Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. But also bacon?

March 31, 2008 1:48 PM

Should I listen to my cravings for high-calorie food? If weight loss is not a concern, and I eat healthy food and still want bacon, should I have the bacon, too?

I've been trying to incorporate healthier things into my diet along the lines of In Defense of Food- i.e. eat [real] food, mostly plants. I do a pretty good job of it about 70% of the time. However, I still crave "junk food" regularly; it's a very specific mood where I intensely want something that's starchy/sweet/fatty, basically the opposite of a raw vegetable, and usually I cave to the impulse. I've seen this old post asking if cravings mean anything, and I'm wondering the same thing, but I'm not like that poster, or most Americans for that matter- I don't need to lose weight. I'm already naturally skinny and losing weight would be bad (would push me toward the underweight side of the BMI scale). By extension I've never counted calories in my life. I eat whenever I'm hungry, and my desire to eat healthier things is mostly for cardiac benefit and ecological soundness. I rarely eat to the point of feeling really full, and I'm completely omnivorous, moderately active (no intense sports/exercise mania).

So how much should I listen to my cravings for "bad" food? Should I pass it all off to junk food addiction and tell myself to have a carrot instead, or are the cravings a way of telling me I need the more high calorie food (in moderation) along with the healthier stuff?

posted by slow graffiti to food & drink (16 comments total)

I say go for the bacon. A little bit of fat every so often is not going to clog your arteries (although IANAD so I wouldn't want to put huge amounts of money on that). If you balance it out right, for instance eating bacon with a salad, or only having bacon for breakfast once a month/two weeks/whatever you decide, you should be fine :).

Now I want bacon...
posted by Planet F at 1:55 PM on March 31, 2008

high calorie/starchy/sweet/fatty =/= "junk" food (or at least, not always). You can eat clean foods - whole, minimally processed, etc. - that satisfy: excellent cheese, chocolate, potato chips, whatever. You're just trying to avoid the packaged shelf-stable laboratory-grown industrial foodstuff stuff. If you're really craving Doritos, Hohos, etc. specifically, I'd suggest you're looking for a quick salt or sugar hit.
posted by peachfuzz at 1:55 PM on March 31, 2008

Well, unfortunately pretty much everyone is going to have an opinion on this, but I don't think there's any need to skip bacon entirely. You might actually want to start counting calories just to see how things are going. You may be underfeeding yourself on all these veggies.
posted by delmoi at 1:56 PM on March 31, 2008

but oh, right, bacon: yeah, bacon is good. Real bacon (actually smoked, not full of fake stuff, from a local processor if you're lucky) is REALLY good, and I totally don't buy that it and mindful eating are mutually exclusive.
posted by peachfuzz at 1:58 PM on March 31, 2008

Actually, bacon and other processed/red meats are not the best foods to indulge in if you're at all concerned about your cancer risk later in life. But hey, if you don't care about getting colorectal cancer, go ahead and eat it. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
posted by acridrabbit at 2:14 PM on March 31, 2008

I'm working with a dietitian to develop software tracking dietary guidelines for middle school students. We talk about sort of thing often.

Having a little bit of anything isn't going to have any long term effect unless it's something like blowfish prepared by an unskilled apprentice. In fact, denying yourself is more likely to make you overeat something when presented with the opportunity. Having two or three slices of bacon once a month, in conjunction with a veggie-heavy, but balanced diet won't do much, if anything, to you.

Here's a trick I learned when to help divide the 'anytime' foods from the 'rarely' foods for people with regular sodium diets. Take a look at the nutrition label and look for 'calories from fat', if more than half of the calories come from fat then it is a food that is best in limited quantities. There are some foods where that rule can be bent a little (i.e. olive oil), but it is a good rule of thumb for picking out snacks. Most pork bacon will have about 2/3 of its calories from fat, so it's not something for everyday eating. Once in a while, though is just fine.

If you're worried, look for the kind without nitrates. Turkey bacon is good, too.
posted by Alison at 2:17 PM on March 31, 2008

If you are good on your diet 80% of the time I'd say you'd earned a designated binge day. If you have the discipline to wait until binge day, I say go for it.
posted by CrazyJoel at 2:27 PM on March 31, 2008

Just to clarify, bacon itself is not what I'm worried about, it was just an easy example food that's high calorie that no one would ever mistake for being healthy. Other things I tend to crave are potato chips (Trader Joe's salt and vinegar, mmm) and home made cookies, brownies, and so on. I'd say I rarely ever OD on one bad food, I get bored too easily, but I do crave many bad foods, often.

[I am not especially convinced by that JAMA study either- don't tell me bacon will give me ass cancer until you control for weight and smoking, but I know there are probably stronger links out there]
posted by slow graffiti at 2:47 PM on March 31, 2008

If you want a way to be "good" while still eating "bad" foods, then I have a tip.
Humans crave salt/fat/sugar. Just biology. If you're underweight and have never worked at it, then you probably have a high enough metabolism that you could use the extra calories every once in a while, too. We get ourselves in trouble when we eat high-calorie/fat/badstuff items as convenience foods, rather than having to work for them or discover them rarely as our ancestors did. So eat "junk" foods, but avoid "convenience" foods. Want bacon? Go to the butcher and get yourself some good bacon, not the shelf-stable stuff from the 7-11, and cook it up. Want cookies? Bake some cookies, they're not so hard. If you can't cook at all, then at least don't keep any junk in the house - go out and purchase the single thing you're craving, no other impulse buys or stocking up on junk. If you don't have it around, you won't abuse it. Just try not to eat the whole cake you've baked at midnight on Thursday in one sitting.
posted by penciltopper at 3:01 PM on March 31, 2008

Somewhat off-topic, but they did control for smoking, as well as age, sex, total caloric intake, education, BMI, physical activity, use of hormone therapy, multivitamin use, aspirin use, beer/wine/liquor intake, and fruit/veg/high fiber food intake.
posted by acridrabbit at 8:24 PM on March 31, 2008

You sound kind of like me, metabolically and dietarily. Usually cravings mean two of two things: One, that I am lacking something; and two, that I have tried to fill that gap inappropriately. That might mean filling a caloric gap with sugar, or filling a protein gap with carbs, but whatever it is, it didn't do the job in a stable, effective way. If I then figure out what the food lack is and meet it, all is well and I'm back to a steady, healthy, appetizing diet. If I just get hold of what I think I want, usually it's another bad stopgap and the cravings for blah junk will return in strength. Kind of Buddhist, in a way: The apparent solution to the apparent discontent will only perpetuate it, but the real solution will create a different state not involved in that cycle at all.

If you really are not getting enough of something, including possibly calories, then yes, it's healthy to fix that by appropriate means. In my case, at one time, that meant I used whipping cream to mix my milk up from whole to 12% for a month, because I had seriously bottomed out my fat reserves. In your case, it may mean moderate bacon or something. Whole milk is also a great mix of the sweet/fat/salt tastes that tell your body all is right with the world. So what's 'appropriate'? Conventional American notions of what one should and shouldn't eat won't be much use; they are almost exclusively tailored to people who habitually eat more than they can burn, and possibly haven't ever really learned to like good food; skinny freaks like you and me are mostly on our own there. But the 'eat food' bit is right on the money: Would your great-great-grandmother have recognized it as edible? (I use two 'great's because, well, one of my one-greats lived till 1985, by which time, well...) If your great-great-grandmother, like mine, grew up on a farm, I guarantee she ate a diet that would successively appall, attract, and slay many contemporary Americans. Including bacon.

If it's protein cravings in particular or even meat cravings—yeah, I try to go light on the meat because I have numerous relatives who had severe heart problems. But there's a limit. The metabolic furnace must feed, and if I don't feed it animals' flesh it will consume my own. That's when I defrost a steak, rub it with garlic and salt-preserved lemon, sear the outside and then gently heat it till the center just brushes 140° F, not a degree further, plate it alongside some rice, and rub a bit of sage over. Mmm, all better.
posted by eritain at 11:45 PM on March 31, 2008

acidrabit - plus they say "However, the association was substantially attenuated with further adjustment for educational attainment, cigarette smoking, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors associated with red meat intake"... also, I may not be reading those tables correctly, but it looks to me like the largest increase they saw, for the top third of long-term red meat consumption compared to the lowest third, was a 1% increased risk... I think slow graffiti is going to be safe with the occasional bacon or other fatty red meat treat...
posted by russm at 2:34 AM on April 1, 2008

My last comment - I can't let misinformation stand uncorrected. Russm: the largest increase in risk was a statistically significant 50% for those with high intake of processed meat. In other words, those in the high-intake group were 1.5 times more likely to develop cancer of the distal colon than those with low intake.
posted by acridrabbit at 6:55 AM on April 1, 2008

misinformation, acridrabbit? I read it as approx twice as likely, on top of a base 1% risk, which is a ~1% increase in risk... let's say there's something with a 1 in a million risk, and I do something that increases my risk 1000-fold, I've increased my risk all the way to 1 in a thousand... saying "1.5 times as likely" without stating the base risk is a classic way of inflating the apparent scariness of these sort of numbers...
posted by russm at 8:13 AM on April 1, 2008

Speaking as someone who has been losing weight purposefully, I'd say if your cravings are occasional & moderate: go for it. One of the things that has kept me being healthy and steadily losing weight over the last year has been not having any forbidden foods. I can occasionally have some not-healthy foods, as long as I'm still keeping w/in my calorie limit. And that means that I satisfy the craving early, when it's one cookie, or two pieces of bacon, instead of 5 or 15. :)

(For a take on food that's related to Michael Pollan's, but with some surprising differences, try Real Food by Nina Planck.)
posted by epersonae at 9:56 AM on April 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

There is some research these days which indicates that cravings have a lot to do with serotonin--cravings for high calorie foods are really all about getting carbs (in the form of sugar or whatever) into your body so your brain can produce serotonin.

If you google "serotonin" and "cravings," there's a bunch of stuff out there. Some of it is kind of off the wall, but not all of it. These people are trying to sell a book, but the authors do seem to have decent cred, especially Wurtzman). I did a quick Medline search to see if she's published at all, and she is, and the topics are in line with what she's claiming in the book. The website and book are all about losing weight by controlling cravings, but I think there's good information about cravings there even for someone who doesn't want to lose weight.

So, if she's right, the way to handle those feelings are to have a snack of complex carbs with no protein, and aim for around 150-180 calories. You should try to do this about half hour to an hour before the time of day (assuming it's at all regular?) you usually get cravings. See if that helps.

Or, hell, I don't know--I really just think you should go ahead and snack and not get too caught up in the reasons why, but wanted to let you know that there's probably a reason your body wants food. If I were you and didn't need to lose weight, I'd just try to eat things that aren't actively bad for you (like trans fats) when I got cravings.
posted by hought20 at 12:14 PM on April 1, 2008 [1 favorite]