Why is prepackaged food the best?

Figure 1. Surprisingly to me, tracking what I was eating actually changed my eating habits.

The general consensus on prepackaged, processed food is that it is bad, bad, bad for you. I am going to give you an example of why it is good, good, good for you--well, me. As I mentioned in my last post, which some of you liked and some of you really, really liked, I have departed the lab and am now confined to a chair for most of the day. Sitting for long hours requires a break, and where is more appropriate to take a break than the break room? Unfortunately, that room is stocked with different foods from Costco. The ploy is genius. Work hard, take a break, eat food, get fat, grow large, increase immobility, stay in chair longer, work more. That may have happened if leaving the lab hadn't left a void in my life. I am talking about the main purpose of my last decade at the bench: collecting data--well, that and avoiding collecting data. Sitting all day and reading about nutrition inspired me to start tracking what I was putting into my body for the first time in my life. At the end, I realized that it seems much more efficient to diet than to exercise.

Calories In

People count calories when trying to lose weight, and I used to wonder how they do that. I still wonder a little because understanding how many calories are in the hodge podge of items I eat at lunch and dinner is difficult to calculate. I can't measure anything by eye and the imprecision drives the scientist in me nuts. And nuts are high in fat. Some of you are thinking, duh, which is fair. I'm a novice to calorie counting, so I'm way behind people like my sister who know all the current nutrition trends and can estimate the grams of monounsaturated fat in a meal with 17 ingredients if she knows what kind of oils were used to prepare the meal. The advantage of prepackaged foods is that it's incredibly easy to precisely quantify what I am putting into my body, at least snack-wise. It's a fun little science experiment (albeit with no controls, a low n, and a biased experimenter), and I was surprised at the results.

Here's a list of the foods that I have inhaled at some point since I started keeping track:

Nutrigrain breakfast bar

Quaker oatmeal bar

Kudos bar with some sort of candy

Tiger's milk bar

Trio bar

Beef Jerky single serving package

Tropicana orange juice

Activa yogurt

There were plenty of other options, but I started with these.

My focus has been on five main categories (though I have data for many more, like vitamins). I have been trying to minimize calories, total fat, and sodium while maximizing protein and fiber. Most of the above products are fine in the sodium category, except one. That's right, don't eat beef jerky everyday because each package has one third of your recommended daily intake (RDI). I knew it was salty, but damn. Say hello to hypertension. But also say hello to muscles like a major league slugger because you also get a third of your protein.

I like salt literally more than anybody I know, but even the amount in beef jerky seemed like too much. I wanted to maintain the protein but decrease the sodium, so I switched to having Trio bars (starting on Day 2), which are packed full of nuts. They don't have quite as much protein as straight up meat, but they have a fair amount, plus way more fiber--and that comes with less than one twelfth of the salt in beef jerky. What a great deal! Such a great deal that I was eating two a day. But two Trio bars equal one half of your RDI of fat and almost 25% of your total calories. Oh, that's why they tasted so delicious.

I stopped eating Trio bars and stuck to a Tigers Milk bar, which comes in three flavors. The one I eat is called "protein rich", which means that it has six grams of protein instead of five like the other flavors. So rich with protein! I also ate fewer items and not because was busier. I just stopped grabbing two of everything when I was in the break room. Weird how that works. Here's where the numbers were on Wednesday (see also Fig. 1).

Calories: High 49% Wednesday 27%

Total Fat: High 66% Wednesday 20%

Sodium: High 51% Wednesday 10%

Protein: High 64% Wednesday 32%

Fiber: High 52% Wednesday 20%

So, I'm a little deficient in the protein and fiber categories, which I fix by chowing down on more salad, fruits, and protein at my work-provided lunch. Of course, then I eat as many cookies as I can find when I get home from work just because I can.

I started by saying that prepackaged food is awesome, and it is if you don't care about keeping track of the big meals like lunch and dinner. How many calories can be in those anyways? The majority of your RDI? Whatever. The interesting thing is that keeping track actually influenced what I've been eating, which I didn't really expect. True, it's probably not the eating of the prepackaged food that changed my diet but tracking my intake that made the difference. However, keeping tabs is much easier if it's written right on the food--or at least the environmentally unfriendly plastic that encases it. It's also easier to keep track of your carbon footprint.

Calories Out

Caloric intake is only half of the equation. The energy you spend also factors into the equation. Or does it? This article from Slate summarizes some findings that say diet may be more important than exercise when it comes to weight loss. When you look at the numbers, this makes perfect sense. I've calculated how many calories I burn running a mile using this handy calorie calculator. Basically, a person of my weight burns around 120 calories per mile run, at a pace between six and ten minutes per mile. So, ten minutes equals 120 calories gained. I can eat a Nutrigrain bar in 10 seconds. Eating is just way more efficient than exercise. I can negate an entire ten minutes of running with ten seconds of eating. So it's easy to see why gaining weight is way easier than losing it. Of course, eating brings pleasure whereas running brings gasping for air--at least when I run. So it's much harder to cut the eating than to add the running.

This little prepackaged food experiment has revealed to me that the diet part of the diet and exercise equation is more important to watch if a person is trying to change his or her weight. Exercise is for the birds! (Or anybody who is trying to maintain decent cardio fitness, which should be everybody, of course.) All this sitting and writing has made me hungry. Time for a cookie! I hope I can get the package open.