Sometimes humility pays off…

On Monday night, I went to the first practice for the Carrboro, NC Fall Ultimate Frisbee league. After a grueling scrimmage against Team 9, we retreated to the sidelines to chat and play some cooldown toss.  I was tossing with a guy I've played with before, but don't know particularly well (he had to remind me of his name before the practice), and Evie, our stalwart captain.

Evie asked me what's new, and I told her a little about FitFam and where it's going. Our throwing partner remarked, "I've done some work in nutrition." 

Now, sometimes it's hard for me not to feel like a know-it-all. I'm usually in the position of giving nutritional advice, so it took a tiny, almost imperceptible internal struggle for me to be curious about his work. (I haven't asked his permission to publicize him or his work, so he's going to remain anonymous until I get such permission. I don't want my team to clam up around me for fear of being blogged.)

Turns out, he's written research and policy papers for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a truly heroic organization with some of the best school-lunch guidance on the web, and he's an expert in the economic, environmental, and health aspects of meat production. But it's his current research that inspired this post.

His current research is on the history of beverages. Not the history of Coke and Tang, but the biological history of the human race and liquid food. Here are the really cool points he made:

Beverages are about 10,000 years old
Our current digestive system is about 200,000 years old
We haven't evolved to handle calories from beverages yet

Research reliably shows that when we drink out calories, we overeat by precisely that number of calories. In other words, if you and I have an identical meal, but I have a can of cola or fruit juice with my meal, I'll consume the same number of food calories as you, in addition to the beverage calories. I don't compensate for the cola calories by eating less. If, however, I consume those additional calories in the form of food, I will compensate by reducing the amount of calories I consume from the meal.

In other words, our bodies don't "notice" beverage calories as they accumulate within us. We're programmed not to "feel full" after drinking, no matter how much we drink.

He explained one possible theory for this: "Imagine you're a caveman, living in a time where calories are scarce and starvation is a real and present danger.  Let's say you've just finished a huge drink of water from the river, and someone comes into camp with an animal they just hunted. If you feel full because of the water, you're not going to eat enough meat to keep you fueled through a few days of famine."

We're meant to drink water. Not fruit juice. Not sugar waters. Not colas.

Interestingly, soup doesn't seem to have that effect. We register soup calories just fine. I asked about whole food smoothies, and he said the research hasn't been done yet.

I'm going to try to get him to record a teleseminar with me, and I'll post it to the site. Wish me luck - this is cool stuff!