My post today over at 180DegreeHealth: I simply must make this post, as I keep hearing people fretting about the amount of PUFAs in chicken. Im mainly interested in demonstrating a CONCEPT here, so you all can go and figure it out for yourselves (I always appreciated Matts approach to teaching a person to fish and try to do the same for my clients). If you want to dissect specifics after reading this, you will have missed the point, and I wont be around to discuss it, as I have clients to help and this post will take enough of my time. ***Absolute vs. Relative***. This is a very important concept, especially on a topic like PUFAs. Absolute = the total amount of something. Example: the total amount of PUFAs in all the foods youre going to eat in a day. Relative = the percentage of something. Example: the percentage of the fat in a food that is PUFAs. Chicken is considered to have a high *relative* PUFA content, but as youll see, that can be misleading, even to supposed nutritional leaders. Im going to talk about skinless chicken breast and whole milk here, to demonstrate the point with some extremes, to also show that thinking in extremes is a poor way to go about things. Lets say you wanted to get 50 grams of animal-based protein a day, and you were going to get it from either skinless chicken breast or whole milk. The Peat-o-philic PUFAphobes say you should avoid all chicken because it is too high in PUFA, and you should drink lots of milk, because it is low in PUFA. Well, we all need a certain amount of protein for proper function--so thats why I set an arbitrary protein amount--because it is quite easy to find carb sources and fat sources that are nearly PUFA-free (heard of sugar and butter?), thus the other macro differences become somewhat inconsequential to this discussion as they can be corrected later. Skinless chicken breast nutritional info I used: nutritiondata.self/facts/poultry-products/703/2 A little math leads us to 1.3 grams of PUFA to get 50 grams of protein. Whole milk nutritional data I used: nutritiondata.self/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/69/2 A little math leads us to 3.1 grams of PUFA to get 50 grams of protein. WHAT? Milk has MORE PUFAs than chicken?!?! More than twice as many in this example. (note how I left out the whole milk and skinless chicken breast in that sentence?...changes things, dont it?) Huh. Maybe painting foods with a black and white brush isnt such a smart thing to do. Everything is contextual. Maybe math IS hard, like that ill-fated talking Barbie that came out in the 80s said. Oh wait. Now Im going to have some fun. Tryptophan is also something that *some* people have decided that they should minimize. Lets compare the tryptophan content of chicken and milk (I had to go to a different website to find the amino acid breakdown): whfoods/genpage.php?tname=nutrientprofile&dbid=104 whfoods/genpage.php?tname=nutrientprofile&dbid=13 Again, for 50 grams worth of protein from either food: Chicken = 0.58 grams of tryptophan Milk = 0.65 grams of tryptophan Milk is again left as the LOSER in the *ABSOLUTE* content of BOTH categories, with more PUFAs and more tryptophan! Apparently, to minimize PUFAs and tryptophan for equivalent amounts of protein, skinless chicken breast is BETTER than whole milk. Eat what you like. I simply refuse to let people do it on false theoretical pretenses. Thats about all I have on that topic for now. Learn what absolute vs. relative means, and dont be afraid to get our your calculator and question the gurus out there. Speaking of which, I had a great time on the Kill The Guru podcast today with James Kahan... --Dr. G
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 22:42:55 +0000
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