I feel absolutely ridiculous admitting this, but I am only human. And sometimes I end up shrugging my shoulders and saying “do as I say, not as I do. I’m only human.”
Tuesday was one of those days. (more…)
“Although it’s true that our bodies can’t break fat down into glucose (though, interestingly, they easily use glucose to make fat), our bodies can convert some of the protein we eat into glucose.” (Low Carb Diets)
It is common knowledge that the body’s primary source of fuel is glucose. From the above statement, we even understand that is the author’s thought process.
But.
If we stop making assumptions about what we “know,” we may be able to find the truth. If the body can’t break dietary fat into glucose, but glucose is easily turned into fat… would that not suggest that perhaps the body prefers dietary fat to use in the body?
Do you often feel like you simply cannot say “no” to donuts, candy bars, cake or other simple carbohydrates? Do you crave pastas, white bread, and other sugary foods? Perhaps you think, or friends or family members suggest, you don’t have enough will power to avoid these bad foods or ability to keep on a diet. Do not blame yourself or feel guilty: it takes much more than will power to eat healthy; it takes nourishing foods and knowledge of what food does in your body.
Our bodies need healthy saturated fats for the cells to function properly, and if we don’t get enough cholesterol from saturated fats, our bodies become deficient in the primary building block for hormones.
Cholesterol also repairs cell membranes, makes vitamin D, bile acids to digest fats along with a host of other functions. But, in the 1900s when heart disease was steadily increasing, saturated fat and cholesterol were depicted as being the culprit for clogging arteries and causing heart disease. This is the Lipid Hypothesis; it is still a hypothesis and has never been proven. In fact, just the opposite is true but we’ll get into those studies (that prove healthy fats results in healthier people) another day.
In response to the lipid hypothesis, many people avoid saturated fats and anything with cholesterol. Thankfully, the body can use the sugars from carbohydrates and turn them into a usable source of energy (although not the preferred source).
When the body does not receive healthy fats, it reacts as if there is a crisis and craves simple sugars because it can quickly use that in emergency situations. Once we allow our body to begin using simply carbohydrates, it becomes an addiction because there is a slight serotonin boost also. Now the body is learning to rely on sugar which comes with the risks of developing diabetes, heart disease and many other modern diseases.
Carbohydrates, sugar metabolism, insulin versus healthy fats, saturated fats, cholesterol : these are all topics I cover in my Food & Nutrition 101 classes as well at the Nutrition for Weight Loss program.
Entered in Monday Mania Carnival.
Welcome! Food Police is a somewhat new addition to this blog – my goal is to inform readers about healthy alternatives for somewhat staple food items in most American diets.
Allow me to explain in clear, concise words:
This is not food!
Consumers are lead to believe they are simply adding a tablespoon of cream to coffee – just a little bit of Vanilla Caramel or Hazelnut (ooh Fat-Free!), but what are you really putting in your body?
Water, Corn Syrup Solids, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oil, and less than 2% of Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative)**, Dipotassium Phosphate, Mono- and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Artificial Flavor, Carrageenan.
**Not a source of lactose.
Better option:Organic Valley heavy whipping cream (avoid “ultrapasteurized” heavy whipping cream). Ingredients: ORGANIC GRADE A CREAM (MILK).
And it has 6 grams of healthy fat, which is good. (Coffee Mate has 1 gram of fat and 2 grams of carbohydrates.)
Whole, raw cream from your local dairy farmer. BONUS: shake it and make raw butter!
As Nora Gedaudas wrote in her book Primal Body-Primal Mind,
Being fat isn’t about EATING fat, its about the inability to burn fat, which is a direct consequence of relying on carbohydrate – sugar – as a primary source of fuel.
Osteoporosis is considered a deficiency of calcium in the body, right? Bones are mostly made of protein and collagen, giving bones their strength and flexibility, and calcium, which gives bones their hardness. Hardness without strength or flexibility leads to weak, brittle bones. Especially for people who’s body is used burning sugar as fuel, i.e. diabetics; the body will take the protein out of the bones and convert to sugar at night, leading to weak and brittle bones.
The solution. Eliminate sugar and starchy carbohydrates; bread, pasta, rice, grains, beans, potatoes and all sweets and sweeteners. Limit fruits and use mostly berries when you do eat fruit. Then, consume just enough protein to “meat” your dietary needs, using grass-fed, local beef, pork, pastured eggs and wild-caught fish. The rest of your diet should be mostly healthy fats; olive oil, butter, avocados, nuts, sesame seeds and oil, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, safflower mayonnaise (unrefined), whipping cream, coconut oil, ghee, palm oil, lard and tallow.
References:
Primal Body-Primal Mind, Nora Gedgaudas
Nutritional Weight and Wellness
the info:
Advanced Glycolytic End Products (AGEs) are the result of excess auto-oxidized glucose in the bloodstream. The glucose produces potent free-radical activity which damages the arterial walls and forms cross-links with proteins called AGEs. Diabetics sometimes have neurological and cardiovascular complications, and this is the reason.
what are the symptoms?
AGEs accelerate aging in cells and tissues and cause mutations in DNA. Which is why they AGE you, get it? AGEs bind with certain receptors in the bloodstream, RAGEs, and cause inflammation which leads to more advanced cardiovascular disease. Fasting blood sugar is NOT an accurate marker for this, but a test called Hemoglobin-ArC can more accurately monitor glycation tendencies over time.
the take home message:
Glucose literally ages, or AGEs, us. And glycation occurs in a cumulative process: you can’t detox or cleanse the damaging effects of years of glucose in your body. The very thing scientists and, most likely, your own M.D. think we need so much of for our brain to function is slowly killing us! We do need some glucose for our red blood cells to function, but not so much for our brain. Remember, our brains run primarily on fat, not glucose.
references:
Primal Body-Primal Mind, Nora T. Gedgaudas, CNS, CNT
Recently the LA Times published an article, A Reversal on Carbs, alluding to what most Weston A Price Foundation (WAPF) members already know: carbohydrates are NOT the body’s preferred method of fuel and is, in fact, the number one reason why America is fat.
Yet many people think they “need” carbohydrates to function. The accepted knowledge is this: it doesn’t matter what you eat, as long as you stay within your daily nutrient allowance of so many calories. What does science have to say about the role of fats versus carbohydrates in the body?
Firstly, in the whole history of man-kind, it has only been since the mid 1900s that carbohydrates (not including vegetables and, to some extent, fruit) become the “norm,” so this “scientific study” in the LA Times is only bringing us back to what has been normal for thousands of years.
If a person consumes a balanced diet which is about 30-80% healthy fat, protein and no or very few carbohydrates their body will automatically find it’s healthy weight. Without effort.
Carbohydrates turn into glucose in the body and insulin comes in to turn it into energy or storage, right? Healthy fat, on the other hand, is usable from the minute it enters the body — the body and the brains’ primary source of fuel is designed to be fat in the form of ketones — not glucose!
Furthermore, if one is not consuming enough healthy fat, ones own body will synthesize fat from other sources, most notably, carbohydrates, and absorb and store this unwanted fat. Grains (most common source of carbohydrates) cause many health problems due to its ant-nutrient content, its tryptophan-poor profile, high omega-6 levels… it’s an allery and sensitivity potential to tons of people. One only feels like one NEEDS carbs to get through the day when ones body is in glucose-burning mode (sugar addiction). Then one will have cravings. When one body is in fat burning mode, one can last without food longer between meals and will have more energy because ones body isn’t spending energy converting glucose into something usable.
Just to clarify about “healthy” fat, this includes saturated fats, monounsaturated fats and certain essential polyunsaturated fats such as omega-3s but stay away from the poly-unsaturated vegetable oils. These last oils are simply damaging to ones body. Most of ones fat consumption should be from animal fats though, it’s only natural. Unadulterated animal fats, preferably, are the best source of fat for ones body… so yes: butter, raw full fat cheese, raw milk, etc. God made it that way, that’s the way humans ate for thousands of years… what’s wrong with it? SCIENCE has proven it’s healthy even. It’s basic biochemistry.
As far as exercise goes, it’s good for keeping a value of life–being flexible and able to run, jump, sprint, etc and lift things, but I put very little value in exercise as far as weight control. Exercise can never compensate for an unhealthy diet, any more than supplements and drugs can. To get/maintain a healthy body and healthy weight it’s 80% nutrition and 20% exercise. I see physical activity as a fun thing, not do-it-or-you’ll-get-fat type of a thing.
About the whole calorie in/calorie out idea: if this worked, a lot of people would be normal weighted. BABIES are overweight these days, do we have a plethora of under active babies? Uh, no. They just eat, sleep and poop as they are programmed, yet they are fat. Being fat must not be about willpower or exercise. I think we have to dig deeper.
What exactly is a calorie? A calorie is the amount of energy required to heat 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius in a bomb calorimeter. Every gram of protein and carbohydrate takes about 4 calories to heat the water while every gram of fat takes about 9 calories and alcohol takes about 7. BUT, the human body doesn’t burn calories the way a bomb calorimeter burns calories. The human body is complex with multiple organs, enzymes, hormones, brain chemicals, and more – every day new cells are made, hormones are manufactured and toxins are neutralized. On the other hand, the bomb calorimeter is a tank. Food goes in and then goes out in the form of heat. There is no manufacturing going on, no thyroid glands or hormones to contend with.
So just because a gram of fat produces 9 calories in a bomb calorimeter doesn’t mean the body will store 9 calories from that same fat gram. Calories are used for other things in humans other than storing fat and providing energy for exercise.
Then where did the calorie in/calorie out come from? Let me quote from Nora Gedgaudas: The first law of thermodynamics states that energy in a closed system at thermal equilibrium is neither created nor destroyed. Energy can be transformed. First, is the human body a closed system? Nope.
So what does the law of thermodynamics and caloric deficit have to do with calories and weight gain? NOTHING. This law really says that the calories we eat can be stored (in fat or glycogen), burned off with work (as in exercise or digesting food), or burned off as waste (as in carbon dioxide or sweat). It simply says not all calories will go to the fat stores in our hips because some of those calories will be used to do work and some will be discarded as waste.
Animal fats are healthy and necessary for the human body and carbohydrates are not, exercise is not necessary for weight control but is good for quality of life, a calorie of food in a human is much different than in a bomb calorimeter, and the first law of thermodynamics (caloric deficit) has nothing to do with calories and weight gain.
References:
The Liberation Diet, Kevin Brown and Annette Presley
Primal Body-Primal Mind, Nora Gedgaudas
The Obesity Epidemic, Zoe Harcombe