The 14-percent advantage of eating little and then a lot: Putting it in practice

var citeN=0; In my previous post I argued that the human body may react to “eating big” as it would to overfeeding, increasing energy expenditure by a certain amount. That increase seems to lead to a reduction in the caloric value of the meals during overfeeding; a reduction that seems to gravitate around 14 percent of the overfed amount. And what is the overfed amount? Let us assume that your daily calorie intake to maintain your current body weight is 2,000 calories. However, one day you consume 1,000 calories, and the next 3,000 – adding up to 4,000 calories in 2 days. This amounts to 2,000 calories per day on average, the weight maintenance...

Read more »

So who made your pants? Let's talk about ethical underwear

Being a lover of fancy lingerie and a right nosey parker, I couldn't resist the opportunity to visit ethical pants manufacturer Who Made Your Pants?.I have been following them on Twitter for about six months, having spotted that they use end-of-line lace, which other lingerie manufacturers discard at the end of their seasonal runs. However, I soon discovered that this business was not just about saving waste, it was about turning around people's lives too.And it's that which tempted me to scoot all the way from Suffolk to Southampton for the company's open day and to finally have the chance to meet founder Becky John (pictured left) and to find...

Read more »

The 14-percent advantage of eating little and then a lot: Is it real?

var citeN=0;When you look at the literature on overfeeding, you see a number over and over again – 14 percent. That is approximately the increase in energy expenditure you get when you overfeed people; that is, when you feed people more calories that they need to maintain their current weight. This phenomenon is related to another interesting one: the nonlinear increase in body weight and fat mass following overfeeding after a period starvation, illustrated by the top graph below from an article by Kevin Hall (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN))1). The data for the squares on the top graph is from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment...

Read more »

An educational farmers' market. Lessons from a Suffolk primary school

On Friday, my son's primary school held its end-of-year award winning "Farmers' Market".With gazebos and traditional bunting to set the scene, the hall was transformed into a wonderful entrepreneurial venture, with fresh vegetables, plants and food on offer as well as toys that the children had either decorated or made.Organised entirely in-house, with just some support from the school community and a couple of external producers, the school Farmers' Market has already won a Green Suffolk award.  And it really is well-deserved.  This is something really special and here's why I love it....Most of the vegetables sold - including those...

Read more »

The lowest-mortality BMI: What is the role of nutrient intake from food?

var citeN=0;In a previous post (citeN=citeN+1;document.write(Number(citeN))1), I discussed the frequently reported lowest-mortality body mass index (BMI), which is about 26. The empirical results reviewed in that post suggest that fat-free mass plays an important role in that context. Keep in mind that this "BMI=26 phenomenon" is often reported in studies of populations from developed countries, which are likely to be relatively sedentary. This is important for the point made in this post. A lowest-mortality BMI of 26 is somehow at odds with the fact that many healthy and/or long-living populations have much lower BMIs. You can clearly see this...

Read more »