Too much at one sitting? page

[AtlJohn]

There are days when the bulk of my carb intake comes from the smoothie I make for me and my girlfriend at breakfast time, depending on the fruit I choose to include on any given day.
This got me wondering: Are there any general guidelines regarding having too much of any one nutrient at any single meal? How much is too much carbohydrate, protein, fat, etc. for your body to process at one time?

[jhed]

Too many carbs in one meal may mess with your insulin levels, especially if you're not having protein and/or fat along with the carbs.

Regarding max. consumption in one meal, I myself often eat a day's worth of calories within a 2 - 4 hour eating window and am none the worse for it. The larger your meal the longer it will take for your body to process it, but it will still be done.

[cillakat]

Too many carbs in one meal may mess with your insulin levels, especially if you're not having protein and/or fat along with the carbs.

Regarding max. consumption in one meal, I myself often eat a day's worth of calories within a 2 - 4 hour eating window and am none the worse for it. The larger your meal the longer it will take for your body to process it, but it will still be done.

+1 on all of it. The high carb intake of one meal will not likely be an issue for someone who is young, fit and active. But if there is diabetes/insulin resistance in the family and/or you're at risk based on other factors it may be worth rearranging the carb intake.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about it but I'm active and have great insulin sensitivity.

Nice to see another Atlantan here. I live intown, near Emory.

Best,
Katherine

[cillakat]

Here is a more detailed answer:

For some people, a fruit intensive meal is certainly enough to spike blood glucose - and therefore insulin - to levels that are problematic when it's occuring repeatedly.

If you have reason to believe that you are or were on the path to becoming insulin resistant, you could either

1) buy a cheap glucometer and occasionally test your fasting (am and premeal) blood sugar and more imporantly, test your post-prandial (post meal) blood sugar at 60 minutes post meal, 90 minutes post meal and 2 hours post meal. I'd strongly encourage this based on William Davis MD's post on his blog, heartscan:
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/20...ur-finger.html

We know that foods that trigger insulin lead to fat storage. (snip)

So how can you stop triggering insulin?

The easiest way is to eliminate, or at least minimize, carbohydrates...(snip)...check your blood sugar one hour after completing a meal and keep your after-eating, or "postprandial," blood sugar 100 mg/dl or less. Let's say you are going to eat stone ground oatmeal, for example. Blood sugar prior to eating is, say, 90 mg/dl. One hour after oatmeal it's 168 mg/dl--you know that this is going to trigger insulin and make you fat. Oatmeal should therefore be eliminated.

Keeping blood sugar to 100 mg/dl or less after eating teaches you how to avoid provocation of insulin. A shrinking tummy will follow.

To do this, you will need:

1) A glucose meter--My favorite is the One Touch Ultra Mini ($13.42 at Walmart). It's exceptionally easy to use and requires just a dot of blood. Drawback: Test strips are about $1 each. Accuchek Aviva is another good device. (We've had a lot of problems with Walgreen's brand device.)
2) Test strips--This is the costly part of the proposition. Purchased 25 or 50 at a time, they can cost from $0.50 to $1.00 a piece.
3) Lancets--These are the pins for the fingerstick device that comes with the glucose meter. A box should be just a few dollars.

...(snip)...conserve test strips, use them only when a new, untested food or food combination is going to be consumed. If you had two scrambled eggs with green peppers, sundried tomatoes, and olive oil yesterday and had a one hour postprandial glucose of 97 mg/dl, no need to check blood sugar again if you are having the same meal again today.

or 2) structure your meals to be blood sugar friendly - no more than 2 servings of berries per day and no other fruits. stick with low carb non-starchy veggies only - at least until your insulin sensitivity returns. it's suprising how many veggies one can actually eat and stay under 50g of carb. I can easily eat 10 servings of lettuces, kale, collards, chard, broccoli, cukes, celery, green beans, zucchini, summer squash....and being careful about tomato and onion which are both pretty high carb comparatively.

Fruit can be problematic in other ways as well. I generally have a serving of berries a day, down from two servings....and today I did have an apple. As I've learned more about fructose in the last five months, I've been convinced that it's worth minimizing fructose in one's diet. And for some, it's absolutely worth avoiding entirely.

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/20...-fructose.html
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/20...sk-factor.html
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/20...-fructose.html

And from Emily Deans, MD via her blog evolutionarypsychiatry

• Dietary Strategies for Fructose Malabsorption
• IBS, Fructose, Depression, Zinc, and Women

And from Stephen Guyanet, PhD (neurobio)
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.co...-showdown.html

The investigators divided 32 overweight men and women into two groups, and instructed each group to drink a sweetened beverage three times per day. They were told not to eat any other sugar. The drinks were designed to provide 25% of the participants' caloric intake. That might sound like a lot, but the average American actually gets about 25% of her calories from sugar! That's the average, so there are people who get a third or more of their calories from sugar. In one group, the drinks were sweetened with glucose, while in the other group they were sweetened with fructose.

After ten weeks, both groups had gained about three pounds. But they didn't gain it in the same place. The fructose group gained a disproportionate amount of visceral fat, which increased by 14%! Visceral fat is the most dangerous type; it's associated with and contributes to chronic disease, particularly metabolic syndrome, the quintessential modern metabolic disorder (see the end of the post for more information and references). You can bet their livers were fattening up too.

[cillakat]

While the links in the following google may not appear to relate directly to your situation, they actually do -- much of what I wrote below is 'Primal 101' and is applicable to any condition.

http://goo.gl/lists/QWbK