I don’t exactly understand the question but 1 gram is 1 gram.

Why do monosaccharides provide the same amount of energy per gram as polysaccharides? Cannot get my head around it.

Thanks

As far as soup, it does seem to fill me up a lot more than just drinking a few cups of water with dinner. I make some veggie/grain/bean heavy soups, so maybe the fullness is just the fiber and water in the ingredients.

This isn’t the place to discuss exercise metabolism and fuel use and it gets too complicated to deal with in any form or fashion in the comments section. Sufficed to say that you can’t turn fat into glucose. But nor can fat fuel high intensity activity which is why many of the pro-fat (in terms of ‘caloric provision’) folks are off base.

As to your other question, just adding water doesn’t seem to have quite the same impact as consuming high water foods although I don’t recall exactly why that’s the case off hand (I seem to recall a paper showing that drinking water with a meal didn’t have the same impact as eating a high liquid food but I may be misremembering it). I was just making an example about how water content of foods can affect things.

Steve: I think as a generic recommendation for diet (e.g. in terms of what might be more or less appropriate for a majority), the Mediterranean diet is a very good place to start. Certainly there are far worse ways people could eat.

Lyle

You mention pasta as a relatively high energy-dense food. It is definitely easy to over-eat it, which is an obvious problem for anyone trying to lose weight. Many people tend to eat less pasta if it’s the whole-grain product, and they eat it lowly, with lots of veggies.

With my medical background, I am a huge advocate of the traditional Mediterranean diet. Many studies have associated it with prolonged life and reduced rates of heart attack, stroke, cancer (breast, prostate, colon, uterus), dementia, and type 2 diabetes. I blogged about the most recent study here, for anyone interested:

https://advancedmediterraneandiet.com/blog/?p=70

-Steve

I have a question regarding the following article excerpt:

“Pro-fat authors will contend (usually in the context of exercise performance) that since fat contains twice the calories of carbohydrates, it provides more energy to the body on a gram per gram basis (again, the context is usually exercise performance). While there is an element of truth to this it leaves out some important information that I’m not going to get into in this article.”

Does this (at least in part) have anything to do with the intensity level of the activities a person is involved in and the energy required to convert dietary fat into glucose if needed? If I am way off base here, feel free to just ignore this post.

As always thank you for all the fantastic articles.

Nice article. The grapes-raisin explanation illustrates the issue well.

This article, the 9 ways to deal with hunger, the calories, nutrients, or food article and a few others recently really fill a need for simple, helpful stuff I can link people to who ask me about diet but never take my advice to read your books. Hopefully enough of these articles and they will buy the books!

Onto my question, as I understand it you cannot just drink a bunch of water with your candy and have your body treat it like low-density plant foods. Something about the body taking time to breakdown those plant foods whereas the water with candy would be in and out of your system. That makes sense.

Does the above mean that, the grapes-raisin analogy would apply similarly to someone cooking oatmeal vs. drinking it in a shake? Does it mean that if I make my cup of rice with 2 cups of water v. 3 that that would make a difference in energy density? Soup is often cited in energy density explanations and I believe the volumetrics diet is a proponent of soups for low energy density foods. Would I be correct in thinking that the water you see in your soup has little-to-no affect on the energy density of the meal, but rather the benefit is from the soup-cooking process where the meat and vegetables you cook absorb more water than they would contain if prepared otherwise?

Thanks again,
Matt