healthy food ideas to raise caloric intake

When we want to hike up the caloric intake of patients we do it either by IV feeds or through their diet (in the hospital). A good way to up your caloric intake is to eat food that have more complex proteins and sugars. Carbohydrates are complex sugars that get broken down into smaller and smaller units until they become glucose, which is taken up by the cells in the body. Fats get broken down into fatty acids. Digestion is basically a process of breaking down complex molecules into their smaller components so that they can be take up into the blood stream and then to the cells of the body's tissues.

Picking foods that are carb-heavy will hike your caloric intake significantly. Healthy choices such as whole-wheat pastas and rice will do this very easily. Meat is muscle tissue which is a source of very complex proteins (everything in your body is made of proteins. Molecularly protein means something else than what protein means in health and diet science), so eating a body tissue will mean eating a complex aggregation of proteins that will require quite a bit of work by the body to break down and will render more subunits for uptake.

People seem to avoid meats these days for various reasons, including fears of red meat and the fat content. Lean chicken or fish will hike up your protein yield as well as your calories.

Given the numbers you gave for your calorie intake and what you are aiming for, I suspect that a cup or two of pasta or rice with a small chicken breast will give you a little boost and still be a 'healthy' choice.

All the best,
- Mharren

Oh dear. I didn't mean to imply that the OP should use an IV line. My bad.

These are some of the guidelines that we follow for patient nutrition. Satiety is gained quicker from ingesting simpler compounds because that are more readily absorbed upon entering the duodenum out of the stomach. The more simple a compound the less it needs to be broken down and the faster it can undergo uptake. So yes, simpler sugars would provide satiety more quickly. The OP - as I understood - commented that they feel 'full' before they can intake their projected calorie intake. A more complex molecule would delay satiety because it would require more time to be broken down in the bowel. And because they are more complex, they have more sub-units to contribute after the digestion process. Sort of like division, a larger number divided by say '2' will take more repetitions of division and provide a greater yield due to the conservation of mass.

What makes meat more complex than beans? That is a good question. A bean is a seed, a single cell, that has not been fertilized. A cut of meat is taken from muscle, a tissue, which is composed of many cells. Again, the digestion/breakdown process will take longer and lead to a greater yield of sub units. Thats not to say that beans could not be a viable substitute for meat, generally you would require more beans than a length of muscle tissue to garner the same yield.

It was not my intention to imply there is anything 'wrong' with simple sugars or more simple compounds, all complex things get broken down into those simpler sub-units. A mix of complex and simple macromolecules is unavoidable and is characteristic of a decent diet.

I mention the IV feed because what is in those are simple sugar and salt solutions that are delivered directly into the blood stream (thus why they need to be simple sugars). They are the sub-units that are derived from foods that move through the bowel, cross the lumen wall, and enter the blood stream. Since we can deliver these directly to the blood stream, we by pass the gastrointestinal tract completely.

When we administer medication we choose a route of administration. The further from the heart or target tissue is the higher the dose tends to be...because the bulk will get lost in the digestion process. When we deliver medications intravenously the dose is relatively small. The digestive tract is a great barrier and is the least efficient method of delivery for any compound, be it food or drug or what have you.

Food that can yield more sub-units is more likely to have those sub-units survive the digestion environment and actually be taken up into the blood stream, than simpler compounds which may get lost mechanically, or become hijacked, or taken up by the gut flora.

Hopefully that made a little more sense.

Cheers,
- Mharren

My contribution is simply..


Nuts.

My head hurts from reading this lol.

I too have issues with keeping my cals up there without eating junk.

My contribution is simply..


Nuts.

My head hurts from reading this lol.

I too have issues with keeping my cals up there without eating junk.

Riiiiiiiight