The Problem with Nutrition Labels and Macros

Probably once a week I see a post from somebody that’s a rookie to counting calories asking how the calories on the label don’t add up. Well, there are two very simple answers if you are in the US: the product is mislabeled (intentionally or not) or they are following the FDA labeling standards and regulations and making the product more desirable to nutrition conscious people.

Addressing the first scenario, it isn’t a unique or unusual problem to have a product “mislabeled.” As other posts have explained far better than I can, the concept of a calorie is flawed. You can read about it here in Scientific American. The tl;dr version of why a calorie isn’t just a calorie can be summed up to just a few parts:

• Calories are measured in isolation, meaning with just that food. This does not account for what we have eaten previously or at the same time as our meal. By combining foods, like most people do, we change the time needed for digestion and how hard our body works to perform digestion. This changes the Thermic Effect of Food.
• Different people react to different foods differently and take different amounts of calories from them based on their unique body chemistry and gut bacteria. This blog post explains further based on a study done with mice.
• Calorie labels on prepackaged food are “averages” and may be higher or lower than your actual meal. Since many prepackaged foods are mixes of several different foods, the exact amount of each ingredient is rarely precise. When the amount of each food isn't precise combined with an inexact range of calories, chances are, you aren't getting what the label says. 

With the second issue, it’s a matter of the FDA giving more than a loophole, but leaving a canyon of ways to trick the consumer. Here are just a few of the ways labels can be manipulated to read as lower or more desirable.

• According to the FDA, if there are less than 5 calories per serving, the total calories can be declared as 0. That means if I create something like coffee creamer and claim a small serving size, like a tsp. and it has 4 calories, I can promote it as a 0 calorie product.
• If the product has 50 calories or less--Round to nearest 5-calorie increment: Example: Round 47 calories to “45 calories”
• If the product has above 50 calories--Round to nearest 10-calorie increment: Example: Round 94 calories to “90 calories”
• Alcohol brings up another anomaly to the calorie counter.  Carbs are 4 calories per gram, fat is 9, but alcohol falls in the middle at 7 calories per gram.
• Lastly, fat can be labeled as 0 fat when there is less than .5 g per serving. So a product with .4 g of fat per serving is fat free.

As you can see, there are a few ways a manufacturer can make a pre-packaged food into something it really isn’t and throw off your most dedicated efforts to eat on plan.

Let’s take a look at something many people use every day, coffee creamer. If we’re trying to be a macro-magician, we might be super concerned with the exact measures so we pick a “Fat Free International Delights”. On the left side, the Canadian label; on the right, the US label.


Same product, same calories listed… one label tells you their best average per serving and the other hides some information because the FDA allows it through rounding.

Let’s take this further. Since there are no restrictions on what is considered a serving size, one product can list a different serving size to make it seem more appealing. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it can add up over all your different meals throughout the week, especially if you don't check the serving sizes.

Italian Dressing	1 tbsp	2 tbsp
Calories	50	80
Fat	6g	7g
Carbs	1g	4g
Protein	0g	0g

If you’re grabbing one of these dressings off the shelf and you’re just looking quickly at the label for the one that reads the “healthiest”, you might overlook the serving size and go right to the nutrition counts. Take into account that very few of us ever use just 1 or 2 tablespoons and the 30 extra calories for 2 tbsp starts to add up. Yes, this is a small example, but it happens on a larger scale, too. Just imagine this with Peanut Butter or some other "treat" that you enjoy.

Moving on.

The calorie counting problem is a complex one complicated by a lack of precise labeling regulations in the US and the rounding of both macros and total calories. Further, the ability to manipulate serving sizes allows manufacturers create certain labels and make a less healthy product more appealing. If you really are going to be precise (which I don’t recommend unless you want to drive yourself crazy or are a top level competitor) you need to really read carefully and do the math instead of just trusting the companies that play within the rules to look better.

And if you want a better solution, give yourself a margin of error, say 4% of your total calories. On a 2,000 calorie diet, that’s 80 calories. At the end of the day, you might slow down your progress just a little bit, but you won’t drive yourself insane along the way.

Lastly, if you’re brand spanking new to healthy eating, take baby steps; start with just making some better food choices and just writing down what you eat. There will be a time to make things more detailed, but in the beginning, just get started!

Why MFP could be holding you back

For years, MyFitnessPal has been the nutrition and fitness tracker used and recommended at brolific rates among new to calorie tracking and fitness people looking to get their diet in order and achieve a weight related goal. As we’ve mentioned and you’ve more than likely read about, weight loss, weight gain, and body transformation is largely a product of our diet, so it only makes sense to know what’s going into our body on a daily basis. While some advocate “extreme” calorie counting and others shun the idea completely, I am somewhere in between. I find it extremely helpful for myself and my clients to see the foods they are consuming and an estimate of how much they are consuming. For many people, this means using some form of tracking app.

As tracking software goes, the vast majority are the same, especially at the free level. You can set your own goals, track your food, the quantity, add new foods, see the macronutrient and micronutrient breakdown, and add new foods not already listed in the database. MFP is not much better or worse than any other tracker out there as far as the tracking apps go other than some really poor entries of food done by people that either misenter or only enter what they care about. With the big time bankroll of Under Armour, it is pretty to look at and has a large number of features. Where MFP starts to fall apart is their recommendations for how much a person should be eating and their process.

The following picture is taken directly from MFP for me, a 5’11”, 210 lb, approximately 15% bodyfat individual that trains 6 hours per week. This is their recommendation for me to eat to maintain weight.

3,030 seems like a good number to eat in a day, but what is this second number, 2,770 calories per week? That is what MFP determines your fitness goal to be, approximately 692 calories per workout and an additional amount of calories you can eat IF you burn those calories. If you know anything about MFP, this very small line between Nutritional Goals and Fitness Goals is overlooked and misused - “So the more you exercise, the more you can eat!” Essentially a statement that they suggest “eating back” calories that you have burned off in order to reach your goal.

Now, let’s take the calculator on our ZStrength website, which uses five popular estimations, and then takes the average. Using the exact same numbers I entered into MFP, I receive the following result:

Looking at the output, the estimated average intake I need to maintain my weight would be 3,329 calories per day. Like the line below our calculator says, it is an estimate and could be off, resulting in needing some adjustment up or down...just like MFP could (and almost always does) need adjusting.

Now looking at some of the math:

MyFitnessPal	ZStrength Calc
7 days at 3030 = 21,210 calories per week Workout Calories = 2770 Total Calories per Week = 23,980 Average per Day = 3,426	Average per Day = 3,329

That’s right, assuming you actually burn those 2,770 calories per week, you could eat an average 3,426 calories per day and the numbers aren’t that different. But is this clear to the average person just starting? Probably not and that’s what creates the problem.

The problem, and it’s a BIG PROBLEM that has happened time and again with clients when they use MFP, they either don’t know that MFP sets them low and wants them to eat back their calories or they know it and over-eat their exercise calories. The result is chronic over or under-eating because they are following the suggestions of MFP.

Combine the flaws of MFP with even the best non-clinical calorie burn estimators have a margin of error of at least 10%, and you can begin to understand just how bad this could turn out. Assuming one of the closest estimations of 10% and 692 calories burned per day could be 761 or 622. PN did a piece about how bad calorie estimators are: [http://www.precisionnutrition.com/problem-with-calorie-counting-calories-out].

As someone that works with clients to help them build the body they want, I have problems with the lack of clarity and relying on measurements with a known margin of error. MFP is going to take an inexact science (estimating calories in food) combined with another inexact science (how many calories you burn) and add an even less exact science (how many calories you burn in exercise) and convince you to eat that amount. Further, MFP only includes CARDIO calories in what you should eat back, so if you weight train for an hour and “burn 500” calories, you are still to eat 2730 according to them, but if you do an hour of cardio and “burn 300”, you get to eat 3030.

And a simple scenario to hammer home the problem:

You are training to lose weight at a rate of 1 lb / week. MFP gives you a 500 calorie deficit and a count of 2,530 + 1,500 calories of exercise per week. At 5 days per week of exercise, that’s 300 extra calories. Training day total: 2,830.  Off-day total: 2,530.

You train and log your workouts on MFP, which only logs your cardio burn. You train an hour with weights, burning approximately 550 calories + 30 minutes of cardio burning 150 calories.

In addition to being at a 500 calorie deficit to start, you are now an extra 550 calories short because MFP doesn’t know what you burned lifting weight. That’s over a 1,000 calorie deficit and 25% below your maintenance calories. It goes without saying that that large of a deficit isn’t good for you, especially in the long term.

Is MFP really that bad? No. Can this scenario be avoided? Yes, if you are knowledgeable (which most people just starting out aren’t) or if you know how to work MFP like a pro (which most people don’t). And an even easier yes; don’t rely on MFP to determine how many calories you should eat. There are hundreds of calculators and formulas to help you estimate your needs, which can then be plugged in to MFP. As mentioned before, we have one that on our site that uses 5 of the most popular formulas and provides an average. You can find it here at: http://zstrengthfit.com/tools/calculator.html

Weight Loss - The Internet is Filled with Stupid Ideas

As most of you know, I spend a lot of hours reading articles and blogs posted by other fitness minded individuals looking for “new” information or research, something I can use to improve my skills and understanding. Most of my time is spent on the weekends going through blog after blog and article after article looking for something unique. Instead of finding unique articles, I have been finding unique viewpoints on old material. There is value in having a disagreeing viewpoint when it comes to creating traffic, but sometimes, the foundation of disagreement is so stupid it can’t be ignored. Two posts I have seen lately are how a lady “stopped exercising and lost weight” and how “simply cutting carbs results in fat loss”. Total click-bait, but I fell for it and got sucked into the posts and scared for the thousands of people that would read and believe these posts.

Between the magic bullet articles that promote eliminating entire food groups, “detoxing” with lemon vinegar tea coffee bean extract, or “15 fast fat burning foods”, common sense about sustainable weight loss takes the backseat because it isn’t what people want to hear. People don’t want to hear that it isn’t quick or easy. They don’t want to hear that it takes time, effort, and a little bit of common sense. They don’t want to hear that sometimes you can do everything the way your favorite fitness icon does it and fail. Sometimes their lives are so hectic they just need the Disney ending to their struggle with eating, body-image, and fitness. Sadly, Walt didn’t figure out how to make fairy-tale magic happen for us.

This would have been a short post had it not been for the number of posts and messages we receive from similar cases. The lady that stopped exercising and lost weight was like so many people first starting out. She was doing everything right, or so she thought; five hour-long sessions per week, tracking her calories in, and tracking her calories out. Where she went wrong was instead of having weight training and cardio, she was only doing cardio like rowing, walking, etc. She also made the huge mistake of estimating her caloric burn and then eating back those calories. After some time of trying to lose weight this way, she was injured by her dog and unable to be active. Because there was no exercise, there were no calories to eat back and amazingly, she lost weight! This led her to the conclusion that not exercising and eating normally is the way to go instead of performing exercise, building muscle, and still eating in a deficit by not eating back your calories.

Many people forget that building muscle is healthy for our metabolism and believe that a low scale weight is all they need. When we move from active to couch potato, our body will waste muscle, especially when faced with a caloric deficit. Remember, a pound of muscle takes up less space in the body than a pound of fat, so while the scale drops, the tape measure may increase as the body loses muscle but builds up fat. In the evil scenario, we lose precious muscle and reduce our intake, slowing our metabolism. Similar to the “The Biggest Loser Scenario” where contestants lose weight only to regain it years later, losing weight only through reduced intake is likely to result in the regain of fat. When discussing TBL and the downfalls, I’ve had more than a few people misinterpret my objection to mean not eating at a deficit. That is not what I am suggesting at all. I am suggesting having a set number of calories regardless of whether you train or not. I am suggesting a small to moderate deficit caused primarily by activities, specifically resistance exercise. No matter how you cut it, weight loss requires some form of deficit.

Another factor the post brought to light is the concept of “eating back” exercise calories. One popular food / activity tracker in particular encourages you to eat back your exercise calories by giving you a low target and increasing your target intake as you exercise. I find this to be a poorly thought out recommendation for several reasons. Calorie labels / trackers rely on averages. As PN points out in “The Surprising Problem with Calorie Counting - Calories In” it is very hard to reliably say how many calories we are actually consuming. Further, calorie expenditure, even when monitored with a good heart rate monitor has a minimum 10% error. The second part of “The Surprising Problem with Calorie Counting - Calories Out” breaks down just how bad estimates are for predicting how many calories we burn through exercise. Combine the inaccuracy of calories listed on a label with the variance of calories burned and you have the beginning of a recipe for disaster when you attempt to eat back your calories.

Some believe that adjusted macros will create fat loss. Simply adjusting macro intake won’t translate to fat loss or weight loss with few exceptions. Yes, I acknowledge the concept of a recomposition, which is the process of building muscle and losing fat at the same time. No, your body doesn’t turn fat into muscle and no, it isn’t easy. The post proclaiming all that is needed to lose fat is reducing carbohydrate intake is a sad oversimplification. Regardless of how low you get your carbohydrate intake there are other factors:

Total caloric intake and deficit - if there’s no deficit, the body has no need to burn fat stores.

Stress - causes Cortisol release. Cortisol is a factor in the accumulation of visceral fat and sugar cravings.

Sleep - it’s our body’s chance to repair and recover. If you’re not getting enough sleep, you don’t recover, have a tendency to eat more, have impaired glucose control, and are likely to have higher Cortisol levels.

The solution:

Avoid the scale -

Like many others, I recommend limited use of the scale only to track patterns in weight gain or loss. Scales can be highly inaccurate measures and vary up to 10 lbs per day depending on our size. Unless you are severely overweight, there are better measures. If we only watch the scale, we risk losing the right kind of weight for the wrong kind.

Body Composition -

We know it’s possible to be at a “healthy weight” and have a high bodyfat percentage and that it’s possible to be “overweight” and have a low bodyfat percentage. There are hundreds of pictures of people that have gained weight yet become slimmer by building muscle. Even if the goal is to lower your weight, there needs to be a focus on building and maintaining muscle to keep burning calories. The result of losing muscle is a soft physique with less than ideal metabolism.

Hip & Waist Measures -

While body composition is one of the best, tracking changes in hip and waist circumference (two places we all tend to store fat) is a good indicator of our training and diet progress. There is also a high correlation of disease associated with people that have a high waist to hip ratio.

Tracking -

Track what you are eating, not necessarily taking calorie count as being exact, but understanding it is a range. When you find how much you can eat and maintain your weight for a week, decrease your calories by a minimal amount, say 10%. If you aren’t active, add some activity. No fancy gym necessary, but some basic bodyweight work to start.

Use the scale to track for weight changes, knowing that your weight can fluctuate +/- 10 pounds every day depending on your size. I like to keep a running five-day average, which will allow for those daily fluctuations.

Track progress using a variety of tools:  clothing fit, tape measure, progress photos, general feelings throughout the day. If two or more measures are moving in the right direction, you’re making progress, even if the scale isn’t moving.

Patience -

Be patient. Understand that most changes takes several weeks to show up and that good, lasting progress will take time, so if your goal is to be “bikini body” ready in 6 weeks, it may be time to re-think and re-plan.

Be patient through the failures, the slip-ups, and the lack of progress. Each time we don’t move forward is an opportunity to learn and make progress. Each opportunity allows us the chance to figure out to do it better and how to forgive ourselves when we make mistakes.

March Q&A

Kettlebell Workouts... do they really burn more?
Theoretically, a kettlebell workout could burn more calories than a standard workout. Given the majority of kettlebell workouts incorporate full-body exercises (swings, cleans, snatches) with periods of higher intensity exercise, the potential to burn more calories exists in the same time frame when compared to a standard barbell or dumbbell workout. HOWEVER, if one were to perform barbell complexes or super / giant sets with minimal rest, a similar training effect could occur. An ACE Study showed an equivalent calorie burn to a 6 minute mile (http://prn.to/1eC0hOR).

As a training tool, especially for somebody that needs to develop muscular endurance or that wants to have the body composition benefits as well as cardiovascular benefits, performing kettlebell workouts are a great addition to your training program.

Does it matter, weight versus reps, if enough muscle fiber is engaged?

Like all other answers for training questions, it depends on the goal. Quick science, there are 3 types of muscle fibers (Type I, Type IIa, Type IIb) that are trained during our workouts. Type I fibers are the slow twitch, or endurance fibers. Type IIa fibers are a "hybrid" fiber that can demonstrate both slow twitch and fast twitch properties. Type IIb are fast twitch and prone to fatigue quickly.

One of the first principles of training explained to me was simple, "the body will only use as many muscle fibers as it needs to." Sounds simple enough, right? The second was "a muscle is either on or off." The body uses the smallest fibers first (that's Type I) before moving to larger fibers. So when we lift a weight, the body does just enough to lift the weight, whether it's 1 rep or 20 reps. This creates the dilemma about weight versus reps and maximal muscle engagement. Old school convention says heavier weight is the only way for more muscle engagement. However, our fast twitch fibers exhaust quickly, which means training with heavy weights for higher reps isn't possible, which provides little training stimulus for the Type I fibers.

So can we get recruit our largest fibers (Type IIb) along with the Type IIa and Type I fibers? Thankfully, somebody with far more knowledge confirms my belief that we can. Dr Ralph N. Carpinelli, of the Human Performance Laboratory at Adelphi University did an exhaustive review of the scientific literature regarding muscle fibers and weight and reported his findings in the Journal of Exercise Science and Fitness, volume 6, number 2, 2008. One of his main points discussed that effort of action is the key factor in determining the number of muscle fibers recruited. Carpinelli's conclusion was simple, whether it was a 5, 10, or 20 rep max, the most important factor in maximal muscle recruitment is being at "maximal-or near maximal-effort" at the end of each set.

And back to the "it depends" part of my answer. If I am training for a competition, whether it's weightlifting, powerlifting, rowing, or cycling, it will be more beneficial to train in a way that mimics your event. On the other hand, if training to be healthier. I would recommend a variety of weight and rep schemes following the principle of near maximal effort at the end of each set.

Follow up from last month: I've been reading "periodization training for sports". In reading about the maximum strength phase it suggests that the maximum load method should not be used before a minimum of 2 years of general strength training. Of the ms methods reviewed this seems like the only one accessible to me. How hard and fast is this rule? Is there another alternate maximum strength method I can use in the interim? I've only been lifting for about six months and during that time only in a somewhat body building style. Finally the edition of this book I have is from 2005. Is it totally outdated?

The 2005 edition is the 2nd edition of the book, so while some parts may have been updated, I don't believe the book could be considered "outdated." Here's where I disagree and my experience working with youth and new- to-training athletes effects my perspective. I don't believe you need to train for 2 years in general strength before attacking maximum strength. While I do believe there is a prerequisite level of experience and conditioning to be met, I don't believe it has to take 2 years. Training maximal strength takes a toll on the body and developing a solid base is key to avoid preventable injuries that come from jumping in too fast.

The NSCA Periodization model (http://bit.ly/1FoaFZx) also contains the same basic cycles. A deeper explanation of the block methodology can be found on EliteFTS (http://bit.ly/1ChzyRP) with Jeremy Frey's videos. While there is a lot of information directly related to powerlifting, it is easily applied to multiple disciplines. And here's another link to explore (http://bit.ly/1HpvOCq) about maximal strength training through periodization.

I honestly believe if you have a high enough level of GPP you can do block periodization. If you feel you need more GPP, I recommend training at least 6 weeks with the focus purely on GPP. So that begs the question, what is "enough"? For each person it is different and there are millions of opinions. For me, GPP is being able to complete an entire workout without needing 10 minute rest periods on non-ME days or being able to run a sub-10 minute mile or sprint and change direction like playing a sport. For others it may be different, like running 6 minute miles or swimming 500m, or performing 100 kb swings, unbroken.