How healthy are cranberry juice, oatmeal, rice and coffee for a CR diet?

[FrederickSebastian]

Hi,

 

My name is Fred and I've posted several times to this site already... I was just wondering if: cranberry juice, oatmeal, rice and coffee are for the CR diet? Do they have enough nutrition for someone consuming so few calories? The reason I ask this is because these are food my grandparents used to eat and I was very close with them... If white rice isn't very nutritious, then is Red Rice? I've tried red rice before and liked it... brown rice is ok too... 

[timc]

Without a full analysis, I don't think anybody could answer your questions.  Have you tried running your diet so sample diets through a calculator to compare with the RDA?

 

http://cronometer.com/download/

 

Also, what is your concept of "so few calories"?  Hopefully not 800 again!  I'm not aware of any benefit to losing weight quickly although you might consider it analogous to a fast, but if you are doing CR ... why?  Do you happen to have your maintenance weight calories known?  Consider just going below that by 5-15%.

 

I'm partial to 1 or 2 meals daily (typically ~12-24 hours without food).  Presently (2500-2600 kcal/day - a 2 year+ average, but I'd like to approach a median of ~2000 kcal with some higher days each week).  This is with no rush to lose quickly.  If it was 3 lbs/year, that wouldn't hurt my feelings.

[Michael R]

I was just wondering if: cranberry juice, oatmeal, rice and coffee are for the CR diet? Do they have enough nutrition for someone consuming so few calories?

As Tim says, the only real way to answer this is to actually run your daily diet thru' CRON-O-Meter or other nutrition software and see. ANY food can be incorporated into a CR diet: it depends on how much you're eating, what else is in your diet, and how much "room" you have in your Caloric knapsack. (And again, you haven't said what "so few calories" means — but 800 is likely less than half of what you need, unless you're a slim dwarf).

 

In general, however, I would say that all of these are nutrient-poor foods (especially if by "cranberry juice" you mean the usual cranberry cocktails (Ocean Spray, etc)), and you can only fit a small amount of them into any plausible CR diet.

 

If white rice isn't very nutritious, then is Red Rice? I've tried red rice before and liked it... brown rice is ok too...

There really isn't much room for grains in a CR diet, and certainly refined grains are largely going to be small-serving treats rather than staples. Brown rice is moderately better if it really is whole-grain rice: some "brown rice" is just polished rice with a brown tinge to it ;) . Ditto, more or less, with "red rice": Red Camargue is a polished rice, but most is unrefined, and it does have the bonus of containing some anthocyanidins.

 

You should also be conscious of the Arsenic concerns with rice.

[Guest Rodney]

Frederick:

 

You ask about the healthiness of cranberry juice, oats, rice and coffee in a CR diet.

 

There is a very simple, but totally unsatisfactory, answer to this, and to any other similar question:

 

It depends on which studies you have read and take seriously as likely being determined eventually to be correct.  Many papers are published making interesting claims which are completely contradicted by a later paper.  So which is 'correct'?  In almost every case we really do not know for certain.

 

The answer is that little about nutrition and health is etched in stone.  It certainly seems that CR itself is one case which does seem water-tight.  But some serious people even question that.

 

To take oats as an example:  Michael R says they are comparatively deficient nutrients - which obviously makes them undesirable in a CR diet where high nutrient concentration is not just desirable but necessary.  On the other hand a paper posted by Dr. Al a couple of months ago claimed to find that whole grain cereals, as a group, appeared to have greater health benefits than any other food group:  greater benefits than vegetables, or fruits, or nuts, legumes, meats ........  ..

 

So who should you believe?  The answer seems to be YOURSELF.  You have to read the science yourself - Al makes that comparatively easy - and then come to your own conclusions about what you believe is likely to turn out to be correct, instead of being contradicted convincingly by later research.  There is a disagreement here about olive oil, as another example.  Some people believe the research shows it to be highly beneficial.  At least one other (me) believes the same identical piece of research shows the precise opposite.

 

I eat whole grain cereals which may account for why I have had difficulty getting my BMI below 21.  I hope this will mean appreciable health benefits for me.  But it may not, and we may not truly *know* the answers to these questions until 50 or 100 years from now.

[Guest saul]

I agree compleely with Michael Rae.

 

Everything on that list is something that I wouldn't eat -- including any grains, whole grain or not.

 

  -- Saul