Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 7, Number 10, 1 ʻOkakopa 1990 — ʻAi Pono, E Ola [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

ʻAi Pono, E Ola

By Terry Shintani, M.D., M.P.H.

When are calories not calories?

A calorie is a calorie is a calorie right? Not always. Sometimes calories don't count. Sometimes calories such as those in taro and poi don't count towards making you fat. Calories are a way of measuring the energy

in food that we eat that ean be turned into fat. Because of this, it has always been thought that the only way to lose weight was to keep the amount of calories we eat below the amount of calories we burn in exercise. Recent research is now telling us that this formula isn't always right. Our three main sources of calories from food are fats, starches and proteins. Recently, it has been found that 97 percent of fat calories ean be turned into body fat. This is because food fat is so similar to the fat in our bodies that it takes only 3 percent of the energy to turn it into body fat. On the other hand, starches are quite different from fats and it requires at least 23 p>ercent of the energy in the food to convert the starch into body fat. In other words only 77 percent of starch calories count in adding body fat. Another factor that causes some calories not to count is the fact that certain foods cause us to burn calories more than other foods. This is known scientifically as the "thermogenic effect" of food. In other words, it is the natural tendency of foods to burn off calories just because you eat them. Starches cause us to burn calories faster

automatically. Fats on the other hand cause u"s to burn calories slowly. This means that starch ealories don't count as mueh as fat calories because starches cause us to subtract a certain amount of calories automatically by burning them off. Finally, in experiments in whieh people were overfed with starches, (that is, given mueh more calories as starches than they needed to eat in a day), it was found that only four percent of the ealories were actually turned into body fat. At the same time, the body automatically burned slightly more than this during this period of time. In other words, even if large amounts of starch calories were being eaten, because they were eating starch instead of fat, these people were losing body fat. The trick was that they were eating very little fat and a lot of starch. While eaeh individual is different, you ean probably get the same automatic weight loss by eating lots of starch and very little fat. This was the experience with the Wai'anae Diet Program in whieh individuals lost an average of over 17 pounds in three weeks, and is probably why ancient Hawaiians were "thin" according to written accounts in the 1800s. And this is why mueh of the calories in taro and poi don't count in making you fat if you are eating a low fat diet. How do we eat a diet low enough in fat? Evidence suggests that to get this weight loss, we should eat between 10 to 20 percent of our calories in fat. For most people this means eating less than 20 to 40 grams of fat a day. If you don't exceed this

limit, it's possible to eat as mueh taro, poi, sweet potato, regular potato and even rice, (preferably brown rice) pasta and other starches to your heart's content. Next month we'll talk about how to find and eliminate the hidden fat in our diets. Dr. Shintani, physician and nutritionist, is director of preventive medicine at the Wai'anae Coast Comprehensive Health Center. A majority of its 18,000 clients and its Board are of Hawaiian ancestry. Dr. Shintani is also host of the weekly radio talk show, "Nutrition and You"onKGU am 76 Mondays at 7-8 p.m.