Diet

© Brooke Clarke 2011

This page is about diet in relation to weight gain/loss and in relation to cancer related foods.

Food Preference Is Calories Per Pound

Given a choice between two foods the one that tastes the best is the one with the higher number of calories per unit weight.  This is a food selection method that's built into all animals DNA for survival (Darwin's No. 1 idea).

If we only ate the foods that were available 100,000 years ago we would not get overweight because our bodies are designed to control how full we feel to keep our weight in control.  In the book Catching Fire they make a good case that we were eating cooked food as long ago as 790,000 years and the human body has a number of features that are the direct result of that.  For example if we ate raw meat it would take over 6 hours per day just for chewing, but with cooked meat we can chew for less than one hour per day.  There are many other anatomical ways that humans differ from the great apes that's because of eating cooked food such as the length of our gut (much shorter), the size of our stomach (much smaller), the size of our jaw muscles (much smaller), etc.

Low Carb Diets are Bad for You

The Atkins Diet (Wiki) (low carbs) - is not a good idea, it's bad for you if done for more than a month or so (where the key benefit is water loss).  Also see:
TED Talk: Dean Ornish on healing - with comments on the Atkins diet.

Some Foods may help Prevent Cancer

There's an idea that some foods tend to help prevent cancer.  See the TED Talks:
Eva Vertes looks to the future of medicine 2005 - cancer might be a curing process, mentions antiangiogenic foods
William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer? 2010
List of foods from William Li's TED Talk:

Green Tea	Red Grapes	Lavender
Strawberries	Red Wine	Pumpkin
Blackberries	Bok choy	Sea Cucumber
Raspberries	Kale	Tuna
Blueberries	Soy beans	Parsley
Oranges	Ginseng	Garlic
Grapefruit	Maitake mushroom	Tomato
Lemons	Licorice	Olive oil
Apples	Turmeric	Grape seed oil
Pineapple	Nutmeg	Dark chocolate
Cherries	Artichokes	Others

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiogenesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiogenesis_inhibitor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Folkman - founded the field of angiogenesis research

Un Processed Foods

Notice that given a choice between any two foods in the table you will like the one with the higher energy density.  For the average person 2,000 calories per day is about right. I've divided the foods into arbitrary groups based on their energy density.

Food	Cal/gram	Cal/pound
cucumber	0.12	54
Bok choy	0.13
lettuce	0.15	68
celery	0.16	73
Tomato	0.18
tomato	0.21	95
mushroom white	0.22	100
Pineapple	0.24
cauliflower	0.25	113
Kale	0.28
watermelon	0.3	136
Maitake mushroom	0.31
Grapefruit	0.32
Strawberries	0.32
broccoli	0.34	154
mushroom portobello	0.35	159
onion	0.4	181
carrots	0.41	186
pear	0.41	186
Blackberries	0.43
Artichoke	0.45
plum	0.46	209
orange	0.47	213
Apple	0.47	213
orange juice	0.47	213
apple	0.48	218
soy milk	0.52	236
Raspberries	0.52	236
Sea Cucumber	0.56
Blueberries	0.57
yogurt, regular	0.61	277
Cherries w/o pits	0.67
Red Grapes	0.67
grape	0.69	313
Wine (Red)	0.8
banana	0.89	404
potato	0.93	422

Slightly Processed Foods

Food	Cal/gram	Cal/pound
cheese cottage nonfat	0.85	386
cheese cream fat free	0.96	435
cheese cottage	1.03	467
wheat rice (cooked)	1.1	499
ling fish	1.11	503
tuna (water)	1.16
pasta white	1.22	553
spaghetti wheat	1.24	562
white rice (cooked)	1.3	590
spaghetti white	1.5	680
avocado	1.6	726
egg boiled	1.6	726
egg scrambled	1.7	771
chicken breast	1.65	748
cheese swiss low fat	1.7	771
Soy beans	1.73
salmon fish, wild	1.82	826
chicken leg	1.91	866
tuna (oil)	1.98

High Calories per gram

Food	Cal/gram	Cal/pound
ice cream vanilla	2.01	912
salmon fish, farmed	2.06	934
ice cream chocolate	2.16	980
salmon Chinook	2.3	1043
pizza	2.3	1043
cheese cream low fat	2.31	1048
lamb chop broiled	2.35	1066
burger (85%)	2.5	1134
steak sirloin 0 fat	2.65	1202
cheese feta	2.64	1197
bread	2.7	1225
beef steak	2 - 3.5	907 - 1588
lamb shoulder broiled	2.78	1261

Highly Processed Food

With the exception of walnuts all these foods are highly processed and were not available 10,000 years ago.

Food	Cal/gram	Cal/pound
cheese swiss	3.34	1515
cheese Brie	3.34	1515
cheese cream	3.49	1583
cheese provolone	3.51	1592
cheese blue	3.53	1601
cake chocolate	3.17	1438
Licorice	3.57
popcorn	3.87	1755
sugar	3.89	1764
cheese Cheddar	4.03	1828
chocolate chip cookie	4.4 - 4.9	1996 - 2223
Dark chocolate	5.6
walnuts	6.18	2803
alcohol	7	3175
olive oil	8.84	4010
Grape seed oil	9

I've seen this mentioned a lot in relation to making a case for a vegan (Wiki) diet.
But correlation does not mean there's a cause and effect function at work (Wiki).
A compresenhive cirticism of "The China Study" (Wiki) is at:
Spotting Bad Science 103: The China Study

Ohio State: Energy density of foods
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