Consider how everything from maltodextrin and modified starches to partionally hydrogonated oils have not only been given to humans without testing, but made into the majority of the majority of people's diet!)
Actually I think this is because nutrition scientists (and people in general) are falling for another fallacy, where they believe it would be "unscientific" or irrational that anything other that the macro-scale fat, carbs and protein content of food could have any effect on people. It's like a reductionist fallacy(?), where you think reductionism is *so* true that you abstract away the entire world. Nevermind that different fats have different molecular structures, or in the other direction, that bigger scale structures could be important.
Urf, yeah, sorry. I meant the difference between "processed" and "ultra-processed" not between "processed" and "unprocessed". Which, unfortunately, completely changes the meaning!
Note that this is also what the studies, especially Kevin Hall, says!
I don't think a lot of people claim regular processed foods have any predictive power. Hence the misnomer.
Do you also have resting heart rate data?
That is a good proxy for overall health, and I find it to be sensitive to diet.
Also, are the processed foods you do eat relatively healthy (bread) vs the processed foods people often eat (burgers, fried chicken, etc)?
Oh, the pulse measurements are all taken rested. (If my pulse was 50 while exercising, that would really be something.)
My baseline diet is pretty healthy, but not extreme. So more like bread. I do occasionally eat fried foods and desserts, but I try to treat those as "sometimes foods", and only eat perhaps 1-4 servings per week. If I had to give a number, my best guess is that my diet would probably be around the 90th percentile of healthiness, relative to people in the Anglosphere?
I don't know but it tastes great. You should try the Barillo spaghetti or pasta if you haven't had any whole wheat pasta in a few years. I was staggered by the improvement.
I haven't tracked my progress with bp or cholesterol or even getting on the scales, but the difference is extremely noticeable in terms of how I feel. N=1 but for me it was the 1 that counts.
I'll try it! My biggest issue with bread is that I don't like getting tired after lunch, so if it even just had that effect that would be big for me.
Well what I want to know is the true efficacy of creatine.
There's this:
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03146-5
And this:
https://gwern.net/creatine
Good study! The high level summary seems to be *maybe* 1 to 2.5 IQ points based on how you measure, though it's not super clear if the effect is real. (Honestly, I think that's about all you could hope for from creatine...)
"In terms of raw scores, the effect size for BDS was 0.41 additional correct items, i.e. a 0.2-digit longer digit span, because there were always two-digit spans of the
same length. For RAPM, the effect was 0.23 more matrices solved (Fig. 2). If these were IQ tests, this increase in raw scores would mean 2.5 IQ points for BDS (using
the standard deviations of a normative study [47] or our own baseline gives the same result, see Appendix). For RAPM, the improvement would be 1 IQ point (using the standard deviation of our own baseline, see Appendix)."
See this self-experiment, I think the best one out there: https://www.self-experiments.org/
(I actually need to get back to Alex about a design for a longer creatine experiment...)
I’ve used it on and off a few times and not noticed any obvious gainz or cognitive effects. Some fitness folks swear by it as part of the Bro Science Stack, but idk.
With glycine I notice a clear effect on my sleeping, so that’s easy.
The most obvious effect for me is a big increase in water weight. (Which I actually like.) I think the evidence that it makes you a little bit stronger is pretty immense, but the effect is small.
Given that there's so much creatine in meat, I mentally classify it more as a "nutrient" than a "drug". I tend to think that it could plausibly have some mild cognitive benefits (especially if you don't eat much meat) but there's no clear evidence to that effect as far as I know.
An experiment you might consider is just change to 100% whole grains -- that is pretty easy these days, you can buy 100% whole grain bread that tastes great (Dave's !). Ditto bagels. Barillo has a 100% pasta that doesn't feel grainy. They've got both spahetti and rotini. You can buy whole grain rice that is 'quick rice' -- it is a lot more expensive than buying brown rice and cooking it yourself but it is really fast, and comes out perfect every tme. Kodak even has delicious muffin mixes etc that are 100%.
For me just switching from white italian bread to Dave's Good Seed cause a dramatic decrease in blood sugar spikes. It was like overnight. So I got the Kodiak muffins and they taste better than the white flour ones and also don't cause problems. Then I changed over to Barllo's spaghetti. Used to be that whole grain spaghetti was a serious sacrifice, but this stuff is better tasting that the spaghetti made out of white flour, and I've never noticed any graininess at all.
So I've been really happy with the whole process. I don't feel like I'm on a diet at all.
Stupid question, but is whole grain bread actually better? My impression was that the glycemic index was only a tiny bit better? I love whole grain bread FWIW but I hate hate hate whole grain pasta. :)
But it looks like Dave's Good Seed bread has a GI of ~53, which is much better than "normal" white bread. How do they do it?
I've been married to a diabetic for many years, and the plain fact is that the official glycemic index doesn't always have any relationship to a specific individual's blood glucose. Stuff that isn't supposed to spike my spouse's bg will send it soaring. Fat isn't supposed to spike bg, but it does for my spouse. I believe you just have to test stuff out on yourself. It's really irritating!
Ezekiel bread’s GI is 36 and the sesame seed version is actually good!
Interesting! According to the AI I asked, Dave's bread achieves this through "whole grain content, high fiber, and significant amount of seeds" while Ezekiel does it because it's made from sprouted grains. (Why sprouted grains have so much lower GI seems extremely complicated and confusing though.)
A resting heart rate of 40-45 BPM is damn impressive. What's your 5 k time? Failing that, what's your FTP?
My 5k probably isn't very impressive! I do run, but I intentionally don't measure or track anything, on the theory this makes it easier to maintain the habit: https://dynomight.net/2021/01/25/how-to-run-without-all-the-agonizing-pain/
Probably it's also at least partly genetics. (Every time I get a new doctor I have to reassure them that I've had this pulse for years.)
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQDUvzGJ3w