Skip navigation

Snack smart! All calories are not created equal

Those 100-calorie packs are not as innocent as you think. Here’s the skinny

Video
  Are 100-calorie packs healthy?
July 11: Telemundo’s Maria Celeste talks to nutritional expert Dr. Mark Hyman about whether those 100-calorie packs of snacks are really good for you.

Today show

  Photo features
Grandmother sheds 140 pounds
Take a look at the amazing before and after photos of the newest Joy Fit Club members.
Image: Sheryl Crow
AP
  Famous breast cancer survivors
Movie stars, athletes and a former First Lady who've all beaten the disease share what inspired them to keep fighting.
Courtesy McCartney family
Miracle baby born twice
See photos from Macie Hope McCartney's incredible surgery and birth.
Image: The Biggest Loser; Michelle Aguilar
NBC
  Biggest Loser: Before & after
In season six, parents and children and husbands and wives battled the bulge together.  See their amazing weight loss. 

TODAY's Hoda Kotb explores issues that are important to your family.   Watch the show

20 - worst foods in America12 foods to shrink your stomach11 metabolism myths busted8 breakfast foods to avoid10 pounds to lose without even trying20 saltiest foods exposed
By Mark Hyman, M.D.
TODAY
updated 11:08 a.m. ET July 11, 2008

The old concept that weight loss is simply a matter of calories in and calories out is wrong. Learn how the quality of the food you choose is more important than the amount you eat.

Eat more, weigh less: Eat real food
Unfortunately most of us have been brainwashed to believe that weight loss is simple math. Burn more than you eat and you will lose weight. Right?

Wrong!

Story continues below ↓
advertisement | your ad here

In fact, you can eat much more food and lose weight. But here’s the catch. You have to eat real food. Just imagine what your great-great-grandmother had to eat. Everything came from a farmer’s field and nothing from a food chemist’s laboratory. Nothing was homogenized, refined or processed. There was no need for “nutrition labels” because nothing had labels.

The bottom line is that quality is MUCH more important than quantity. Eating only whole, fresh, real food completely eliminates the need for calorie counting, or measuring fat grams or counting carbs.

This works for one simple reason — you eat not only calories but also information. Eat the wrong information and you give your genes instructions to make you fat. Eat the right information and you give your genes instructions to lose weight. This is based on an exciting new understanding of how food talks to your genes called nutrigenomics.

And it doesn’t work slowly over years, but literally in minutes. Just try it for a few weeks. Don’t eat anything with a label. You are probably wondering what is left for you to eat.

It’s simple: real food. Vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, beans, whole grains (no flour because a bag of flour has a label), poultry, fish and eggs. That’s it. No counting calories, carbs or fat grams! Eat as much as you want and enjoy. Here are some examples of healthy and unhealthy snacks.

Foods to lose: Food allergies, inflammation and weight loss
Exciting new research helps pinpoint why some people just can’t lose weight. They are puffy. Puffy eyes, puffy ankles, puffy hands — and puffy bellies! Why do people get puffy? Allergies!

But I am not talking about pollen or dust allergies, nor am I talking about serious life-threatening food allergies from peanuts or shellfish (also known as IgE allergies). I am referring to low-grade, delayed reactions to food, that until recently have been completely ignored by conventional medicine.

A recent study broke incredible ground in our understanding of our obesity epidemic. Researchers examined two groups of children — obese and normal weight. They found the obese children had three problems (all related) that the thin children didn’t have.

First they were much more inflamed (as measured through a special blood test called C-reactive protein). Second, they had the beginnings of cholesterol plaques in their arteries. And third, they had 2½ times the level of delayed or IgG food allergies.

So what’s happening? These hidden, low-grade food sensitivities trigger a chronic immune reaction and inflammation. And anything that causes inflammation interferes with your metabolism, leading to weight gain.

But the solution is simple: Try a one- or two-week holiday from the foods that most commonly cause these low-grade allergies. Not only will you lose weight, but also a whole host of other chronic health problems like headaches, fatigue, joint pain, sinus problems and more might go away.

Just try this: For one to two weeks, leave these foods out of your diet: gluten (wheat, barley, rye, spelt, oats, kamut), dairy, eggs, corn, yeast and citrus. Think of it as a cheap experiment. The side effect will be not only weight loss, but also relief from many food cravings.