Another victory in the war against greens fatigue

Every week, we get more and more non-leafy vegetables in our subscription share from Needle Lane Farms—now we’re getting cucumbers and string beans and lots of summer squash along with things like cabbage and fennel that might be technically leafy vegetables but aren’t in the interchangeable-cooking-greens category. However, we still get at least one bunch of cooking greens every week too. Left to my own devices, I would probably buy non-spinach cooking greens once or twice a year. And after 9 straight weeks of eating cooking greens every week, I kind of hit a wall. It turns out there’s only so much kale I can take, even if it’s cooked in bacon fat or a cheese-infused béchamel.

And then, I remembered the kale “chips” that I started seeing on blogs last winter. They all alleged that if  you just toss kale with some oil and coarse salt and maybe some vinegar, and then you bake it, it crisps up and becomes crunchy and delicious. It sounded a little too good to be true. After trying it, I’m declaring it half-true.

Greens treated this way do get crisp—you could easily crumble them to dust if you wanted to—and they taste mostly like the oil and salt you coat them with. But they do still have a lingering bitterness, which could be either a positive or a negative depending on your palate. I like them enough to eat them, and if I had a bowl within arms’ reach, I’d probably snack on them idly until they were gone. I might even pick at the crumbles at the bottom of the bowl. Brian, who is not generally a fan of kale, has eaten them willingly and says they seem like something he’d expect Japanese people to like, probably because they’re a bit reminiscent of dried seaweed. In general, I feel like this a good thing to do with cooking greens if you’re sick of eating them wilted and dressed or stuffed into every frittata or soup or casserole you make, but you’re compelled for some reason to keep eating them anyway.

However, they’re not so good that I’d encourage anyone to run out and buy some greens just to try it. I definitely wouldn’t expect kids to enjoy them, and if you really just don’t like the taste of kale, this probably won’t redeem it for you. 

Working on the assumption that most cooking greens are basically interchangeable, I also tried it with a bunch of kohlrabi greens and a bunch of rainbow chard, and indeed, they all turn out pretty much the same. The kohlrabi tops are a little more bitter and retain a tiny bit more chew, and the chard is a little more delicate, but I wouldn’t want to have to distinguish between the three in a blind taste test. In the future, I’ll try adding a little vinegar or lemon juice or zest along with the oil to counteract/complement the bitterness, and perhaps some chili powder or garlic powder and nutritional yeast or msg. This actually seems like a perfect nootch vehicle and I’m annoyed with myself that I didn’t think of that sooner.

Since this counts as a “win” (if not a complete trouncing), I think the official record for Me vs. Greens is 9-1-0 in my favor. I’m counting one mediocre batch of bacon kale as a “tie.” Ten more weeks to go.

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Needle Lane gave us our first summer squash of the season last week, and I decided to try the simple sauté with sliced almonds that the Amateur Gourmet had raved about, originally from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from a restaurant called Red Cat. More of an idea than a recipe: toast some sliced almonds in a pan and then add some summer squash cut into very thin pieces and cook for no more than a minute. I like toasted almonds and tender-crisp zucchini well enough, but it probably wouldn’t have gotten my attention if Deb from SK hadn’t called it “My Favorite Side Dish.” Anytime someone lays a superlative down like that, especially for something that doesn’t involve garlic, cheese, or bacon, I’m intrigued.

I fussed with it a bit—I added garlic because I reflexively chopped some while I was heating the fat in the pan, and I added a kohlrabi bulb diced into matchsticks and steamed for a few minutes in the microwave because I felt like I needed to use that up at the same time. I didn’t cut the squash into matchsticks because I don’t have a mandoline and didn’t want to take the time. But I could still kind of see where Deb was coming from. It was simultaneously exactly what I should have expected from sautéed almonds and summer squash, and somehow better than I could have expected. I won’t go as far as “favorite side dish” but it is a delicious and dead simple way to use the squash that’s just about to become so excessive that some people have  designated August 8 official Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night.

The kohlrabi is definitely optional—it added a little cabbagey bite, but I don’t think I would have missed it. I used butter instead of olive oil and let it brown a little, by accident not by design. It may have enhanced the nuttiness. Or maybe what puts Deb’s version over the top is the whatever olive flavor survives the cooking process intact. My suspicion is that any kind of fat will work and that it would be a waste of really expensive olive oil, but expectations probably come into play here: if you want to use a pricey oil and you think you can taste the difference, then you will.

Conversely, the browned butter and almonds might have been a lovely way to finish steamed kohlrabi matchsticks on their own. The kohlrabi greens are edible, too. I threw some in cupboard-clearing bean soup, and they worked just like spinach but a little chewier. The ones from this bulb are still sitting in the fridge, waiting to be cooked in some bacon fat or baked until crisp like kale chips.

Recipe: Kohlrabi and Summer Squash with Almonds

• 2 small-medium summer squash
• 1-3 oz. sliced almonds
• 1 T. butter or olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 medium-large kohlrabi bulb (optional)
• 2-3 cloves garlic (optional)

1. Remove the leaves from the kohlrabi (if using), and peel away the tough outer layer. Dice into matchsticks, place in a bowl with 2-3 T. water and cook on high for 3-4 minutes or until tender. Alternatively, boil/steam the matchsticks in a small saucepan.

2. Heat the butter or oil in a large pan. Mince the garlic, if using, and add the almonds and garlic to the fat.

3. While the almonds are toasting—or before, if you’re a stickler about having your mise en place—slice the squash into thin pieces. Matchsticks if you want to, or little half-moons like I did. You want them to be thin enough to just cook through in about a minute in the pan.

4. When the almonds are turning brown, add the squash. Toss gently to coat in the fat. After about a minute, remove from the heat.

Introduction and Part I of this series.

Few stories that begin, “Many Americans clueless…” can really be called “news.” Nonetheless, a recent study made headlines earlier this month by confirming what research has shown time and again: most people don’t know how many calories they supposedly burn. The 2010 Food & Health Survey by Cogent Research asked respondents (1,024 adults “nationally representative of the US population based on the Census”) to estimate how many calories someone of their age, height, weight, and activity levels “should consume” per day. Only 12% got within 100 calories +/- their Estimated Energy Requirement (or EER, the formula currently used by the USDA) and 25% wouldn’t even venture a guess. The remaining 63% were just wrong. This seems to pose a problem for the claim that publishing calorie counts on menus will improve public health. Logically, if people don’t know if they burn 10 or 10,000 calories in a day, which is the range of estimates collected in another survey, conducted in 2006 at the University of Vermont (full text with UMich login), knowing how many calories a particular menu item contains probably isn’t going to do them much good.

The new calorie publishing policy actually includes a provision to help address this problem—in addition to the calorie counts of all menu items, menus will also have to publish the average daily calorie requirement for adults (2,000 Kcal). New York City also attempted to address the problem of calorie ignorance when it instituted its calorie count requirement by launching an ad campaign aimed at drilling the 2000/day calorie requirement into people’s heads.

But that’s not the kind of calorie ignorance I’m concerned about. For one, I don’t think the success of calorie counts in reducing obesity or improving public health depends on people keeping strict caloric budgets. Enough people have internalized the belief they ought to eat fewer calories that the numbers could be useful as a point of comparison regardless of how many people can accurately estimate how many calories they supposedly burn based on their age, height, weight, and activity level. Even if you’re under the mistaken impression that you’re Michael Phelps, if your goal is to consume less energy, choosing between the 250-calorie sandwich and the 350-calorie one is a simple matter of figuring out which number is smaller. IF calorie counts were accurate, and they inspired at least some people to consistently chose lower-calorie items, and at least some of those people didn’t compensate for those choices by eating more later or being less active, and some of them continued to burn the same number of calories despite eating fewer of them, then the counts would actually have the intended effect. The magnitude of the effect might be small, but it would be in the right direction.

Of course, that’s a big “if.” I already addressed the first condition (calorie counts are often wrong), and will be looking at the next two (people don’t order fewer calories but if they think they have they are likely to compensate later) in more detail in later entries. The problem of most people not knowing how many calories they burn is related to the third condition—the mistaken assumption that people will continue to burn the same number of calories even if they reduce the number of calories they eat.

In other words, the problem isn’t that too few people know that the average adult probably burns something in the vicinity of 2000 calories per day. The problem is that metabolism varies. It doesn’t stick to the formula based on height, weight, age, and activity levels. Most people don’t know how many calories they burn because they can’t know, because it’s dependent on lots of factors that formulas don’t and can’t account for. And one of the things that usually causes people to burn fewer calories per day is eating fewer of them. This starts to get at one of the other reasons I don’t think posting calorie counts will have the desired effect: it’s true that eating fewer calories often leads to short-term weight loss, but the vast majority of people either get hungry and can’t sustain the energy deficit or their bodies adjust to burning fewer calories and erases the deficit. Either way, almost all of them regain all of the weight they lost, and often more. Read more

When I first became a vegetarian, one of the few things I missed was my mother’s fried chicken dinner. And it wasn’t so much the star of the meal I longed for—although her chicken was great. What I craved was the milk gravy she’d make from the pan drippings to ladle over the mashed potatoes and biscuits she always made to accompany the chicken.

This vegetarian version of her gravy is one of the first recipes I figured out mostly on my own. Instead of relying on the pan drippings and scrapings from some kind of cooked meat, I start by frying some cracker crumbs and spices, roughly based on what my mom used to bread chicken. That provides a flavorful base for the gravy and a little bit of texture, just like pan scrapings. I add milk and simmer for a few minutes, and then thicken it with a corn starch slurry. It’s essentially just a savory milk pudding, and you can flavor it however you like. The only constants in mine are nutritional yeast, black pepper, and onion powder (or crushed fried shallots), but I often add a pinch of sage and rosemary, a little bit of bouillon, and just a shake or two of paprika and cayenne.

When I was vegan, I found that it adapted to vegan fats and milks quite well. Since returning to an omnivorous diet, I’ve made a number of gravies and pan sauces with actual pan drippings or sausage—Mexican chorizo in particular seems designed to be a gravy base—but honestly, I still like this version better. The combination of onion and nutritional yeast is so savory and umami and the gravy itself is creamy and satisfying, but just not as overwhelming as meat-based gravies. As far as I’m concerned, chorizo gravy, as delicious as it is, can only ever be a side dish. This gravy, I can eat as a meal. Also, it’s simple and quick enough to be thrown together in the 10-12 minutes it takes to bake a batch of biscuits, which makes it perfect for an easy weekend brunch. No fried chicken required.

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Introduction to this series here.

  When you see 450 posted, that might really mean 530. Or more.

Publishing caloric values right on the menu seems straightforward and transparent. The numbers offer what appears to be a simple way to compare items no matter how different they are based on what many people believe is, as Margo Wootan said, the “most critical piece of nutrition information.”  But even setting aside for a moment the issue of whether the number of calories should be the most important factor governing food choices or all calories are equal, there are problems with the numbers themselves.

Give or take 20%…but almost always give

According to a recent study at Tufts where a team of nutrition scientists led by Susan Roberts used a calorimeter to measure the actual caloric value of 39 prepared meals purchased at supermarkets and restaurant chains:

Measured energy values of 29 quick-serve and sit-down restaurant foods averaged 18% more than stated values, and measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated. Some individual restaurant items contained up to 200% of stated values and, in addition, free side dishes increased provided energy to an average of 245% of stated values for the entrees they accompanied. (Journal of the American Dietetic Association; full-text is subscription only—here if you have UM library permission)

As Roberts told Time, she decided to do the study because when she was trying to follow the diet advice in her own book, substituting prepared or restaurant meals, “the pounds stopped dropping off. Just as suspiciously, she always felt full” (more on the idea the fullness means a diet must be failing when I get to the issue of why calorie-restriction doesn’t work for long-term weight loss).

It’s worth noting that the results of the study didn’t reach statistical significance “due to considerable variability in the degree of underreporting.” However, they “substantially exceeded laboratory measurement error” and—as noted above—the average discrepancy was 8% or 18% higher, it didn’t even out. However, the average is actually within the Federal regulations—from the same Time article:

Federal regulations are strict about the accuracy of the net weight of a package of prepared food, which must be at least 99% of the advertised weight. When it comes to calories, the count can be a far bigger 20% off. The Federal Government plays no role in checking the calorie claims in restaurants, which means it's up to the states to handle the job — with the predictable patchwork results.

What Roberts’ research suggests is that calorie counts aren’t just wrong, they’re wrong in one direction. As anyone who’s ever tried to count calories knows, a difference of +18% could be devastating to a diet. Say, for example, you think you burn 2000 calories/day, like the supposed average American adult, and you’re trying to generate a ~250 calorie/day deficit through your diet. Assuming you continue to burn 2000 calories/day, that diet should make you lose about 1/2 lb per week or 26 lbs in a year. However, if you were actually eating 18% more calories than the 1750 you’ve budgeted, or 2065 calories/day, and the caloric algebra worked perfectly, you’d gain 6.8 lbs in a year instead.

Even if you’re being reductive, food is more than the sum of its parts

One factor that may work in the opposite direction: the method used to determine the caloric  content of food may systematically overestimate how much energy most people get from some foods. A quick primer on the calorie (most people who are reading this probably already know this, but since lots of people don’t): a nutritional calorie is a measure of the energy contained in food. The base unit, a gram calorie, is the amount of energy required to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius. A nutritional calorie is a kilocalorie (kcal) or “large calorie” (C), the amount of energy required to heat a 1 kg water 1 degree.

Here’s the part a lot of people don’t know: the caloric value on labels is calculated according to the “Atwater system” named after the USDA chemist William Atwater, who spent his career burning food and excrement (cue Bevis & Buthead laughter). Based on the formula Metabolizable Energy = Gross Energy in Food – Energy Lost in Secretions, Atwater came up with average energy values for each macronutrient: 9 Kcal/g for fat, 4 Kcal/g for protein, 4 Kcal/g for carbohydrates, and 7 Kcal/g for alcohol. For the purposes of nutrition labeling, even though fiber is technically a carbohydrate, it’s subtracted from the total carb weight before the calories are calculated since it’s not digested.

However, there appears to be considerable variation within macronutrients. Sucrose burns at a lower temperature than starch and isolated amino acids vary in their heat of combustion. Additionally, the Atwater system doesn’t account for differences in how macronutrients behave in when combined—for example, fiber seems to change the amount of fat and nitrogen that turn up in feces, which suggests that its effect on caloric value might not be entirely accounted for by simply subtracting fiber grams from the total carbohydrates. And, as you might expect, “variations in individuals are seen in all human studies” (Wikipedia).

The differences between estimated calories and the actual caloric value (as measured by a bomb calorimeter like the one Roberts’ team used in their study, which still might not correspond exactly to how food is turned to energy in the human digestive tract--I’m not entirely sure how calorimeters account for fiber given that fiber is combustible even though it isn’t digestible) might not be very large—but perhaps more importantly, the discrepancies probably aren’t consistent. The Atwater system is probably more accurate for some foods than others, and seems especially likely to overestimate the energy value of high-fiber foods and distort the differences between starchy and sugary foods.

That might help to explain the discrepancy seen in studies on nuts: in controlled nut-feeding trials, people eating more calories in the form of nuts don’t gain the weight that they should based on their greater energy intake. Additionally, they excrete more fat in their feces (Sabate 2003, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition). This is similar to another issue I mentioned in the introduction—not all calories are the same—but it’s not actually the same problem. Non-random variance in the reliability of caloric estimation means that even if all calories were the same, the numbers on the menus might not be accurate, i.e. the way we estimate calories might not correspond reliably to the amount of energy people actually derive from the food they eat.

So what?

Well, this means that there are (at least) two possible ways that providing consumers with “more information” in the form of calorie counts might actually lead to worse decision-making:

1) Even if people do base their decisions about what to order on the posted calorie counts, they might end up getting many more calories than they want and eating more than think they are.

2) Certain kinds of foods—including high-fiber foods and nuts, which might be “healthier” than items with lower posted calorie counts according to more holistic metrics—might have misleadingly high calorie counts based on the Atwater system. That could dissuade customers from ordering them or restaurants from offering them in favor of less “healthy” foods that may  have lower counts based on the Atwater system but actually provide more energy.

Calories on menus are already a fact of life in New York City and were set to appear in a handful of states like California and Oregon in 2011. Instead, thanks to a provision in the health care legislation Obama signed in March, they’ll be required nationwide. The policy calls for all restaurant chains with 20 or more locations to publish calorie counts for all items on all menus. The policy also applies to vending machines, buffets, and bars.

The policy’s advocates and authors claim that it will reduce obesity rates and improve public health. In a press release from The Center for Science in the Public Interest, Margo Wootan, a nutritionist who helped write the calorie count part of the bill said:

"Congress is giving Americans easy access to the most critical piece of nutrition information they need when eating out…. It’s just one of dozens of things we will need to do to reduce rates of obesity and diet-related disease in this country…. Menu labeling at restaurants will help make First Lady Michelle Obama’s mission to reduce childhood obesity just a little bit easier.” (CSPI press release)

In an interview with the LA Times, she expanded on the logic of the claim: 

"People will be able to see that the order of chili cheese fries they are considering will be 3,000 calories.”

Well, probably more like 400-500. But how could she be expected to know that before the law goes into effect?

Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale told the NYTimes that even if some consumers ignore the information, it will affect enough people to create a public health benefit. However, he also hedged his bet—saying that even if it doesn’t make people eat better, it’s an issue of rights as much as an issue of health:

“You don’t need a study that proves anything,” Mr. Brownell said. “You just have a right to know.”

Proof? Who needs proof? His disclaimer is savvy, because now in 5 or 10 years if obesity rates are still the same* or higher and there’s been no significant decrease in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, or any of the other conditions correlated (albeit often weakly) with obesity, Brownell can claim we’re still better off knowing than not knowing.

I’m not so sure. While I don’t think posting the number of calories is likely to have a significant, negative impact on public health, nutrition is one realm where more information isn’t always better. The usefulness of information always depends on its reliability, relevance, and people’s ability to place it in meaningful context. Calorie counts fail on all three measures, which is why I suspect the new policy isn’t going to have the desired effect on obesity rates or public health.**

Here are a few of the problems with calorie counts I’ll address in this series:

1) The number posted is often wrong (a problem for reliability)

2) Most people don’t know how many calories they burn (a problem for meaningful context)

3) Even though calorie restriction is a highly effective short-term weight loss strategy, it doesn’t work long-term (at least for 90% of dieters) (a problem for relevance)

4) Not all calories are equal (another problem for relevance)

Furthermore, the limited evidence available so far about how calorie counts on menus affect purchasing decisions based on the New York City law is mixed. That calls into question the mechanism by which the policy is supposed to improve public health. Apparently, knowing the calorie content of menu items doesn’t necessarily reduce the number of calories people purchase. And that’s before even beginning to try to measure whether purchasing fewer calories on single visits to restaurants actually leads to weight loss or if people just compensate by eating more on other occasions or eating more often.

One response might be: well, it can’t hurt. I’m also not so sure about that. While I don’t think it’s likely to make public health worse, by reinforcing the idea that your health (or your weight) is based on the number of calories you eat, it may prevent people from taking steps that would actually improve their health, which the preponderance of evidence suggests that calorie-restriction dieting will not.

Part I in this series, on why the number posted is often wrong, coming later today.

*The rate of increase in obesity has already been slowing down so even if it plateaus, that’s not necessarily evidence this or anything else is “working,” it may simply mean that obesity rates have reached an upper limit.

**Two separate issues which are often unjustly conflated. For more on that, see Paul Campos’ The Obesity Myth, J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics, Glen Gaesser’s Big Fat Lies, or Michael Gard and Jan Wright’s The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality, and Ideology—if you feel like I’ve said that before, it’s because I have. The reason I bring them up again and again is that they completely changed my thinking about nutrition, fatness, and health. The authors of those books all—independently—examined the evidence for the argument that obesity is dangerous and all reached the same conclusion: it’s not, and the belief that it is is based on some shockingly bad science. They also argue convincingly that the actual increases in Americans’ weight in the last few decades are actually quite modest (it’s the rate of people being defined as obese that’s trumpeted, not the amount of weight people have gained on average and some of the increase is based on changes in the definition of “normal” or “healthy” with no medical justification); that the correlations between obesity and disease or early mortality—many of which are quite weak—can be entirely explained by other factors that also happen to be correlated with BMI like differences in physical activity, income, and insurance status; and that weight-loss dieting, especially low-fat and calorie-restrictive dieting, do more harm than good. You don’t have to take my word for it. Substantial portions of the books are available for free online, as are many of the studies they cite (including the CDC study that revised the widely-cited statistic that overweight and obesity causes 300,000 deaths per year in the U.S. and said, effectively, “Actually make that 26,000 and by causes we mean correlates with.”)