Sugar Addiction Myths

J72FIT

stanmann571 wrote: »

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.[/quote]

Someone said rice...

J72FIT

All this sugar nonsense has me clearly confused...

stealthq

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

You're excluding the skin and dark meat in your calculations. That's only ~3.3 lbs of chicken thigh, meat only. Besides, there are quite a few people out there that would be overweight eating less than 1800 cals if not active. Not that it matters.

This whole argument is rather ridiculous. I can find people that eat that many pounds of paper for heaven's sake - and then food on top of that. Do you really think there's no one that would overeat chicken, rice, and dark green veg if that's what they liked to eat, or felt they had to eat?

lemurcat12

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

No one is overweight from eating appropriate calories of any foods.

Yes, it's easier to overeat some foods than others, but I don't think it's necessarily any harder [edit, easier, I mean] to stick to a diet that has NOTHING but lean meat and dark green veggies (which would be too low fat for health, IMO), than it would be to stick to appropriate calories of a more diverse diet.

That one guy lost 150 lbs or some such eating only potatoes because he found it impossible to overeat a potato only diet. I also would find it impossible to overeat on such a diet. But I'd also find it impossible (absent real health reasons or a lack of other foods) to stick to such a diet.

lemurcat12

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

J72FIT wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

You left out the rice...

He said chicken and broccoli

Who is he? Isn't it you? And it looks like you initially said chicken, rice, and broccoli (stereotypical bodybuilder diet) and then edited to take out the rice, no?

janejellyroll

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

estherdragonbat

Plus, nobody's considering what those foods might be prepared with. I had a bit of an "Oh, kitten!" moment when I was planning to free-pour a bottled stir-fry sauce into a 12"-skillet's worth of sauteed veggies and imitation chicken strips and took a gander at the calories. A couple of tablespoons of oil, a dollop of butter on the broccoli... the calories can rise quickly.

Rammer123

janejellyroll wrote: »

show previous quotes

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

janejellyroll

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

J72FIT

Yep, looks like that's what you said...

J72FIT

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

Mis-represent much?

J72FIT

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

And you left out the rice again. Just sayin...

stanmann571

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

Just for the record, I'm the case study, no.. I wasn't cat 3, only cat 2.... and no it wasn't "just chicken and broccoli" but There was a lot of chicken and broccoli and rice in there.

Guess what... still eating a lot of chicken and broccoli and rice, just keeping it between the lines better.

Rammer123

J72FIT wrote: »

show previous quotes

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

And you left out the rice again. Just sayin...

I think you should go back in look at the post I was quoting and responding to.

dfwesq

janejellyroll wrote: »

show previous quotes

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

I don't think that's quite accurate, unless the "collection of foods" is an unhealthy diet. If you replace "collection of foods..." with something like "a diet very high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins," it's inaccurate. (As a shortcut, you could substitute the DASH diet for that list. It's a pretty good one.) A good diet tends to improve health faster than losing weight - in some cases it's a matter of a few months or even weeks. Trying to achieve the same results purely by weight loss takes a lot longer, sometimes years.

stanmann571

dfwesq wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

I don't think that's quite accurate, unless the "collection of foods" is an unhealthy diet. If you replace "collection of foods..." with something like "a diet very high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins," it's inaccurate. (As a shortcut, you could substitute the DASH diet for that list. It's a pretty good one.) A good diet tends to improve health faster than losing weight - in some cases it's a matter of a few months or even weeks. Trying to achieve the same results purely by weight loss takes a lot longer, sometimes years.

You don't think it's accurate. Can you provide a study?

Should be pretty simple. 5 groups, 4 obese, 2 "normal BMI" 2 of the obese groups are put on a weight loss diet 1 lb per week comprised of "healthy vs unhealthy food" group 3 is put on maintenance at their current weight using a healthy variety of foods. and the 2 "normal BMI" groups are put on comparable maintenance diets "healthy vs unhealthy food" . at the end of 24 weeks(24-30 lbs) the "standard blood markers" are compared.

I bet you could even get funding from McDonalds.

J72FIT

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

J72FIT wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

And you left out the rice again. Just sayin...

I think you should go back in look at the post I was quoting and responding to.

That's not you?

WinoGelato

dfwesq wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

I don't think that's quite accurate, unless the "collection of foods" is an unhealthy diet. If you replace "collection of foods..." with something like "a diet very high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins," it's inaccurate. (As a shortcut, you could substitute the DASH diet for that list. It's a pretty good one.) A good diet tends to improve health faster than losing weight - in some cases it's a matter of a few months or even weeks. Trying to achieve the same results purely by weight loss takes a lot longer, sometimes years.

I think that bolded part is completely backwards. There are countless stories of people here on MFP who have improved their health markers dramatically and either reduced, managed, or eliminated obesity related diseases simply by losing weight.

janejellyroll

dfwesq wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

I don't think that's quite accurate, unless the "collection of foods" is an unhealthy diet. If you replace "collection of foods..." with something like "a diet very high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins," it's inaccurate. (As a shortcut, you could substitute the DASH diet for that list. It's a pretty good one.) A good diet tends to improve health faster than losing weight - in some cases it's a matter of a few months or even weeks. Trying to achieve the same results purely by weight loss takes a lot longer, sometimes years.

Can you share the source for the claim that a good diet will improve health faster than losing weight will?

stanmann571

WinoGelato wrote: »

show previous quotes

dfwesq wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

I don't think that's quite accurate, unless the "collection of foods" is an unhealthy diet. If you replace "collection of foods..." with something like "a diet very high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins," it's inaccurate. (As a shortcut, you could substitute the DASH diet for that list. It's a pretty good one.) A good diet tends to improve health faster than losing weight - in some cases it's a matter of a few months or even weeks. Trying to achieve the same results purely by weight loss takes a lot longer, sometimes years.

I think that bolded part is completely backwards. There are countless stories of people here on MFP who have improved their health markers dramatically and either reduced, managed, or eliminated obesity related diseases simply by losing weight.

It is completely Backwards. Both Twinkie and McDonald's saw dramatic improvement due only to weight loss in less than 60 days.

ccrdragon

dfwesq wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

I don't think that's quite accurate, unless the "collection of foods" is an unhealthy diet. If you replace "collection of foods..." with something like "a diet very high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins," it's inaccurate. (As a shortcut, you could substitute the DASH diet for that list. It's a pretty good one.) A good diet tends to improve health faster than losing weight - in some cases it's a matter of a few months or even weeks. Trying to achieve the same results purely by weight loss takes a lot longer, sometimes years.

Let's take your example and run with it... I see basically 2 scenarios with the DASH diet:
1. You follow the portion controls that the diet suggests:
This by definition of the diet itself restricts calories, causing weight loss and your argument fails since it has been shown multiple times in this thread that simple weight loss results in better health markers
2. You don't follow the portion controls that the diet suggests:
Again, your argument fails because ANYBODY on this planet can eat a crap-ton of the food identified as 'healthy' and not lose the weight (heck, you don't even need to eat a crap-ton of the food - any amount over the number of calories that you need to maintain your weight and you will steadily gain weight). In this case, things like weight induced high blood pressure will not improve, nor will things like insulin resistance, blood glucose, etc. So again, your argument fails.

And please, don't try the argument that you can't over-eat on a healthy diet. There are numerous examples of people on this site alone that eat what most would consider a 'healthy' diet that are or have been overweight.

nokanjaijo

stevencloser wrote: »

show previous quotes

nokanjaijo wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

I'm sorry if that person doesn't want this post to be quoted elsewhere but I just saw this in another thread and it's exactly this.

Wtn_Gurl wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

macro4luv2 wrote: »

PaulaWallaDingDong wrote: »

macro4luv2 wrote: »

This documentary was as full of crap as processed food, I think most of the experts were actors. Diets are individual. I was done when they said sugar wasn't bad for you.....

Is sugar bad for you? You must have been watching the other netflix documentaries as well.

I'll clear that up... Processed sugar is bad for you. I do watch other netflix docs. and some are better than others...... lol

Still wrong.

I have a question - re sugar (regular white table sugar). I know its BAD bad bad bad, but if I eat one Teaspoon a day, it has only 4 calories, will it really hurt me? if that's all I eat in one day this 1 tsp of regular sugar. I mean that's not ALL I eat, but its like one item i'd like to enjoy. Some things just taste better with sugar. of course, that's about all the indulgences I would eat. otherwise I eat pretty balanced home made food that I make.

BAD bad bad bad. 4 times. She's overthinking about 1 goddamn teaspoon of sugar because of things like this.

These kinds of posts are A DAILY OCCURRENCE on here.

This is due to the fact that a lot of people now think that sugar is 4 times bad for you. They think sugar is one of the worst things you can eat. That is a recent opinion.

That opinion about sugar is a completely different thing than just saying sugar is "empty calories" which is what my mother used to tell me 35 years ago and just means that it's not nutritious. Which is what I understood it to mean when my mother said it and i was all of seven years old. So it can't be that difficult to interpret.

Apparently it is since there's daily threads by people who don't know the first thing about how weight management even works at a basic level due to misinformation purported by people who take sentences like "sugar is empty calories" and tell you to never have it because "empty calories make you fat and sick!".

You seem convinced of this particular chain of cause and effect but I, personally, have zero reasons to think a single link in that chain reflects reality.

It almost seems like you are catastrophizing about the effects of catastrophizing about the effects of sugar. Like you're trying to fight fire with fire.

janejellyroll

nokanjaijo wrote: »

show previous quotes

stevencloser wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

I'm sorry if that person doesn't want this post to be quoted elsewhere but I just saw this in another thread and it's exactly this.

Wtn_Gurl wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

macro4luv2 wrote: »

PaulaWallaDingDong wrote: »

macro4luv2 wrote: »

This documentary was as full of crap as processed food, I think most of the experts were actors. Diets are individual. I was done when they said sugar wasn't bad for you.....

Is sugar bad for you? You must have been watching the other netflix documentaries as well.

I'll clear that up... Processed sugar is bad for you. I do watch other netflix docs. and some are better than others...... lol

Still wrong.

I have a question - re sugar (regular white table sugar). I know its BAD bad bad bad, but if I eat one Teaspoon a day, it has only 4 calories, will it really hurt me? if that's all I eat in one day this 1 tsp of regular sugar. I mean that's not ALL I eat, but its like one item i'd like to enjoy. Some things just taste better with sugar. of course, that's about all the indulgences I would eat. otherwise I eat pretty balanced home made food that I make.

BAD bad bad bad. 4 times. She's overthinking about 1 goddamn teaspoon of sugar because of things like this.

These kinds of posts are A DAILY OCCURRENCE on here.

This is due to the fact that a lot of people now think that sugar is 4 times bad for you. They think sugar is one of the worst things you can eat. That is a recent opinion.

That opinion about sugar is a completely different thing than just saying sugar is "empty calories" which is what my mother used to tell me 35 years ago and just means that it's not nutritious. Which is what I understood it to mean when my mother said it and i was all of seven years old. So it can't be that difficult to interpret.

Apparently it is since there's daily threads by people who don't know the first thing about how weight management even works at a basic level due to misinformation purported by people who take sentences like "sugar is empty calories" and tell you to never have it because "empty calories make you fat and sick!".

You seem convinced of this particular chain of cause and effect but I, personally, have zero reasons to think a single link in that chain reflects reality.

It almost seems like you are catastrophizing about the effects of catastrophizing about the effects of sugar. Like you're trying to fight fire with fire.

Did you read the post he quoted earlier? "I have a question - re sugar (regular white table sugar). I know its BAD bad bad bad, but if I eat one Teaspoon a day, it has only 4 calories, will it really hurt me?" is a real question that was asked here recently. I see variations of it all the time. I can't imagine how you miss how frequently versions of this question -- based on the assumption that sugar should be avoided -- are asked here.

lpina2mi

https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/evidence-caloric-restriction/

nokanjaijo

janejellyroll wrote: »

show previous quotes

nokanjaijo wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

I'm sorry if that person doesn't want this post to be quoted elsewhere but I just saw this in another thread and it's exactly this.

Wtn_Gurl wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

macro4luv2 wrote: »

PaulaWallaDingDong wrote: »

macro4luv2 wrote: »

This documentary was as full of crap as processed food, I think most of the experts were actors. Diets are individual. I was done when they said sugar wasn't bad for you.....

Is sugar bad for you? You must have been watching the other netflix documentaries as well.

I'll clear that up... Processed sugar is bad for you. I do watch other netflix docs. and some are better than others...... lol

Still wrong.

I have a question - re sugar (regular white table sugar). I know its BAD bad bad bad, but if I eat one Teaspoon a day, it has only 4 calories, will it really hurt me? if that's all I eat in one day this 1 tsp of regular sugar. I mean that's not ALL I eat, but its like one item i'd like to enjoy. Some things just taste better with sugar. of course, that's about all the indulgences I would eat. otherwise I eat pretty balanced home made food that I make.

BAD bad bad bad. 4 times. She's overthinking about 1 goddamn teaspoon of sugar because of things like this.

These kinds of posts are A DAILY OCCURRENCE on here.

This is due to the fact that a lot of people now think that sugar is 4 times bad for you. They think sugar is one of the worst things you can eat. That is a recent opinion.

That opinion about sugar is a completely different thing than just saying sugar is "empty calories" which is what my mother used to tell me 35 years ago and just means that it's not nutritious. Which is what I understood it to mean when my mother said it and i was all of seven years old. So it can't be that difficult to interpret.

Apparently it is since there's daily threads by people who don't know the first thing about how weight management even works at a basic level due to misinformation purported by people who take sentences like "sugar is empty calories" and tell you to never have it because "empty calories make you fat and sick!".

You seem convinced of this particular chain of cause and effect but I, personally, have zero reasons to think a single link in that chain reflects reality.

It almost seems like you are catastrophizing about the effects of catastrophizing about the effects of sugar. Like you're trying to fight fire with fire.

Did you read the post he quoted earlier? "I have a question - re sugar (regular white table sugar). I know its BAD bad bad bad, but if I eat one Teaspoon a day, it has only 4 calories, will it really hurt me?" is a real question that was asked here recently. I see variations of it all the time. I can't imagine how you miss how frequently versions of this question -- based on the assumption that sugar should be avoided -- are asked here.

No. I didn't miss it. I replied to it, in fact. I explained that this is in response to people saying sugar is incredibly bad for you which is a different claim than "sugar is empty calories".

dfwesq

janejellyroll wrote: »

show previous quotes

dfwesq wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

I don't think that's quite accurate, unless the "collection of foods" is an unhealthy diet. If you replace "collection of foods..." with something like "a diet very high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins," it's inaccurate. (As a shortcut, you could substitute the DASH diet for that list. It's a pretty good one.) A good diet tends to improve health faster than losing weight - in some cases it's a matter of a few months or even weeks. Trying to achieve the same results purely by weight loss takes a lot longer, sometimes years.

Can you share the source for the claim that a good diet will improve health faster than losing weight will?

To be clear, I'm talking about improvements caused by a better diet versus losing a lot of weight (which happens only over a long period of time). I'm not talking about beginning to lose a lot of weight (which is generally associated with better habits anyway) - that can happen in a very short amount of time.

Because health includes a lot of factors, there's not going to be a single study, or even a handful of them. Also, because of their nature, scientific studies have to focus on isolated changes (such as addition or restriction of particular foods or types of foods). That's just the nature of scientific studies - you'd have to look at a lot of them to get an overall picture.

But studies focusing on the effect of diet on things like blood lipids, LDL cholesterol, insulin response, etc. has often last a matter of weeks or months. That's a much shorter time than it takes a morbidly obese person to reach a healthy weight.

Here are some examples of studies or reviews of studies:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23804161 (reduced glycemic diet had a significant effect on reducing total cholesterol and LDL over 5-12 weeks)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21897113/ (same calories, different glycemic indices, studied over 6 months, beneficial metabolic effects)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25430608 (review of studies ranging from 2 to 24 weeks, showing significant reduction in blood pressure and cardiovascular risk factors on DASH diet)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20108073/ (same calories, different glycemic indices, studied over 6 months, improved cardiometabolic profile)
(These last two studies were with children or teenagers.)

You didn't really ask about this, but here's another study finding that better dietary quality is inversely proportional to cardiovascular risk factors (nothing about the time frame though). http://jn.nutrition.org/content/142/12/2112

janejellyroll

dfwesq wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

stanmann571 wrote: »

Packerjohn wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

rheddmobile wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

For a VAST majority of people, yes empty calories should be very limited.

Depends on what you mean by "very limited." Many take that to mean "oh, no, I better not have any."

I have a little cheese most days. Often in my vegetable omelet in the morning (a little feta makes it even more enjoyable for me), sometimes as a dessert after dinner (I enjoy having an oz of an interesting artisan cheese), sometimes as part of some other meal. The total calories are not huge and, more significantly, I have an overall nutritious and calorie appropriate diet. I understand that the cheese is an accent/indulgence, but don't particularly think it is in a different category than many other things I eat (adding olive oil to vegetables or a salad rather than eating them as low cal as possible, having some good bread if I happen to on that day, so on), and treating it as inherently different rather than focusing on my diet as a whole makes no difference to me.

That way of thinking about it also tends to make people think they ate well if they had no "empty calories" and poorly if they had some, even if the latter day was overall better in other ways (hit a protein target, ate lots of vegetables, had more fiber, etc.). I think it's a really simplistic way of thinking about nutrition that might not be bad as a starting point for kids, but when talking to adults and there's no context given I think it's pretty unhelpful, especially if you are talking to people -- as here -- who know about nutrition and may indeed be focused on things like endurance sports.

There's a spectrum. Cheese isn't "empty,"

Again, the definition that keeps being referred to from the various "scientific" and gov't sources defines empty calories as "added sugar and solid fat." Pizza is a huge supplier of empty calories according to these sources and, yes, it's because of the cheese. For the most part, foods are not empty calories, they contain empty calories, and yes cheese would be mostly empty calories according to the definition in question. Same with a cherry cobbler which, of course, contains cherries and a few other ingredients that have nutrients.

(I don't particularly agree with this use of "empty calories," but that's what we are talking about.)

I don't think anyone is advocating for "empty calories" as a scientific term. It's a useful shorthand in context, and the context isn't all that difficult to understand.

We are debating how useful it is. I don't find it all that useful when it's easy to be more specific and to better focus on overall context.

I can eat an 80 calorie orange or the same calories in jelly beans - the jelly beans are empty calories, because oranges contain a plethora of nutrients in addition to calories, and jelly beans contain very few.

I have carried sports jelly beans (which are largely just jelly beans with some electrolytes that are overpriced) on long runs and a marathon and found them helpful. Carrying an orange wouldn't work as it's difficult and peeling would not be easy for me when running (although an orange would actually taste good if someone handed me one at a stop -- I'm in favor of that!). Saying it's bad to eat the jelly beans in that context, empty calories, is not reasonable, IMO.

As for your hypothetical person who thinks a good day is one in which no empty calories were consumed regardless of the appropriateness of their diet by any other metric - there's no term which is idiot-proof. A determined idiot can misunderstand and misuse any term.

Agreed, but why not focus on things more likely to be helpful, like meeting overall nutritional goals and not overeating. The effect is to limit foods that are high cal/low nutrient anyway. People seem to be equating the questioning of the term "empty calorie" with not caring about nutrition, and that's entirely false. (I don't quite remember how this subthread started.)

I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that's not rude, but why do you care so much? Perhaps it's not the perfect term. Whooptie. It is helpful for some people in some situations. It doesn't have to be a perfect term to be useful. If you don't find it useful, ignore it.

How is an obsession with telling others what words are wrong more appropriate than an obsession with telling them what foods are wrong?

It was talked about up top. Empty calories sounds like "I should never ever have this". Can lead to disordered thinking about foods, failure, ED and whathaveyou. Any evaluation of food that does not take overall diet into account is IMO and many others' opinions, useless at best and counterproductive to dangerous at worst.

And throwing out things like losing weight on something like The Twinkie Diet doesn't?

While Moderation is the Key. The reality is that living at a healthy weight/BF on "The Twinkie Diet" or The McDonald's Diet. Is healthier long term than being morbidly obese on lean chicken and Broccoli.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534737/I-thought-I-going-die-Man-lost-37lbs-eating-McDonalds-three-months-walking-45-minutes-day.html

Nobody is morbidly obese off chicken, rice and broccoli.

IF you say so.

Find one person who is overweight off of only lean meat and dark green veggies.

You'd need to be eating over 5lbs of chicken a day to even break 1,800 calories.

Is anybody eating only lean meat and dark green vegetables?

What a ridiculous challenge.

Just a response to someone else saying they'd rather be in a healthy weight on the twinkie diet than morbidly obese from eating chicken and broccoli. I responded by arguing I don't believe anyone to be morbidly obese off chicken and broccoli.

The general concept is that all kinds of people get overweight, including people who cook their own meals, eat vegetables, or eat whole foods.

Someone who maintains a healthy body weight while eating McDonald's is more likely to have better health results than someone who is obese while eating [collection of foods that are currently touted for weight loss].

I don't think that's quite accurate, unless the "collection of foods" is an unhealthy diet. If you replace "collection of foods..." with something like "a diet very high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins," it's inaccurate. (As a shortcut, you could substitute the DASH diet for that list. It's a pretty good one.) A good diet tends to improve health faster than losing weight - in some cases it's a matter of a few months or even weeks. Trying to achieve the same results purely by weight loss takes a lot longer, sometimes years.

Can you share the source for the claim that a good diet will improve health faster than losing weight will?

To be clear, I'm talking about improvements caused by a better diet versus losing a lot of weight (which happens only over a long period of time). I'm not talking about beginning to lose a lot of weight (which is generally associated with better habits anyway) - that can happen in a very short amount of time.

Because health includes a lot of factors, there's not going to be a single study, or even a handful of them. Also, because of their nature, scientific studies have to focus on isolated changes (such as addition or restriction of particular foods or types of foods). That's just the nature of scientific studies - you'd have to look at a lot of them to get an overall picture.

But studies focusing on the effect of diet on things like blood lipids, LDL cholesterol, insulin response, etc. has often last a matter of weeks or months. That's a much shorter time than it takes a morbidly obese person to reach a healthy weight.

Here are some examples of studies or reviews of studies:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23804161 (reduced glycemic diet had a significant effect on reducing total cholesterol and LDL over 5-12 weeks)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21897113/ (same calories, different glycemic indices, studied over 6 months, beneficial metabolic effects)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25430608 (review of studies ranging from 2 to 24 weeks, showing significant reduction in blood pressure and cardiovascular risk factors on DASH diet)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20108073/ (same calories, different glycemic indices, studied over 6 months, improved cardiometabolic profile)
(These last two studies were with children or teenagers.)

You didn't really ask about this, but here's another study finding that better dietary quality is inversely proportional to cardiovascular risk factors (nothing about the time frame though). http://jn.nutrition.org/content/142/12/2112

The three of those only seem on point if you postulate "healthier" correlates to lower GI. I'm not sure we can assume that.

Those studies, at best, seem to establish that changing one's diet can lead to favorable changes in some health markers for those who remain obese, at least in short term studies.

But is there counter-evidence to show that people who lose weight don't experience beneficial changes also? You're arguing that it's better to be obese (and have a diet that fits a certain template) than it is to be a normal weight and eat in a different way. What is the basis for that claim?

Carlos_421

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

show previous quotes

lemurcat12 wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

RAD_Fitness wrote: »

ndj1979 wrote: »

nvmomketo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

nvmomketo wrote: »

emp·ty cal·o·ries
noun
calories derived from food containing no nutrients.

or Merriam Webster:

Definition of empty calories:
calories from food that supply energy but have little or no nutritional value
First Known Use: 1955

So this wouldn't be true of any food except for alcohol, I don't think. I've never seen a food with calories that was devoid of macronutrients.

Nutrient does not mean macronutrient. If it did the definition would have said "calories derived from food containing no macronutrients"

So macronutrients are not nutrients, really?

That's not what nvmomketo said. You like to twist things to try and make your point. Empty calories means that something is empty of micronutrients and that is a accepted use of the term. Whether or not you agree with the wording is your opinion.

Just like something that is has a low or high nutrient density. The nutrient in that scenario is understood and accepted to be referring to micronutrients. Whether you agree with the terminology or not.

Just micronutrients?

Yes, in the term "empty calories" which are by definition are "calories derived from food containing no nutrients" or "a calorie whose source has little or no nutritional value", both of which, "nutrients" and "nutritional value" are understood to be referring to micronutrients.

Protein is not empty calories under the normal definition, nor are some kinds of fat.

Right and both of which contain micronutrients.

Protein and fat are macronutrients, not foods.

Carlos_421

nokanjaijo wrote: »

show previous quotes

janejellyroll wrote: »

nokanjaijo wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

dfwesq wrote: »

J72FIT wrote: »

I'm thinking the term "empty calories" was invented by the "clean eaters"...

It's routinely used in the health care and nutritional fields. For example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871092/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24200654
https://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa14/dl/health-status-behaviors.pdf

There's a recognized, common understanding of what the phrase means - it's basically a short way to talk about foods that add unneeded extra calories but little else. Sometimes it's put in quotation marks. ETA: It's never used when the calories the food supplies are needed or helpful, only when the extra calories are unneeded and possibly detrimental.

So if I eat gummy bears pre or post workout they don't have empty calories because helpful but if I eat them during a movie they do have empty calories because unneeded?
They're the same gummy bears...either the calories are empty or not.

No, they can be unneeded in one situation and needed in another. If you are, say, Michael Phelps in training, you can't possibly get enough calories to stay well nourished unless you eat a lot of high-calorie, low-fiber foods. If you are an average Westerner, you're in a different situation. For you, candy is "empty calories," nutritionally speaking. Similarly, glucose can be a lifesaver for a diabetic in insulin shock or a patient in a coma, and doctors don't refer to it as "empty calories" in those circumstances.

Sorry if that seems inconsistent to you, but your quarrel is with the doctors and scientists who use the phrase that way.

If whether or not a calorie is "empty" depends on the circumstances, it seems like it would be more helpful to address the circumstances and help people make informed choices instead of focusing on the foods themselves.

I think the point is that the calories are empty in both cases. Sometimes all you need are calories. In that situation, empty calories are fine and welcome. If you aren't in need of calories or if you are in need of certain micronutrients, empty calories are a bad idea.

If you ordered a book and then received an empty box in the mail, that would be bad. If you need to move, you would want an empty box.

Empty boxes can be good or bad, but I have never once heard somebody say, "It's not an empty box because you have a box and boxes are useful so the fact that you have a box means it's not an empty box."

I hope I never do, to be honest.

Your example makes perfect sense, it's just that you usually hear "empty calories" tossed around as something to avoid, where an empty box is just a tool.

It wouldn't make any sense to talk about 'empty calories' as something to look for.

If you have too many caloreis and not enough nutrients, you need to avoid "empty calories".

On the other hand, if you just need calories, it doesn't matter if they are empty or not. You just need the calories. So, advice on how to get more calories won't suggest you look for empty calories, right? Because their being empty is irrelevant. The extra calories don't have to be empty. An avocado is as good as a bag of skittles when all you want is calories.

Not when I want the calories because I'm about to be deadlifting. Keep the avocado and give me gummy bears.

dfwesq

janejellyroll wrote: »

...
Those studies, at best, seem to establish that changing one's diet can lead to favorable changes in some health markers for those who remain obese, at least in short term studies.

Yes, a healthier diet leads to better health more quickly than weight loss does.

But is there counter-evidence to show that people who lose weight don't experience beneficial changes also? You're arguing that it's better to be obese (and have a diet that fits a certain template) than it is to be a normal weight and eat in a different way. What is the basis for that claim?

No one was arguing that losing weight is bad, just that it takes longer to lose a lot of weight than to change one's diet. I wasn't recommending any kind of template. And I certainly wasn't saying that it's good to be obese.

Btw, there's no study like the one you asked me to find, that measures the health effects of weight loss in isolation from other factors like dietary changes and increased exercise.