High Protein Foods are More Satisfying

This is a simple truth that those in the Low-Carb world have known for many years – that a meal rich in protein will help you last between meals without getting an attack of the munchies.

Why have the scientists taken so long to catch up?

I’ve long maintained that higher protein foods are always going to be the most filling. Mainly because they take longer for the body to digest, therefore remain in the stomach and intestines that little bit longer, meaning our bodies aren’t signalling us saying “hey, we’re hungry – give us more food!”

And to a certain extent – now- science is starting to back that up.

Protein Rich Foods ARE More Filling

I’ve long maintained that higher protein foods are always going to be the most filling. Mainly because they [private_silver]take longer for the body to digest, therefore remain in the stomach and intestines that little bit longer, meaning our bodies aren’t signalling us saying “hey, we’re hungry – give us more food!”

And to a certain extent, science does back that up.

If you look over the research papers that have been carried out, certainly over the last ten years, they clearly show that 8 out of 10 people ate less after a protein-rich meal than they did after a meal that was low in protein.

The BBC recently carried out a test to prove whether this was so or not. What they did was to take 3 volunteers who worked long hours, and were used to snacking on the job.

The BBC Reveals the Truth

What they wanted to do was to see if they could give them a meal that would set them up for the long day ahead, so that they wouldn’t need to snack whilst working on their shifts. They fed each of the volunteers a meal that had the same calorific value but whose contents varied in the proportion of fat, protein and carbohydrates – one being high in fat, one high in protein and one high in carbohydrates.

After the meal, they were kept under close observation, to make sure that they couldn’t sneak any crafty snacks. After a four hour period, they were each given pizza slices to eat, and carefully observed as they tucked into the richly-deserved reward.

It Works…

The one who ate the most was the one who had the initial meal that was high in carbohydrates. The quantity he ate was closely matched by the one whose diet was high in fat. The person who ate the smallest amount during the lunch-break was the one who had had the protein rich meal.

It was a very simple test, but it did rather prove the fact that if you don’t want to get hunger pains between meals, then make sure your meals are high in protein.

It’s as simple as that.

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How Our Bodies Get Energy

Do you know how your body gets the energy it needs and what it does with it?

Like many people, you will probably have an idea but no real details about how our bodies get and use the food we eat. So here’s a quick resume covering the two most misunderstood hormones our bodies use.

Knowing about these will give you an insight about how our bodies convert what we eat into energy and what happens to the excess ‘energy’ our bodies produce. More importantly, it will show you just how you can gain more control over what your bodies does with what you eat and how by having that knowledge, you can get the most from the Snack Box Diet through evening out your eating habits.

Where we get our Energy

Glucose is a simple sugar that provides energy to all of the cells in your body. Your cells then take in glucose from your blood and break it down for energy.

For instance, brain cells and red blood cells rely solely on glucose for fuel. The glucose in your blood comes from the food you eat.

When you eat, food gets metabolised via your intestines and is distributed through the bloodstream to the cells in your body. In all conditions your body tries to keep the supply of glucose constant, maintaining as consistent as possible glucose concentration in the blood. If it did not do this [private_silver](as in diabetes for example) your cells would have too much glucose right after a meal (particularly one that is high in carbohydrates) and starve in between meals and during sleep.

When you have an excess of glucose, your body stores this in your liver and muscles by making glycogen, long chains of glucose. Conversely, when glucose is in short supply, your body mobilizes glucose from stored glycogen and/or stimulates you to eat food.

To maintain this constant blood-glucose level, your body uses two hormones – insulin and glucagon. These are produced in your pancreas and have opposite actions.

The Pancreas

Your pancreas is formed from clusters (Islets) of alpha and beta endocrine cells. The beta cells secret insulin and the alpha cells secret glucagons. Both these secretions are protein hormones made up of amino acids.

What Insulin Does

Insulin is used by almost all of your body’s cells, but it’s most active in the liver, fat and muscle cells. Insulin has the following effect:-

• Inhibits the liver and kidney cells from making glucose from intermediate compounds of metabolic pathways (gluconeogenesis)
• Causes the liver and muscle cells to store glucose in glycogen
• Stimulates fat cells to form fats from fatty acids and glycerol
• Causes the liver and muscle cells to make proteins from amino acids

Insulin production is the signal for the body to store energy (as fat). It does so by reducing the concentrations of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids in the bloodstream.

What Glucagon Does

Now when you don’t eat or eat food that have a very low glycemic index  (Are low in carbs), your pancreas releases glucagons instead which causes your body to produce glucose… Glucagon acts on the same cells as insulin, but has the opposite effects in that it:

• Stimulates the liver and muscles to break down stored glycogen (glycogenolysis) and release the glucose
• Stimulates gluconeogenesis in the liver and kidneys

The action of glucagon is opposite to insulin in that glucagon mobilizes glucose stored inside your body and increases the level of glucose in your blood, thus stopping your blood glucose levels from falling dangerously low.

How Insulin and Glucagons Work as a Tag Team

Under normal circumstances, the levels of insulin and glucagon are effectively counter balanced.

When you eat, your body metabolises the food quite rapidly and registers the presence of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids absorbed from the food. This causes the pancreatic beta cells to release insulin into your blood and inhibit the pancreatic alpha cells from secreting glucagon.

As the levels of insulin in your blood begin to rise they act on the liver, fat and muscle cells in particular causing them to absorb the incoming molecules of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. The insulin acts to prevent the concentration of glucose, fatty and amino acids from increasing too greatly in the bloodstream.

In this way, your body maintains a steady blood-glucose concentration. This action occurs when you eat a properly balanced diet as opposed to the high carb diet of today. Unfortunately, where the diet is high in carbs (or there is just too much food) it has to go somewhere and inevitably, it is deposited as fat in just where you don’t want it to go.

Between meals, or when you are sleeping, your body senses that it is effectively starving. However your cells still need a supply of glucose to keep going. So while in this condition, the slight drops in blood-sugar level stimulate glucagon secretion from the alpha cells in the pancreas and in turn inhibit the release of insulin.

This causes glucagon levels in the blood to rise and start acting on the liver, muscle and kidney cells to mobilize glucose from glycogen to make glucose that’s then released into your blood. Such action prevents the blood-glucose levels from falling too much.

This change occurs many times throughout the day with the secretion of either insulin or glucagons helping to keep your blood-glucose level relatively constant, typically in the range of 90 mg per 100 ml of blood.

However, seeing as the secretion of the pancreas lag behind the blood glucose levels, the action of eating large quantities of high carb food will drastically disturb this. Simply put, when the blood glucose level is overly high more quantities of insulin will be produced than are needed as the glucose will have been dealt with. So more glucose will have been absorbed than was necessary. This will cause a dip in the blood glucose level causing us to feel a lack of energy and trigger a production of glucagon.

Sunday Lunch Syndrome

This is something I call the “after Sunday lunch syndrome” as it is most often seen after a big meal. You will most likely have noticed that 30 – 60 minutes after eating far too much (as in a typical Sunday lunch) and then not moving a great deal either, you tend to feel really sleepy and quite soon many will also start to get the munchies and go looking for that last roast potato or piece of pie. In fact the body is wanting anything that will get the blood sugar up again – and so the cycle continues…

What Can You Do?

Well, the most obvious first step is to cut down on foods with a high level of carbohydrates in them.

The nest thing would be to even out the amount you eat by eating smaller quantities more regularly throughout the day.

Just by taking these two small steps in cahnging what and how you eat will make a masive difference to how your body reacts to what you eat. And that will be shown by improved or more even energy levels and slowing down or even reversing the process of fat gain.  I.E. You will start to lose fat instead of putting it on.[/private_silver]

2 handfuls of cashews is the therapeutic equivalent of a prescription dose of Prozac. Inside you, the essential amino acid L-tryptophan is broken down into anxiety-reducing, snooze-inducing niacin. Even more important, tryptophan is also made into serotonin, one of your body’s most important neurotransmitters. Serotonin gives a feeling of well-being and mellowness, or as the Australians would say, “no worries.” This is such a profound effect that Prozac, Paxil and similar antidepressants usually either mimic serotonin or artificially keep the body’s own serotonin levels high. You can do the same thing with your food. And no one can tell us that beans, peas, cheese, nuts and wheat germ are toxic if you eat a lot of them!

Plenty of carbohydrates (starches) in your meals help tryptophan get to where it does the most good: in your brain. In order to cross the blood-brain barrier to get in, carbos are required. So cheese and crackers provides a better effect than the cheese standing alone. An egg or two on toast is better than just the egg. Beans, peas, and nuts already contain carbohydrate, so you are all set there.

Consider that five servings of beans, a few portions of peanut butter, or just one big handful of cashews provides one to two thousand milligrams of tryptophan, which will work as well as prescription antidepressants… but don’t tell the drug companies. Some skeptics think that the pharmaceutical people already know. Here are two quotes in evidence:

“Pay careful attention to what is happening with dietary supplements in the legislative arena… If these efforts are successful, there could be created a class of products to compete with approved drugs. The establishment of a separate regulatory category for supplements could undercut exclusivity rights enjoyed by the holders of approved drug applications.” (Source: FDA Deputy Commissioner for Policy David Adams, at the Drug Information Association Annual Meeting, July 12, 1993).

Here are 15 other Amazing Health Benefits Of Cashew Nuts – http://www.healthdigezt.com/cashews-are-a-natural-anti-depressant/

Cheese, Cream, more cheese, in fact everything and anything dairy can be found on the Snack Box Diet plates.

Eating high calcium, higher fat dairy foods, may not be the heart attack weighting to happen foods many people think they are. In fact they can be one of those foods that actually helps you to lose fat, and for good reason too.

Danish Study on Eating More Calcium

Now, a recent study conducted in Denmark has observed that the more calcium you eat in your diet the less body fat you will have, and therefore the less you will weigh. This points to the fact that not only is dairy a high-energy food, it could be that dairy itself can help you absorb less fat.

Professor Arne Astrup, Head of Human Nutrition at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, Denmark, undertook a study to prove this fact.

In the study, a group of volunteers spent one week eating a diet that was high in calcium, typically more than 2000milligrams of calcium a day; and week 2 was on a low calcium diet, where they were eating around about 500milligrams of calcium a day.

These diets were designed so that they had the identical amount of calories and crucially, they also had the same fat content each week.

The known science led the researchers to expect that the higher calcium diet would indeed cause the body to absorb less fat than on the lower calcium diet.

Better than Expected

However, the results that actually came out were even better than expected, in fact on the higher calcium diet tests on the subjects excretions showed that they passed through twice as much fat as they did on the lower calcium diet.

Putting that another way, on the higher calcium diet they absorbed only half the amount of fat than they did on the lower calcium diet.

What this means for snack box dieters is that when you eat dairy products, not all of their calories count.

But of course, that still doesn’t give you an excuse to binge out on cheese!