My Inner Sponge

 

UPDATE: 1/1/2011 Same trimester and same craving. The mysterious "sea sponge" craving has resurfaced two years later(the baby is due in early march). Here's what happened last time:

My wife has had an unusual craving recently which coincided directly with the beginning of her third trimester of pregnancy. She has had an intense urge to drink water using a sea sponge as a filter. As far as pregnancy cravings go this is one of the more unusual ones, however a simple Google search revealed that the urge to chewing on sea sponges is actually one a small population of people around the globe shares.

There are plenty of potential reasons why she may be craving sponges, but none of them mattered as we headed out in search of a place that sells sea sponges. Emma had been chewing on synthetic sponges for a few weeks but began to crave the real ones. "We'll find one" my wife assured me as we headed out in search of the elusive sea sponge. Being that we live in Minnesota I was not optimistic that we would, but America has instilled in my wife the sense that anything is out there for purchase, you just have to look hard enough. My first bright idea was to stop and Wal-Mart and Target. They have everything....everything but real sea sponges of course. Damn. "The pet store, they sell fish supplies, I'll bet they have sponges." I said. Emma reluctantly came in and looked around. We found lots of coral and things to make a fish tank look good except of course sea sponges. "Let me have the keys," she said. "You don't think I can find a sea sponge." I replied. "It's not that, I just want to wander." she said as she hopped into the drivers side. She seemed uncertain of exactly what direction she wanted to go, but suddenly took a turn east. We were driving through Apple Valley, a local city with numerous big box stores and mini mall shops. Suddenly she took a left, "There, there's where we'll find my sponge." She was heading toward Bed, Bath, and Beyond. "It's here I can feel it." she said to me as we parked and headed inside. She seemed to know exactly where she was going and went directly to the section where she found her real sea sponge for $14.99. I had to laugh at the fact that we had really found one, and we had done so by wandering.
Now that she's had it for a week the craving has been satisfied and perhaps because of the sea sponge and perhaps coincidentally the baby has undergone a huge growth spurt this past weekend. I don't know why. I also don't know the exact reasons for the craving. Some ideas include:
1.Sponges have medicinal potential due to the presence in sponges themselves or their microbial symbionts of chemicals that may be used to control viruses, bacteria, tumors and fungi

2. The sponge is consumed for calcium as Calcerous sponges are made of calcium carbonate

3. The sponges is used to filter water as early Europeans used soft sponges for portable drinking utensils and municipal water filters
source

4. 1,2, 3 are all wrong and I have no idea why my wife craved sea sponges

I tend to think 3 is the most likely and that perhaps the craving is a memory of a past strategic use(she is of European ancestry).

Our lives at many moments can become occupied by cravings, simple ones for sea sponges, or more complex. The strange thing is we live most of our lives in ignorance. We seek something out on a whim without knowing the "why" or the "how". We are only given the signal by our bodies, that may have a purpose and may not. My inner sponge is a representation of my survival through ignorance. Maybe it's better I don't know, as I'm not needed for chemical reactions anyway. I'd probably mess the whole thing up like my high school chemistry experiments(and in the body you can't just screw up and fudge the numbers at the end).

Changes in American eating habits from 1980 to 2009

I'm learning the statistical programming language R at the moment. My goal is develop a second career for myself as a statistician for medical studies. In any case one of the practice data sets I've been working with documents the changes in American eating habits since 1980. The data comes from the 2009 Statistical Abstract of the United States.

Defending Taubes against a Skeptic

There was a story on NPR's The Story last week about Bernadette Lacy, a woman from Washington D.C. working forty plus hour weeks creating stress and ill health for her body(this was before the recession). Feeling stressed and unhealthy her doctor tells her to cut her hours which she does. This has the side effect of decreasing her bank account. And, when she tries to get back into the workforce she's not the same vibrant employee she was before. What else could her doctor have recommended? Here's a similar situation where I'll try to describe a better option.

I read a poorly conceived review of Gary Taubes Why We Get Fat in the June 2011 Skeptic magazine by Harriet Hall, M.D. A few thought experiments and the database I'm working on containing the math of the calorie and insulin relationship show Gary's book to be on the right track and her to be using an odd map of the world.

One notion Harriet Hall expressed was that some people are predisposed to being overweight because they store calories more efficiently than the rest of the population. Looking at the statistics from my database (Link1, link2 ) and an understanding of insulin explains why Gary's on the right track and Harriet Hall has embraced a bad scientific idea. 

            Gary Taubes argues that the reason that Americans are overweight is because we overstimulate insulin release eating carbohydrate . We eat too much carbohydrate because in the 1950's researcher Ancel Keys from the the University of Minnesota argued that the reason that we get fat is that we had too much saturated fat and cholesterol in our diets and since then this idea idea has ruled nutrition science, despite evidence to the contrary. 

            Getting back to Harriet Hall's review if I for example am efficient at storing calories then I don't need many calories to conduct my daily life like running with my Jack Russell Terrier Kirby and writing blog posts and poker articles. Carrying an efficient fat storage idea out to conclusion means that people who have this capability shouldn't need many fat cells in total to meet their energy costs or fat storage needs, so instead of getting fat, someone who “stores fat efficiently” should be thin. Carbohydrate foods that Taubes talks about like rice, corn and wheat stimulate the highest percentage of insulin of any food, and contain the least amount of energy according to my database.

           My hypothesis, slightly modified from Taubes, is based on the data and is that people who are fat have cells that extract very few calories from the food they eat(for starters by eating too many carbs) and also have the same expenses(or greater) than the average person and this also comes along with a larger insulin release. The expenses are organs,gut, brain, muscles, etc. They require energy to run. If, as I hypothesize, they earn very few calories per cell from food but have the same expenses as an average weight person they need more cells to cover the same costs(they inflate). Eating a carb heavy diet increases the frequency of the number of cells you need because carbohydrate foods in comparison to foods like meat gives your body a low return in comparison to its visual size(and a human gut is only so big). The effect experienced by the majority of people who are overweight is a low energy return on every cell and their fat storage too has a low amount of energy given their size. So they need larger populations of all types of cells(fat included) to maintain the same energy level. Imagine a similar situation which is currently being experienced by most American workers is that they need to work more hours to cover the same costs as they did years before. The same thing happens in a body consuming too many carbs.

            Getting back to bad doctors advice, what happens when you tell someone with a lower wage to cut time from work? They don't produce enough to cover their costs creating debt. What would happen (hypothetically) to someone who earns a low amount of energy per cell if you put them on a low calorie diet? They would feel an immense hunger very frequently. When they got back on a normal diet they would have to eat in even higher volume to payback the debt.

            What is the solution? You need to come up with a system of selection, specific to the person and environment that selects for efficiency relative to resources. Hmm, if only there was someone out there who came up with such a system?

*cough* Art DeVany *cough* Doug McGuff, and all the other great Paleo writers and thinkers out there.

Do you want to place the body in your care under stress? If it's already the situation cutting calories is not the answer, but neither is continuing the status-quo.

Innumeracy and Insulin

      Innumeracy is the inability to deal with a way of representing numbers. For instance doctors often come to different conclusions when test results are presented to them as percents or natural frequencies(like 1 out of 2 versus saying 50%). However in my case presenting  myself with the natural frequency proved to block my reasoning while changing to percentages made ideas clearer.

       Gary Taubes in his excellent book Good Calories, Bad Calories argued that the reason that Americans are overweight is because we release insulin throughout our body, and sometimes this release is overstimulated. The reason it is overstimulated, Taubes argues, is that we eat too much carbohydrate in our diet. We eat too much carbohydrate because in the 1950's researcher Ancel Keys from the the University of Minnesota argued that the reason that we get fat is that we had too much saturated fat and cholesterol in our diets and since then this idea idea has ruled nutrition science, despite evidence to the contrary. Taubes went to the University of Minnesota to follow up on a study which was supposedly being conducted only to be told that it was discontinued because “they didn't like the results they were getting.”

          I'm at my local supermarket buying beef when for some unknown reason I start converting the energy insulin ratio of corn based foods into percentages. I buy the 80/20 and rush home to toss it in the freezer. I head to my computer to pull out the Glycemic Load database I made and start converting the corn based products to what I call Insulin %. 

	Energy insulin ratio 1calorie to GL/g of	Insulin %
Cornflakes (Kellogg's, MI, USA)	3.28	23.00%
CornflakesTM (Kellogg's Inc., Canada)	4.95	17.00%
Corn ChexTM (Nabisco Brands Ltd., Canada)9	5.24	16.00%
50 g portion (dextrose)5	3.89	20.00%
Cornflakes, high-fiber (Presidents Choice,	6.33	14.00%
Corn BranTM (Quaker Oats Co. of Canada,	7.02	12.00%
Taco shells, cornmeal-based, baked (Old El Paso	8.88	10.00%
Corn chips, NachipsTM	11.62	8.00%
Average percentage		15.00%

Range of percentage 8%-23%

Walking through the store the beef I find typically ranges from 93/7 to 80/20. The fat % of the animals and the insulin % of the foods are strikingly similar and the minimum and maximum ranges are very close. Too much so to not investigate furthur. Are cows acting as an insulin buffer? They are releasing the insulin and storing fat based on their pancreas while by the time it gets to me that has already been done. I'm currently trying to dig up some data on what % Americans are overweight by in relationship to their normal weight or height. If anyone knows of reliable data could you post a link in the comments?

Of course I also know there's different kinds of beef like 

U.S. Prime - Highest in quality and intramuscular fat, limited supply. Currently, about 2.9% of carcasses grade as Prime
U.S. Choice - High quality, widely available in food service industry and retail markets. Choice carcasses are 53.7% of the fed cattle total. The difference between Choice and Prime is largely due to the fat content in the beef. Prime typically has a higher fat content (more and well distributed intramuscular "marbling") than Choice

What I'm trying to answer are these questions: Is human body fat storage a simple system of creating fat cells in ratio to the insulin released from the highest insulin release during any given meal?

Can the dietary promotion of an insulin % reliably predict your body fat %?

PS while looking for a simpler word than promotion or stimulation to describe insulin release I found these synonyms

incentive, incitement, invigoration, refreshment

Related posts

http://positivelyblackswan.blogspot.com/2011/01/glycemic-load-per-calorie-comparison.html

The energy insulin ratio as a picture

I'm working on improving my use of graphs with open office. Here's two from the charts I've posted so far here and here. Here's a one of the calories/g to glycemic load/g ratio.




The second graph here is just GL per gram. The original tables are here and here .


I think there's a pretty clear power law relationship in both cases.

A glycemic load per calorie comparison

The Energy/Insulin ratio

Table one and two- A comparative ratio of calories per gram in a food to how it affects blood glucose levels per gram(glycemic load per gram).

Calorie per gram data is courtesy of http://www.netzingers.com/cgi-bin/calorie_lookup.php 
Glycemic load data is courtesy of    http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm

On the left we have foods with a low glycemic load per gram and on the right we have those with a high glycemic load per gram. So how do you get to the top ratings? A few ways. Have a low GL(glycemic load) and a medium to high amount of calories per gram, or have a high amount of calories per gram to compensate for a high GL. You can jump down the *** if you don't want to read the table and trust me to do the analysis.

A few interesting things pop out, firstly peanuts top the charts by a long shot. Carrots lie at both the top and the bottom of the left hand cart so there seems to be a large variation due to the type but they are low insulin and also sometimes low in energy.

(*** jump to this point if you trust my data and analysis but don't want to look at the numbers)

Cornflakes(and many of the breakfast cereals) again take the bottom spot for high blood glucose levles produced and low calories per gram. Blueberry muffins, Corn chips, wheat thins, and white flour are the only foods that top a 10:1 ratio on the right, which makes me think at least there may have been some reason that our ancestors detected and chose flour as a dietary staple.

So how should this information be taken?
I'd start by never eating anything in the lower right hand side ever. That means almost all breakfast cereals should be considered useless. I really don't see the point in eating them.

Everything else I would not alter my habits as my analysis to this point still paints an incomplete picture of what you are obtaining from a food.

The logic(or lackthereof) in modern foods

Last post I included my first table that analyzed the glycemic load of various foods per gram. If you were/are unfamiliar with glycemic load, it is basically a statistic used by diabetics to help them figure out what foods are causing them to have blood sugar spikes. Although i am not diabetic(there is a family history) I use the stat to try and steer clear of foods that even though they may taste good or have a lot of calories are placing too much stress on my body.

I posted the list last time of the best foods and fruit dominated the top of the rankings. Apples, pears, cherries, peaches, etc. Fruit has the best looking stats of any sugary food that you could place on your menu. There were also some surprises like yogurt, lentils, and Turkish soup.

Looking at the bottom of the list highlights just how much modern food processing is responsible for the current epidemic of diabetes that is going on in America(click on table for larger view).




Kellogg's corn flakes takes the bottom spot, not far behind are things like Rice crispies, grapenuts , power bars, vanilla wafers, shredded wheat, etc. Another food at the top of the list is the modern additive dextrose which is a form of pure sugar made from cornstarch. The only non modern foods are amaranth, and dried dates. Just for reference chocolate ice cream comes in at .2 GL/g vs .5 GL/g or higher for almost all of the breakfast cereals.

This begs the question of how can an apple be more efficient than human food makers? I think the answer lies in having thousands of years of feedback and having the right methods of selection. There may also be particular dimensions of modern food production that puts them all at the bottom list either by design or ignorance. There are a few possible dimensions of selection like $ profits, calories, quick energy, minimal prep time, long shelf life, and portability that I can think of at the moment, but I hope to analyze this more fully in the future.

The evolutionary logic of fruit

As I stated earlier this is going to be mostly a blog about food stats. I've started working on my first table which I'm using to figure out what foods release sugar more slowly when digested which cause less insulin spikes from your pancreas. I have picked the gram as my unit to center everything around because it will help to have all the stats on the same scale. Calories are also scaled to grams.

In basketball for instance good stats are all based around "the possession" and everything else revolves around that. How many points to you get per possession? How many possessions do you gain or lose for your team. How often do you get up a shot per possession? It makes picking out who is good and bad on your team really easy. This crates a much more reliable picture of who the best players are, and is light years better than looking at stats like points per game. Likewise centering everything around the same unit(grams) makes picking out the good and bad foods really easily. The data that I have comes from http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm . What I did was to sort all the foods by those with the lowest glycemic load(which is calculated by Glycemic Load = (Glycemic Index x the amount of available carbohydrate divided by 10) and then divided each number by the total number of grams that were sampled.

So the statistic here is glycemic load/per gram and what it says is that given equal calories gained per gram the top foods are all the best. Of course this could change once I find a good source of data of calories per gram.




One of my favorites plain yogurt made the list. A few I have no clue what they are. Turkish noodle soup? I may just have to find a good recipe as allrecipes.com returns no hits. Seems like it might be a great food to eat when you are sick!Fruit takes 17 of the top 50 spots by my count(I may have miscounted).



Fruit and your body have been been in relationship quite a while and have worked out an efficient and effective means of exchange(This seems to have alluded modern food processing companies). Tomorrow I'll post the bottom of the list and show you why I think Tony the Tiger is probably a diabetic.