Many Common Notions About Food Are Just Plain Wrong
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A good many of our most cherished beliefs about food prove, in the light of scientific investigation, to be ill founded. For example:
“Milk Quickly Leaves the System After Consumption, Since It Is Mostly Water.”
False. It is a commonly held belief that milk, being mostly water, cannot leave any significant waste mass for the intestines. Actually, milk leaves a great amount of residue — much more than meat or eggs.
A Summary of Research Investigations into Food
Dr. James S. McLester has summarized the investigations of scores of scientists who have delved into the mysteries of food in controlled experiments.
It has been found that:
– Meat is the most satisfying food in that it calls forth the greatest activity on the part of the stomach.
– Milk ranks next to meat.
– Cooked eggs are more satisfying than raw eggs; the latter leave the stomach rapidly and are not easily digested.
– Bread, especially if toasted, has poor appetite-satisfying qualities. Potatoes are only a little higher. Both become much more satisfying, however, if a little butter is used with them, and together they add measurably to the satisfying effect of meat.
– Green vegetables are low in satisfying qualities.
– A little sugar increases the staying power of meals considerably. A meal taken without sugar remained in the stomach three and a half hours; the same meal with sugar added remained eight hours. Evidence of the value of a light sweet dessert!
– If eggs are eaten raw, beat them in order to get full value. Plain raw egg white apparently runs through the system so rapidly that it is hardly digested at all.
– Cooking loosens the connective tissue of meat so that the digestive juices reach it more readily.
– Cooking causes the starch cells of vegetables to burst and become accessible to digestive fluids.
– The most easily digested form of fat is butter.
– Hot fresh breads are just as digestible as cold if they are chewed thoroughly and are properly light in texture.
– Milk is more easily digested when mixed with other foods; take a cracker with your milk.
– Foods that are most likely to cause distress because of individual sensitivities are, in relative order according to one test involving 500 persons:
a) onions
b) milk
c) apples
d) cabbage
e) chocolate
f) radishes
g) tomatoes
h) cucumbers
i) eggs
j) fats
“You LOOK TERRIBLE, darling! Don’t take off another pound!”
When your women friends start making comments to you in this vein, you can count yourself a success. Why? Such remarks are complimentary because they are honest. You have smitten the speaker with a sense of guilt — that’s what it is, guilt! This is because when you have achieved a slim figure by virtue of diet control and physical activities, you become a sort of public enemy. You have proved that you can control your weight. How do you think your plump friends and the pudgy, portly public feels about that? Happy for you? Try envious, jealous, resentful.
– It feels like pulling you and your slim-lassie figure right down off its offensive pedestal. So you must expect to duck a barrage of remarks and side-comments like these:
“Isn’t that frightful diet putting circles under your eyes, dear?”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have a terrible time with colds-no resistance, you know.”
“I think these streamlined dresses make a woman’s figure look awful, don’t you?”
“It’s marvelous how you’ve slimmed down, darling. I just don’t dare take off a pound because I do all my own work and need all the energy I can get.”
“Haven’t you lost weight, my dear?”
On the other hand hearing a salutation from a woman to the effect that you’ve lost weight, just might be a danger sign. It may mean that the speaker has observed a girth increase in the person addressed and is courageously saying what she doesn’t think, the social amenities being what they are.
– You will need to learn the hidden meanings of subtext — what is being said, apart from the actual words spoke. You will have to learn to take remarks for their deeper meaning, not at face value. It’s fun, though, when you realize that you are an object of envy.
What a blissful inward chuckle you enjoy when a friend complains about the wicked dry cleaner who shrank last summer’s dress so she can’t squeeze into it this season! Or the woman who keeps gaining weight in spite of the fact that she eats “nothing-just nothing at all, my dear. Heredity, you know!” Or the man who excoriates the railroads because they don’t build their seats wide enough to accommodate two people comfortably.
But, as you love your social standing, don’t ever let the twinkle in your eye become visible!
You will probably need a whole new bag of tricks to get along with host or hostess. After all, when you arc invited to a dinner party you cannot come right out and say, “I’m on a diet.” Yes, some people do just that, but we’re assuming that you want a repeat invitation some day.
– Men, the handsome creatures, reduce more for health and efficiency than for beauty but they have the same reducing problems as the ladies.
The problem of avoiding the second helping is child’s play
Keep talking and eat slowly! Spring a joke or two; pay rapt attention to what the man on your right is saying; get all wrapped up in appreciation of the host’s puns. By the time the second serving comes around, most of your first will still be on your plate and you can tackle it with every appearance of zest.
Anyhow, for all you know the hostess is hoping there will be enough left over for a pick-up supper tomorrow evening.
You don’t have to consume everything on your plate, either you are now expert in identifying by a single glance of the eye those foods you can eat without undue calorie intake. Polish off the salads, the leafy vegetables, the lean meat.
Forego the thick gravies and mashed potatoes rich with butter and cream.
If you are in a social situation, mess around with them a little if you wish, so it will appear that you were just on the voracious verge of attacking them when the dessert course swept your plate from under you. Leave the rolls and the thick pat of butter on your bread-and-butter plate, covered o’er, perhaps, with a neat thatch of camouflaging celery leaves.
Dieting is one place in which you are not entitled to your just desserts, at least the ones into which the hostess pours love and whipped cream. Fancy footwork is called for here. Sometimes you can eat the cake and leave the sugar icing. If it’s ice cream, you can dawdle while it melts.
When you’re really cornered, whip out the old recipe dodge. Go into ecstasies over the dessert and demand the formula. Get busy scribbling. First thing you know the dessert will have been carried away while the hostess beamingly warns you to be sure not to forget the half teaspoonful of chopped orange rind.
As a gentleman reducer, your problems may be a little different.
Some of the above methods will work for you but you have an added weapon or two in your arsenal. Practically surefire is the trick of tossing an argument bomb. Just mention taxes, the war or the administration. Nobody will notice whether you are eating anything or not. In fact, others may lose their appetites too.
One Less Than Ideal Dieting Strategy that Just Might Work
Simplest protection of all is to skimp on breakfast and lunch so you can consume a hearty dinner without upsetting your calorie budget. A single big meal a day is not good physiology, but after all an emergency is an emergency.

July 7th, 2008 at 9:47 am
[...] Source: Foods [...]