Great news, calories are meaningless!

There have never been more low calorie and low fat products in the supermarkets, with some “light” products doubling their market share year on year, yet we have higher levels of obesity and type 2 diabetes than ever before. So... how can this be? www.BeNiceToYou.com just might have the answer to that!

Because, as Kate Walker of BeNiceToYou.com told That's Health: “There is a direct correlation between the invention of manufactured fats and low calorie sweeteners and the increase in obesity and diet related diseases such as type 2 diabetes.

"If you plot them together on a timeline, the relationship between these products and such diseases becomes very obvious”.

She went on to say: “Low calorie manufactured foods have had the calories removed from them by replacing the natural sugars with sweeteners and the natural fats with manufactured ones, which on the face of it seems like a good idea, but these products are so alien to our systems that our bodies have no idea what to do with them. This puts the body under stress which then creates the right conditions for storing fat.”

According to a study published by The American Psychosomatic Society calorie restrictive diets increase the production of Cortisol in the liver, cortisol being a critical factor in fat storage in the body.

“Calories are meaningless because the way in which the calorific values of foods are determined bears absolutely no relation to the way our bodies process them. Humans break down food with enzymes in a chemical process that releases energy and, more importantly, the nourishment.

"What we don’t do is incinerate food at high temperatures using electricity in a bomb calorimeter. Calories are simply an unreliable measure of the energy potential in our food and bear absolutely no relation at all to how nourishing the food is. All foods contain calories to one degree or another, but not all foods contain nourishment. Nourishment is important because that’s the minerals, vitamins and trace elements the body needs to build and replace millions of cells that die every day. Calories don’t build cells.”

There are low calorie foods that contain little or no nourishment and these tend to be manufactured foods. Conversely there are low and high calorie foods that are packed with nourishment and these tend to be the more natural products. So the conclusion is that it doesn’t matter how many calories there are in the food we eat, the important thing is how much nourishment we are able to extract from the food. If we want to slim down as a nation and reverse the diabetes trend, we need to see our food differently. Counting calories doesn’t work because they don’t matter. We need to look beyond calories and see the nourishment in our food.