diet and health

Low-calorie diet

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What is that

The low-calorie diet is a diet that provides a daily calorie / energy intake lower than that required by the body during the day.

To the eye of a professional, this definition might seem reductive or only partially acceptable; in fact, the characteristics and requirements of a good low-calorie diet are much more numerous, but, strictly speaking, the etymology of the term is nothing short of essential, namely:

  • diet: rules of diet or controlled diet, the result of a therapeutic indication; from the Greek "dìaita" which means "lifestyle"
  • ipo -: diminutive particle
  • caloric: that has or brings calories / energy.

Who prescribes it

The low-calorie diet is a food therapy; "therapy" means "cure" or "healing" and this means that the application of the diet includes at least two discriminants:

  • MUST be prescribed / evaluated / structured and followed by a qualified professional (dietician, biologist specialized in nutrition or dietitian) - the legislative details are referred to other readings;
  • MUST ONLY be used if necessary; as if it were a "pharmacological cycle", the low-calorie diet does NOT benefit healthy people in normal weight and / or without alterations of the metabolism that make it justifiable.

The hypocaloric diet should exclude any aesthetic purpose, since its prolonged use (considered to be over 6-8 months) results in evident stress for the subject, both physically and psychologically; although, of course, low-calorie diets are not all the same.

On the other hand, despite the existence of ethical - professional protection regulations, many pseudo - professionals engage in the prescription and unofficial composition of the low - calorie diet, ignoring or circumventing current regulations. Some of the most frequent "gabulas" are:

  • The transcription of a low-calorie, low-calorie food scheme (legally granted to personal trainers ) whose portions are specified "by voice";
  • Printing (typewritten or computer-written) of the low-calorie diet WITHOUT authentication signature (in order to avoid traceability or legal dispute);
  • The composition of a diet regime then authenticated by a qualified and ethically INCORRECT professional.

Trendy diets and false beliefs

All against the low-calorie diet

The incorrect application and the extremes of the low-calorie diet in the last half century have led to a collective rejection of energy restriction.

Today we increasingly talk about the metabolic destination of nutrients, the abandonment of caloric estimation, the return to the ancestral diet, the exploitation of hormonal cycles, the increase of metabolism, acid-base balance, ying and yang energies, nutrigenic energy, nutrigenomics etc. Moreover, according to certain currents of thought, the hypocaloric diet hurts, does not make you lose weight and lowers your metabolism! We are not discussing why or why these statements are incorrect, approximate and unresolved, and we refer the discussion further to other related articles.

The curious aspect is that, most of the time (but not always), these are concepts with foundations of great truth but unfortunately distorted or incorrectly applied / disclosed. Moreover, certain statements do not take absolutely into account the fact that conventional diet therapy involves a constant updating of experimental research and statistics in the medical - nutritional field; this means that professionals should always be well up to date and aware of the various "novelties" (subject to individual professionalism).

There are those who completely wash their hands and say: "calories are a concept exceeded, useless, misleading; it is necessary to CONSUME only the foods that (for one reason or another) we tend to metabolize correctly." From here follows the delirium; those who totally abolish milk and their derivatives, those who produce cereals and legumes (derivatives included), those who eat fresh fruit, etc. It is also a duty to specify that, at times, we are witnessing good and just awareness, such as the abandonment of artifactual foods, nervine drinks, sugar, salt and added fats, etc. It is curious to note how precisely these attitudes, born in opposition to food restriction, if applied in parallel go to constitute NOT ONLY a real low-calorie diet (and also of those "tough"!), But also a diet that excludes 50% of food available. So much for freedom and disengagement! Of course they make you lose weight, God forbid! Analyzing the complex with the eyes of a professional, abolishing: oil and butter, all packaged or canned foods, cereals, legumes, milk, cheeses and fatty meats, and almost all the fruit, would remain only: lean meat and fish, eggs, vegetables and dried fruit. In practice, a high-protein, potentially ketogenic and necessarily low-calorie diet (unless abnormal portions are used). Probably, by documenting the potential risks of a similar diet in the LONG TERM, the reader will understand how far such strategies can be far from the requirements of health and nutrition education.

Recall also that, taking advantage of the traditional dietary system (the one so rejected by the new "gurus" of nutrition) for an overall energy estimate, there is NO weight loss diet WITHOUT CALORIAL COUNT which is not, in reality, a low calorie diet cleverly disguised as semi-freedom food.

I believe that, having said that, there is no need to add anything else.

When to use it

When is the low-calorie diet necessary? What are its application implications?

As anticipated, the low-calorie diet is a therapy.

The "primary" use of this diet is aimed at weight loss, ie the reduction of fat mass and abdominal circumference, and therefore of body mass index / body mass index (IMC / BMI). It is well known how the overweight and even worse the obesity are related to the onset of metabolic diseases, primary and secondary, of an environmental and / or hereditary nature; some examples are:

  • dyslipidemia (TOT cholesterol and / or high LDL, high triglycerides, both)
  • hyperglycemia or type 2 diabetes mellitus
  • hypertension
  • hyperuricemia and / or gout;
  • more than one and concomitant they go to define the so-called "metabolic syndrome".

Metabolic diseases present a series of complications and negative implications on the organism, which worsen the quality of life, increase the risk of death or permanent disability and significantly increase public health expenditure; some complications and negative implications are: alterations of the microcirculation, of the sight, of the peripheral nervous system, of the functionality of some organs (above all kidneys, liver and heart), systemic inflammation, atherosclerosis, therefore increased cardiovascular risk (ischemic heart disease and cerebral vascular syndrome ). There is no lack of joint and ligament disorders.

The low-calorie diet, in addition to reducing overweight - indirectly lowering both the risk of onset and the severity of metabolic diseases - also has a DIRECT effect on physiological parameters (eg blood and haemodynamic ones) as indicators of health status. This means that the hypocaloric diet, being BALANCED, is able to reduce LDL and total cholesterol (sometimes to increase HDL), triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, uricemia and to improve other blood indices such as parameters of systemic inflammation; all this even regardless of weight loss. Ultimately, the low-calorie diet is a dietary therapy that is applied ONLY in overweight individuals, in order to improve quality and life expectancy (reducing the risk of unfortunate events) by reducing the fat mass (hoping especially for visceral events) and restoration of optimal physiological parameters. Motor therapy should also be associated with the low-calorie diet and, if necessary, pharmacological therapy.

How to structure it

Low-calorie diet: a real puzzle

Certainly readers will have already wondered what are the reasons that support the discrimination between a qualified professional and an improvised self-taught. From a technical and methodological point of view, computer science does miracles today; it is therefore possible to obtain a low-calorie diet through automation and in just a few minutes. To make a fitting comparison, one might ask why AUTONOME "musical composition" machines do not exist; in all fields, the automaton can replace man only in calculation, but not in reasoning.

We say that the hypocaloric diet looks very much like a "puzzle" or the famous "tetris" videogame (the two little "specialist" similarities are granted to me), whose pieces or segments represent: physical characteristics, therapeutic needs, habits and lifestyle, propensity, availability and willpower of the subject. Furthermore, each piece or segment is further structured and defined by many other evaluations and mathematical equations. Wanting to be fussy, even at this level it would be possible to automate the method; it is sufficient to assign a value included in a numerical scale to each evaluation parameter. A little like we do for estimating vascular risk. So why not?

Simple. The answer is that: " the first goal of the nutritional therapist who prescribes a hypocaloric diet is that it be applied and FOLLOWED correctly "; in one word: " compliance ". Respect for the hypocaloric diet is always the result (or the compromise, depending on the point of view) of an NOT mathematically evaluable abstract formula, whose variables are:

  1. Patient-operator relationship (trust, honesty, empathy, ability to dialogue, ability to listen and understand, communication, intuition, cunning, ability to induce motivation, etc.)
  2. Accuracy and precision of the method
  3. Customization.

The above is not a free complication; just think about the fact that:

  • It would be useless to gain the trust and motivation of the patient and then lose it by assigning an ineffective or impractical low-calorie diet;
  • It would be useless to provide a technically perfect low-calorie diet if the patient was not motivated or refused to disgust the foods that structured it;
  • It would be useless to prescribe a low-calorie diet made up of all the foods that are most popular but ultimately prove ineffective or that, even if totally perfect, cannot enjoy the right motivation / trust of the customer.

The psychological profile and the behavior of the patient emphasize in a totally subjective way one or the other variable, which is why, to two different subjects (despite having the same nutritional needs in common) it is very difficult to assign the same low-calorie diet.

Obviously, the fundamental and IMPRESSIBLE requirements of the hypocaloric diet remain: healthiness, nutrition education and nutritional balance. The professional must know how to shape the diet, guaranteeing the therapeutic goal and respecting the professional code of ethics.

The ability to interpret all these variables (but not only) is the difference between various professionals and explains why NOT ALL patients get the same results with the same operator, and why everyone prefers a technician and a low-calorie diet rather than others.

A machine CANNOT do all this, therefore, a pseudo - professional who does not possess the technical - methodological knowledge sufficient to understand the patient 's objectives (as well as the therapeutic priorities), and for this reason he relies indiscriminately on automation, It CANNOT do anything but do a BAD job.

Let it be clear, it is not difficult to make people lose weight and sometimes not even reduce their cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar and blood pressure; however, the performance must be evaluated as a whole. Also included in the judgment of a good low-calorie diet: nutritional deficiency and possible need to integrate with drugs / food supplements, psychological stress, preservation of social habits, possible recurrence of the disease (lack of nutrition education index), organ fatigue, onset of symptoms or discomforts of various kinds etc.

Nutritional balance

Elements of nutritional balance of the low-calorie diet: composition problems

The reader will now be aware that formulating a correct low-calorie diet is NOT an easy task. Even from a technical and methodological point of view, it requires a lot of time, in-depth chemical knowledge of the various foods, experience in food associations, etc. Sometimes, in the most restrictive low-calorie diets (those to be assigned to people with severe handicaps, bedridden, elderly, sedentary and with a very reduced physical structure, severe obese requiring rapid and extraordinary slimming etc.) it is really complicated to reach the necessary quotas of certain nutrients without exceeding the ration of other components.

Among the molecules / ions whose daily "dose" is more difficult to reach, we recognize:

  • iron (especially in pregnant and fertile women),
  • football (especially in the elderly and in children),
  • essential fatty acids of the ω-3 family (especially in those who do NOT consume fish),
  • vitamin B2 (especially in lactose intolerant and in those who do not consume milk and derivatives),
  • folates (especially in those who do not consume fresh vegetables),
  • vitamin B12 (especially in vegan subjects),
  • vitamin D (in all low-calorie diets and especially in growing or elderly subjects),
  • dietary fiber (especially in diets against hyperglycemia and type 2 diabetes mellitus) etc.

Among the molecules / ions more difficult to contain / reduce in the hypocaloric diet we recognize:

  • saturated fatty acids (especially in those who season with butter and not oil),
  • cholesterol (especially in subjects who consume ample consumption of eggs, aged cheeses and offal),
  • sodium (especially in those who consume a lot of preserved products),
  • simple sugars (in all low-calorie diets),
  • proteins (in all the hypocaloric diets MA with more interest when there is a hepatic or, in some cases, renal)
  • purines (only in the presence of an inherited metabolic disease that induces hyperuricemia or overt gout),
  • lactose (in intolerant subjects),
  • gluten (in intolerant subjects).

In conclusion, having to make a choice "for health", I suggest that readers address themselves to qualified professionals who are possibly specialized in weight loss for the obese, as well as in the treatment of metabolic diseases; less fashionable diets and more awareness!