Spilling the Magic of Beans...

It has been almost an year now, since I discovered the magic of including beans in my daily diet and thought i will finally spill some beans about the health benefit of this wonderful class of food!

In general, all kinds of dry beans and legumes have this common nutritional profile. They have

• A Low Glycemic Index (GI)
  
• LOTS of both Soluble and Insoluble Fiber
• Excellent source of Protein (though not complete for the human body, like all plant proteins!)
  
• Good source of Folate, Iron, Phosphorus & vitamin B1
  
• Excellent source of complex carbohydrates too!
  

With this great nutritional profile, eating Beans can potentially have all the following health benefits :-)

• The Soluble Fiber in Beans helps reduce the bad cholesterol (LDL) and increase the good one (HDL).
  
• The Insoluble Fiber helps reduce the risk of Colon cancer and other digestive disorders like IBS, Diverticulitis, Appendicitis, Hemorrhoids etc.,
  
• Insoluble fiber also helps in dieting and controlling food cravings by giving a feeling satiety.
• Lowers the risk of Type 2 Diabetes
• Helps in controlling Diabetes because of the complex carbohydrates that are absorbed as much 45% slower than other carbohydrate sources
  
• Helps in avoiding / controlling Osteoporosis by increasing Calcium absorption

Following are some of the easy ways, I add Beans to my diet...

• Use a bag of mixed beans (available in korean stores in the US) and add a cup of it to my regular rice while cooking.
  
• Bean Chili recipes are abound in the Internet and they make a tasty side dish for rice or as filling in a burrito or a wrap.
• Add frozen Peas to any vegetable dish
  
• Hummus made with less oil(!!) is also a tasty way to consume beans.

Now, which Bean is the best ?

Now we all know that there are so many different kinds of beans or sometimes we wonder if something is a bean or not... Well, here is a photo dictionary of various kinds of beans that might help you identify beans in your local grocery store!

I feel that its good to include all varieties of beans in our diet since Beans differ in their mineral content and it might also avoid some boredom. Nevertheless, here is a table showing the basic nutritional profile of the various kinds of beans (mainly taken from [NutritionData])... Compare it to the nutritional profile of White and Brown Rice at the bottom of the table...

Per 100 gms (Boiled,Unsalted)	Total Calories	Fat Cals	Carb-Fat-Protein ratio	Carb	Fiber	Protein
Black Beans	132	5	74-3-23	24 g	9 g	9 g
Black Eyed Peas	116	4	73-4-23	21 g	6 g	8 g
Garbanzo (Chick peas)	164	22	68-13-19	27 g	8 g	9 g
Green Peas	84	2	76-2-22	16 g	5 g	5 g
Lima	115	3	73-3-24	21 g	7 g	8 g
Mung Beans	105	3	74-3-23	19 g	8 g	7 g
Pigeon Peas (Toor)	121	3	78-3-19	23 g	7 g	7 g
Pinto Beans	143	5	74-4-22	26 g	9 g	9 g
Red Kidney Beans	127	4	73-3-24	23 g	7 g	9 g
Soybeans	173	75	24-43-33	10 g	6 g	17 g
White Rice (medium grain)	130	2	92-1-7	29 g	0 g	2 g
Brown Rice (medium grain)	112	7	87-6-7	24 g	2 g	2 g

Do we weigh more on the carpet than on a hard floor ?

After my huge binging spree for the past 6 months, finally I decided to lose some of that fat I gained and so I have religiously, started going to gym and avoiding all my favorite, fatty food... and suddenly today morning, I noticed that I was weighing a pound more than what I was 2 days ago... I just could not believe that, because I had been on a healthy, calorie restricted diet and have been burning around 800 calories a day in the Elliptical... And so, all through the day I was thinking about whether I had lost some muscle due to my rigorous exercise and hence gained some weight in spite of my low calorie diet ? Or was I burning all fat but my Carb reserves in the liver and the muscles were full ? I was just puzzled... and I still believed that I could not have gained a pound of fat and there should be some explanation!

Finally, at night I remembered that they always ask you to weigh in a hard floor. Then I remembered that the last time I checked it, I had placed in the hard bathroom floor. Then, I weighed myself in the bathroom and presto! I had lost a pound in a few minutes!!

And then I find that, it is common thing to notice that the scales show an approximately 10% more weight on a carpet than on a hard floor... And as explained here, a Cambridge university prof has found out why it is so (at least for the analog ones, though my digital one also behaves the same)... It seems it has to do with some bending of the fulcrums that collect the weight and send it to the lever or something like that...

Interesting to know... When the instructions on the scales do mention that you should use the scale on a hard floor, I wish they can also add that you will weigh more in a carpeted floor too. It would save a few from unnecessary worry ;-)

Wait Until Dark - what a great thriller!

Thanks to my random movie-picking from the public library, I just had a chance to watch the 1967 thriller "Wait until Dark"!! Oh my god.. what a great movie that was!! Screenplay and Audrey Hepburn's acting was totally awesome... and it left me with that rare but good feeling of watching a nice movie...

And I was also greatly impressed by the villain, Alan Arkin, sporting those circular glasses like what tamil actor Sathyaraj used to wear as a villain. may be they got the idea from this movie :-) All through the movie I was thinking that I had seen him somewhere but could not recollect where... and Voila.. in imdb, I find that he is that Oscar winning 'Grandpa' from Little Miss Sunshine! hmmm, I was not sure if that was really why I felt like I had seen him before... really good acting by him - may be the Oscar for L.M.Sunshine was a compensation for missing out in some earlier good movie like this one! When Alan Arkin was asked if he were surprised that he was overlooked for "Wait Until Dark", his second movie, it seems he replied: "You don't get nominated for being mean to Audrey Hepburn!"

And from the then movie trailer, it seems that the theaters darkened all their lights "to the legal limit" during the last twelve minutes of the film, each light going out as Audrey Hepburn smashed each light bulb. The one remaining light in the theaters would be switched off as the last light source in the film went out!

Effect of high protein diet and exercise in weight loss

"A Calorie is a Calorie is a Calorie..." Or IS IT ?

Though there are tons of fitness articles written every month about why dieting for weight loss is bad and how doing resistance training helps weight loss by increasing muscle loss, I had not seen or read any study about the different approaches like, losing weight by cutting say, 800 calories from your daily calorie intake OR losing weight by just burning 800 calories by exercising everyday ? And does the carb-protein-fat ratio of the food intake have any effect on whether you are losing muscle or fat when you are cutting calories ?

Finally i found this paper that seems to answer all these questions by means of a study... This interesting paper titled, "Dietary Protein and Exercise have Additive Effects on Body Composition during Weight Loss in Adult Women", was published in the Journal of Nutrition.

and here's the Bottomline: High Protein diet (30% of total calories supplied by protein) along with exercise and resistance training seems to preserve muscle mass and produce greater fat loss. But the Carb heavy diet (15% protein) produced significantly greater decrease in Total cholesterol, LDL and HDL while a protein diet just increased HDL slightly but decreases only a third as much as the Carb heavy diet! So, if you have a normal cholesterol level, then a high protein diet can be better which will help you lose more fat, less muscle and also increase your HDL. If you have to lower your cholesterol too, then a CHO diet seems to be best option...

And now, we go to the gory details of the study...

They had four groups of women, as follows:
PRO group (30% protein diet), CHO group (15% protein diet), PRO-EX (30% protein diet with exercise) and CHO-EX (15% protein diet with exercise). Exercise consisted of 30 min walks for 5 days a week and 7 resistance training exercises (using Nautilus machines) at least 1 set of 12 repetitions with a weight chosen such that it fatigued the individual by the 12th repetition).

• Effect on Body Weight
  

The PRO and PRO-EX groups had a weight loss of maximum weight loss of 10.1 kg after 4 months while the CHO and CHO-EX lost 7.8 kg at the max). and the PRO-EX had the largest weight loss (11.2%) while CHO had the lowest (8.4%)!

• Effect on Body Composition
  

Regarding the body composition, the PRO and PRO-EX had lost a max of 8.1 kgs of fat while the CHO and CHO-EX group lost 5.6 kgs max.

they also concluded that Protein-diet and the exercise had an independent and an additive effect on the body composition and the PRO-EX group alone had lost 21.4% of their fat mass, while the CHO group lost only 12.8% of their fat mass!! Also, the CHO-EX group faired slightly better than the PRO group in terms of their fat loss!

Also, the fat in the trunk (torso, I guess) reduced the most in the PRO-EX group and the least in the CHO group.

And the PRO-EX group did not lose any muscle mass while the CHO group lost 5.4% of their muscle mass... I think this tells how dangerous, just dieting on a low-protein, carb-laden diet could do... If you lose such precious muscle mass, then your BMR would have come down and you can never go back to a much normal diet without gaining some fat!!!

• Effect on Blood Cholesterol

And here's some interesting news that has really opened a new area of research: how does the diet and exercise affect the Blood Cholesterol levels ? To my surprise, the CHO and CHO-EX group had a reduction in Total Cholesterol (9.2%) as well as LDL (10.4%) while the PRO and PRO-EX group had their Total Cholesterol reduced only by 3.7% and their LDL by a negligible 1.7%!

To add to the surprise, the CHO, CHO-EX and the PRO groups saw a decrease in HDL by 7.6%, 5.9% and 2.3% respectively, the PRO-EX group saw an increase in HDL by 4.1%!

I still have some doubts on whether these effects on blood cholesterol might be little bit different on men ? but we have to just wait for more studies to be made and I am sure this paper has opened a new area of research!

Now, get off your chair and do some exercise!! ;-)