The FastDay Forum

Just out of interest does anyone take meal supplements on fasting days?
In the past I have used a product called 'Mealtime' which is a protein shake. It's non GM and dairy, gluten & wheat free it can be mixed with water or sprinkled over food. As a non meat eater I worry that my body does not get all the nutrition it needs and as I cant always afford to buy organic I end up buying possible GM foods which are lacking in real nutrition. does any one else have these concerns or an opinion on this?

I lost about a stone on a soup diet (swapping several meals a week for soup) last year, only some of which came back before starting the 5/2 diet at the start of the year. The thing about soup is it packs relatively few calories into quite a large volume and consequently leaves you feeling fuller for longer. I imagine a meal replacement could have the same effect.

I'm avowedly a meat eater but these days I'm as likely to be eating lentils, beans and rice because of the current meat uncertainties. I think it's possible to eat well and cheaply with that sort of a base, with the possible addition of a multi-vitamin.

There's no nutritional difference between GM and non-GM food, or indeed between organic and inorganic. Selective breeding has given us the vast majority of our staple crops. Selective breeding is essentially genetic modification on a much slower scale.

There's an argument to be made about pesticides on non-organic foods. There's another argument to made about pesticides on supposedly organic foods. While you can't ignore food safety, more people drown in the bath than die because their food is GM or non-organic. Does that put you off baths?

TL:DR - don't worry about it. In the Western world there's far greater risk from over-eating than there is from malnutrition.

[carorees]

As Bob says, soup is a good meal replacement and likely to be healthier and cheaper than your protein shake!

My worry is that by having a protein shake you may be increasing your protein intake too much. The link between fasting and lowering protein intake and hence lowering cancer risk needs to be considered. A man only needs around 55g of protein a day, a woman around 45g.

GM foods have all the same nutrition in terms of macronutrients and micronutrients as organic foods. The issue over GM is more to do with the effect that GM crops might or might not have on the non-GM varieties if they were to 'escape' into the wild. But as humans have already massively influenced every ecosystem they have entered including transporting plants and animals all around the world and wiping out species by introducing foreign organisms into habitats where they run riot, I think we are unlikely to do any more harm with GM foods, less probably as they are more strictly controlled!

As Bob says, most people in the developed world are dying from too many nutrients and it is this that is behind the problems with cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc as is increasingly becoming obvious.

Sorry you misunderstood about the supplements, I use them as a supplement not a replacement meal. I do tend to freak myself out a bit if I think too much on the toxins I ingest & I know I need to chill out a bit with it all, if the food dont kill me the worry will

[carorees]

I am not sure about the mealtime protein shake. I had a look at the ingredients and nutritional information:

Ingredients: Soya isolate, apple powder (organic), chocolate flavour, psyllium powder, stevia extract, Atriplex Halimus, vitamins and minerals.
Nutritional info:Per 100g
Energy1537kJ / 363kcal; Protein 42.3g; Carbohydrate 43.2g (of which sugars 18.5g); Fat 1.3g (of which saturates 0.4g; of which monounsaturates 0.3g; of which polyunsaturates 0.5g); Fibre 4.4g; Sodium 0.67

I think the protein is rather high if you are adding it to your meals as we are trying to reduce protein intake. If you had no other protein source that day then the shake would be OK. I also think the carbohydrate is too high for a fast day and likely to make you hungrier. Next, the safety of stevia extract has been questioned as crude extract was shown to be toxic in experiments with lab rats. The high purity extract that has been licensed for use has not been subjected to long-term experiments in humans so we just don't know if it is safe. Lastly, I can find no studies at all on the safety of Atriplex Halimus (saltbush) in humans. It may have some hypoglycaemic effect as it has been used to treat diabetes in Egypt and Israel, and it seems to be used to fatten lambs! Not sure about that at all.

Personally, I think I would save my money and be confident that my plant-based diet was sufficient to provide all the nutrients I need.

Oh God!!, I dont want to end up a fat lamb !! Thanks for looking into it for me, prehaps I should stick to the veggies in future.

[carorees]

Veggies are ace!

Hi I am using a protein shake that only has 3gms of carbs and 24gms of protein per drink made up. It has 120 cals for the drink. Its gold standard 100% whey so carbs are very low. I'm just wondering, would this be ok as a drink in the day and then have your 380 cals for dinner? I just want to keep most of my cals as exercise quite heavily at night and need to sustenance for the marathon I'm training for.

Thanks

Julienne

I watched that WeightWatchers hatchet job on C4 about a month back and I'm reminded of the segment where they compared the ingredients in Ben and Jerrys and WeightWatchers ice cream - one had about four natural ingredients while the other had a long list of E numbers.

I take a regular multi-vitamin and the odd cod liver oil capsule, so I'm not exactly purer than pure but there's no real comparison between a supplement and a real meal you've made yourself. I make a big tub of lentil chilli and freeze half a dozen or more portions to have as necessary. Cheap as chips, fills you up and full of vitamins. B12 is the only thing you're going to be lacking from a veggie diet, unless you eat dairy or eggs.

I used to weight train and did the whole supplement thing. Don't really give it the time of day now - the only thing that actually worked I used to get from a Greek pharmacy and it wasn't a protein shake.

At the end of the day if training is more important to you than your health (because excessive training is inherently unhealthy) then you're possibly better off not fasting. The point of fasting isn't so much the weight loss, which is more like a by-product, but coaxing your body into repair mode. I don't see how that's going to be compatible with heavy training. But that's just my opinion.

Personally, i wouldn't touch any supplements/vitamin pills ect. You absorb nutrients from real food much more efficiently than from artificial pills or powders. Most of the vitamins from the pills just pass right through you in your urine . The vitamin pill companies just make up pills claiming to cure just about everything under the sun, much like homeopathy, just to make money out of gullible health conscious people.

Make sure you eat a good balanced diet. If you think you don't get enough of something in your diet, go find out which foods contain the most of what you need and incorporate them into your diet.

Hi guys-I take your point re fasting and exercise.think ill stay off the shakes and stick to real food.thanks for the responses though

I don't think you can dismiss supplements so easily. It's all very well to say "eat a good balanced diet" but you will have to do a pretty in depth analysis of everything you are eating and have regular blood screens to find out what is deficient in your diet and whether you are correcting it with food alone.

If you have a condition that is caused by, say, lack of magnesium, then adopting the 5:2 plan is unlikely to correct it and, since overall you are eating less food, could make the deficiency worse.

The 5:2 plan may well take care of the excess calories that we all previously were eating and lower circulating GTF-1, but nothing in the science of it suggests that the plan is able to magically synthesise chemical elements that are not present in sufficient quantities in the foods you happen to choose.

So my view is that supplementation may be needed, depending on what you are eating and what you're deficient in, and indeed there's reason to think that boosting certain nutrients above normal levels (whatever they are) might enhance longevity, speed weight loss and increase the feeling of well being that many report.

[carorees]

By eating more vegetables on fast days and now feed days too than I did before starting 5:2 I reckon I'm getting my "supplements" that way! However, I have started taking vitamin D this winter due to being indoors shivering most of the time! When (if) summer comes I'll stop the vit d until autumn.

Supplements are not supposed to replace food, you take them at the times when you cannot eat the certain nutrients you need. For instance I cannot eat dairy or eggs as they give me an instant migraine so in order for my bones not to crumble and many other arising problems I take supplements for the nutrients I can't eat. If you can eat all food groups you shouldn't need anything extra, But if you have been poorly and not eating well they will help you get back on your feet.
Toni x