Maine Cottage Foods, LLC is where sweetener science is put towards the common good. We've gotten mail wondering about what role a PhD plays, why we choose the ingredients we do and how things work biochemically and such. So, we are considering having a "TechTalk" section. If we do risk it, please, please let us know if we are getting too nerdy. We really are about chocolate. As many of you have found, baking low carb is way harder than baking with sugar. To help out, Donna is organizing her notes on baking low carb so she can share them with you. If all goes well, we will put together a book of truly low carb baking recipes and explain what the special ingredients do, how they work, and how they interact so that you can warm up the oven and make something special that will not sabotage your diet, rot teeth or harm diabetics. Diet Sabotage. I've always been stunned by the amount of trash about weight-loss, with "facts" and strategies that don't make sense on a theoretical, empirical, observational or even social level. This is a place where I will write about some of the more common offenses. "It's not *what* you eat, it's how many calories you consume". Follow up to my previous post. This just occurred to me following a rather heated discussion about weight loss with some physicist friends. Why does what we eat get reduced so quickly to the number of calories? I know that it's easiest to add up the numbers of calories in foods - there's tons of calorie books out there to help you along. But really, why would mathematics and physics rule over the human body? Isn't biology important? Does the human body really only respond to food by how many calories (how much energy) is in it, independent of its nutritional components? Does the human body respond the same way to 1000 calories of sugar as it does to 1000 calories of fat or protein? I truly doubt it. Survival during our pre-agricultural history required as much data about our environment as possible so that the human body could respond either with storage, energy-burn or repair depending on the chance of catastrophic lack of food (starvation). The diet humans had for most of our history would have been sugary in spring/summer (fruits and berries) and less sugary in the fall/winter (meats and fish). Sugar would signal the body into storage mode, since there was little fear of starvation. During the tougher seasons, calories would be burned-up for energy or repair. Since storage itself costs calories, storing energy during times of potential starvation would put the body at a disadvantage since it would very likely store one day then burn it soon after. The precious calories used for the process of storage would have been wasted. That's why insulin, which goes up in response to sweets, leads to fat storage. Because of seasonal changes in available foods, the amount of sugar consumed would have provided a real-time snapshot of the risk of starvation as human-kind spread throughout the globe. What an advantage it gave us! It's biology - the actions of a living organism in concert with its environment. Not physics or mathematics. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie to a test tube, but not to the human body. Arlene We always love to hear from you, please email us at mainecottagefoods2003@yahoo.com. Enjoy! updated 8/04/2009 |