6 ms·

This is why I tell people to go easy on the spinach when they’re making smoothies.

zingababba 3y ago
Yeah, throwing a bunch of greens into a blender is not a great way to consume them. Boiling/steaming is the way to go. The vast majority of vegetables I personally eat are well cooked and mushy.
- Bluecobra 3y ago
  I used to make green smoothies all the time, even went as far to by an expensive Blentec blender. If you are following Weight Watchers you actually get penalized for blending/juicing vegetables, so I stopped. Normally these are zero point foods. Their justification makes a lot of sense to me: https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/blog/food/why-fruit-counts-smoothies https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/blog/food/why-fruit-counts...
  - whycome 3y ago
    The fiber factor probably plays a big role too. Sometimes juicers take that out. Fiber can make you feel full and it may also play a role in rate of sugar absorption.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Man, I wish that chewing and food volume would reduce my hunger. The only thing that makes me stop feeling hungry is my blood sugar going back up to a normal level. I'm truly envious if there's actually anybody out there who can eat low-calorie bulky foods and actually feel satisfied by the meal. I just feel bloated but still just as hungry as before eating.
    - tomcar288 3y ago
      i know exactly what you mean. I can eat like 4 LBS of cucumbers in one sitting and still feel like I could eat a pizza afterwards. when you consume super low calorie foods like cucs and tomatoes, zuchinni, the body actually keeps on counting the calories with incredible accuracy and adjusts your hunger/appetite accordingly. But, I'll say, it does help a little bit and you do get a bit of discount by going with low calorie veggies, it's just not a silver bullet. at the end of the day you'll still consume less calories than you would have: just don't expect one large salad to fill you up. at the end of the day, you still need to go hungry to loose weight or keep it off.
      - lamontcg 3y ago
        You actually need fats to poke the satiety receptors.
        tomcar288 3y ago
        fats don't all do that well on satiety studies. just look at the holz studies. most of the satieting things didn't have much fats in them: potatoes, apples and oranges.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      I don't think that only caloric content matters. How satiating do you find a 150-calorie small bag of Doritos compared to three or four grapefruits, with a similar caloric content? For me the answer is "not very."
      - crazygringo 3y ago
        Grapefruits aren't a good comparison, since Google says a grapefruit has 104 calories. But if we compare a 150 calorie bag of doritos with 5 large tomatoes (each one being 33 calories), that feels about comparable in terms of satiating me in terms of giving me a break from hunger for maybe 45 minutes. On the other hand, just large tomatoes does absolutely nothing for hunger. Which is the indication for me that volume is entirely irrelevant. (And why would volume matter? Your body can't turn volume into calories.) Only problem with 5 large tomatoes is that it leaves me feeling kind of gross/bloated with that much volume. My stomach will literally feel like it protrudes, which is uncomfortable.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        My mistake. I got misled by the “serving size” of half a grapefruit (who just eats half?). But volume mattering is pretty well attested and most people have experience with it. Why wouldn’t it? You physically can only fit so much food inside your stomach before it is uncomfortable to continue, no matter the caloric content.
        crazygringo 3y ago
        Yeah I guess that's what mystifies me about it so much. Volume does nothing for me. Like if I'm on a diet of 1,200 cal/day to lose weight, eating bulky foods does nothing to make me any less miserable, compared to if I stick to dense protein/fats/carbs. The sensation (and distraction) of hunger remains identical.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        1,200 calories per day is an exceptionally restrictive diet in any case. I think it might be more obvious the difference if you were just eating till you felt full and tried swapping around different foods (though there is plenty of historical record of people resorting to nonfood items of no nutritional value just to fill their stomachs if hungry enough).
- IIsi50MHz 3y ago
  Steaming retains more nutrients. Not only does boiling leach nutrients into water that is often discarded, it's easy and common to boil for longer than is necessary to make the item digestible. Note that some things must be boiled to become safe; pokeweed greens can be boiled (and the water discarded) to reduce alkalinity. The berries, however, are never safe for human consumption.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Because of a case study of one woman who did a fad cleanse and had predisposers like a gastric bypass and prolonged antibiotic therapy?
- hackerlight 3y ago
  Hmm? Oxalates causing less severe damage (kidney stones) is more common than just one woman. If you are a vegan you know you need to go easy on things like raw spinach and almonds.
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    Could you bring some empirics to the table for normal people having a common problem with oxalates at normal doses without predisposing issues like kidney disease or the ones the woman had in the case study? Does "going easy on oxalates" just mean you have fewer than six spinach smoothies per day? I'm used to these dietary memes cashing out into either trivial claims or nothing burgers.
    - retrac 3y ago
      > Oxalic acid has an oral LDLo (lowest published lethal dose) of 600 mg/kg.[62] It has been reported that the lethal oral dose is 15 to 30 grams. and > Frozen commercially available spinach in New Zealand contains 736.6 ± 20.4 mg/100g wet matter (WM) soluble oxalate while the USDA says about 900 mg per 100 g for American spinach on average. So roughly 1% of the wet spinach by weight. 1 kilo of high-oxalate spinach probably has 10 - 20 grams of oxalic acid. That's a lot of spinach, but probably chuggable in one day in smoothie format. Far too close to the LD50 estimate for my comfort! For one large salad, it's unlikely to exceed a couple grams. I'm unsure about the effects of chronic lower dose exposure.
      - hombre_fatal 3y ago
        This is what I mean, though. How many people regurgitating "Be sure to watch out for oxalates!" know that we're talking about thousands of grams of spinach? Looking it up, people generally eat 50-200mg of oxalates per day with 1000mg being the outlier high end. Eat your spinach. If you're worried, then cook it.
stickfigure 3y ago
I offer, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, this lecture: Don't eat plants; they're trying to kill you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA I usually forward it to friends that rant about meat being bad for your health.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  Depends on the meat. If it’s western raised pork or chicken, they bioaccumulate omega-6 from their feed that the percentage of their fat that’s omega-6 can rivals or exceed that of “vegetable” oils. Ruminants seem to resist this bioaccumulation. So the wrong meat give you all the same lovely effects of systemic inflammation, paradoxical immune suppression, metabolism suppression, and the pile of strange effects from the metabolites and free radicals. Which normally don’t matter much, but start to do when modern consumption of omega-6’s end up significantly more than historical exposure, all year long. This is one thing to watch out for in rodent studies involving “fat”. In addition to having a very different relationship to fat than humans, the fat they are given is generally very high in omega-6, often being lard (from western raised pigs) mixed with some amount of vegetable oil. Thus because “animal fat” was used, the generally negative outcome then gets wrongly associated with saturated fats. If the study doesn’t give a breakdown of the fatty acid profile, then it’s basically worthless. Unless someone feels like trying to track down the researchers and find the chow product they used. Which is sometimes viable.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    I'm no expert in the matter, but this seems to contradict what you're saying in terms of effects from too much of it: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to-avoid-healthy-omega-6-fats https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to...
    - james4k 3y ago
      The key part of those studies is that they were comparing omega-6 fats to saturated fats like butter. They are healthier than saturated fats all else being equal, but that doesn't mean you should have that much of it.

Yeah, throwing a bunch of greens into a blender is not a great way to consume them. Boiling/steaming is the way to go. The vast majority of vegetables I personally eat are well cooked and mushy.

Bluecobra 3y ago
I used to make green smoothies all the time, even went as far to by an expensive Blentec blender. If you are following Weight Watchers you actually get penalized for blending/juicing vegetables, so I stopped. Normally these are zero point foods. Their justification makes a lot of sense to me: https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/blog/food/why-fruit-counts-smoothies https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/blog/food/why-fruit-counts...
- whycome 3y ago
  The fiber factor probably plays a big role too. Sometimes juicers take that out. Fiber can make you feel full and it may also play a role in rate of sugar absorption.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Man, I wish that chewing and food volume would reduce my hunger. The only thing that makes me stop feeling hungry is my blood sugar going back up to a normal level. I'm truly envious if there's actually anybody out there who can eat low-calorie bulky foods and actually feel satisfied by the meal. I just feel bloated but still just as hungry as before eating.
  - tomcar288 3y ago
    i know exactly what you mean. I can eat like 4 LBS of cucumbers in one sitting and still feel like I could eat a pizza afterwards. when you consume super low calorie foods like cucs and tomatoes, zuchinni, the body actually keeps on counting the calories with incredible accuracy and adjusts your hunger/appetite accordingly. But, I'll say, it does help a little bit and you do get a bit of discount by going with low calorie veggies, it's just not a silver bullet. at the end of the day you'll still consume less calories than you would have: just don't expect one large salad to fill you up. at the end of the day, you still need to go hungry to loose weight or keep it off.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      You actually need fats to poke the satiety receptors.
      - tomcar288 3y ago
        fats don't all do that well on satiety studies. just look at the holz studies. most of the satieting things didn't have much fats in them: potatoes, apples and oranges.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    I don't think that only caloric content matters. How satiating do you find a 150-calorie small bag of Doritos compared to three or four grapefruits, with a similar caloric content? For me the answer is "not very."
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      Grapefruits aren't a good comparison, since Google says a grapefruit has 104 calories. But if we compare a 150 calorie bag of doritos with 5 large tomatoes (each one being 33 calories), that feels about comparable in terms of satiating me in terms of giving me a break from hunger for maybe 45 minutes. On the other hand, just large tomatoes does absolutely nothing for hunger. Which is the indication for me that volume is entirely irrelevant. (And why would volume matter? Your body can't turn volume into calories.) Only problem with 5 large tomatoes is that it leaves me feeling kind of gross/bloated with that much volume. My stomach will literally feel like it protrudes, which is uncomfortable.
      - emodendroket 3y ago
        My mistake. I got misled by the “serving size” of half a grapefruit (who just eats half?). But volume mattering is pretty well attested and most people have experience with it. Why wouldn’t it? You physically can only fit so much food inside your stomach before it is uncomfortable to continue, no matter the caloric content.
        crazygringo 3y ago
        Yeah I guess that's what mystifies me about it so much. Volume does nothing for me. Like if I'm on a diet of 1,200 cal/day to lose weight, eating bulky foods does nothing to make me any less miserable, compared to if I stick to dense protein/fats/carbs. The sensation (and distraction) of hunger remains identical.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        1,200 calories per day is an exceptionally restrictive diet in any case. I think it might be more obvious the difference if you were just eating till you felt full and tried swapping around different foods (though there is plenty of historical record of people resorting to nonfood items of no nutritional value just to fill their stomachs if hungry enough).
IIsi50MHz 3y ago
Steaming retains more nutrients. Not only does boiling leach nutrients into water that is often discarded, it's easy and common to boil for longer than is necessary to make the item digestible. Note that some things must be boiled to become safe; pokeweed greens can be boiled (and the water discarded) to reduce alkalinity. The berries, however, are never safe for human consumption.

hombre_fatal 3y ago

Because of a case study of one woman who did a fad cleanse and had predisposers like a gastric bypass and prolonged antibiotic therapy?

hackerlight 3y ago
Hmm? Oxalates causing less severe damage (kidney stones) is more common than just one woman. If you are a vegan you know you need to go easy on things like raw spinach and almonds.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  Could you bring some empirics to the table for normal people having a common problem with oxalates at normal doses without predisposing issues like kidney disease or the ones the woman had in the case study? Does "going easy on oxalates" just mean you have fewer than six spinach smoothies per day? I'm used to these dietary memes cashing out into either trivial claims or nothing burgers.
  - retrac 3y ago
    > Oxalic acid has an oral LDLo (lowest published lethal dose) of 600 mg/kg.[62] It has been reported that the lethal oral dose is 15 to 30 grams. and > Frozen commercially available spinach in New Zealand contains 736.6 ± 20.4 mg/100g wet matter (WM) soluble oxalate while the USDA says about 900 mg per 100 g for American spinach on average. So roughly 1% of the wet spinach by weight. 1 kilo of high-oxalate spinach probably has 10 - 20 grams of oxalic acid. That's a lot of spinach, but probably chuggable in one day in smoothie format. Far too close to the LD50 estimate for my comfort! For one large salad, it's unlikely to exceed a couple grams. I'm unsure about the effects of chronic lower dose exposure.
    - hombre_fatal 3y ago
      This is what I mean, though. How many people regurgitating "Be sure to watch out for oxalates!" know that we're talking about thousands of grams of spinach? Looking it up, people generally eat 50-200mg of oxalates per day with 1000mg being the outlier high end. Eat your spinach. If you're worried, then cook it.

stickfigure 3y ago

I offer, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, this lecture: Don't eat plants; they're trying to kill you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA I usually forward it to friends that rant about meat being bad for your health.

Modified3019 3y ago
Depends on the meat. If it’s western raised pork or chicken, they bioaccumulate omega-6 from their feed that the percentage of their fat that’s omega-6 can rivals or exceed that of “vegetable” oils. Ruminants seem to resist this bioaccumulation. So the wrong meat give you all the same lovely effects of systemic inflammation, paradoxical immune suppression, metabolism suppression, and the pile of strange effects from the metabolites and free radicals. Which normally don’t matter much, but start to do when modern consumption of omega-6’s end up significantly more than historical exposure, all year long. This is one thing to watch out for in rodent studies involving “fat”. In addition to having a very different relationship to fat than humans, the fat they are given is generally very high in omega-6, often being lard (from western raised pigs) mixed with some amount of vegetable oil. Thus because “animal fat” was used, the generally negative outcome then gets wrongly associated with saturated fats. If the study doesn’t give a breakdown of the fatty acid profile, then it’s basically worthless. Unless someone feels like trying to track down the researchers and find the chow product they used. Which is sometimes viable.
- latchkey 3y ago
  I'm no expert in the matter, but this seems to contradict what you're saying in terms of effects from too much of it: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to-avoid-healthy-omega-6-fats https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to...
  - james4k 3y ago
    The key part of those studies is that they were comparing omega-6 fats to saturated fats like butter. They are healthier than saturated fats all else being equal, but that doesn't mean you should have that much of it.