1 post tagged “fat”

I decided to go with the older term "newbies" meaning someone new at something as opposed to the more derrogatory term "noobs" which is what WOW players call new people.  ;)

I have books and books about various aspects of low carbing.  I've been a member of the Active Low Carber Forum for years and have read many articles, posts, summaries, medical research and anecdotal materials.

Basics: 

There are three macronutrients:  protein, fat, and carbohydrates.  These provide calories that keep us alive.  Micronutrients are vitamins, minerals and trace elements contain no calories but are essential to life.  Without macronutrients we would starve and die.  Without micronutrients we would have deficienies, declining health and then death. (Protein Power)

Whenever you reduce one of the macronutrients, you increase another one to make up your daily caloric intake. 

Protein is the most important macronutrient.  I can't find the source right now but the word's origin meant "of first importance"  Protein is essential for life function.  When protein is eaten, our bodies break that protein down into its amino acid componants and sends them to needy tissues for reassembly. (Protein Power LifePlan) Our bodies use it for repairing our cells and there are many vitamins and minerals found in meat.  Low in potassium?  Don't eat a banana....eat pork!  Vitamin B-12 is only found in animal products.  The type found in plant sources is not absorbed and is useless.

Fat is also a required macronutrient.  Fatty acids function in many ways throughout the body but most importantly in the cell membranes.  (PPLP)  Fact or theory?  I've read that the reason we are intelligent, sentient beings is because of our fat intake.  A primative forerunner to Homo Sapiens Sapiens, a branch off the evolutionary tree long, long ago we were much like other primate species.  Many are vegetarian, but more developed ones are omnivores, they eat plants and meat.  Anyway, it was said that we started out as scavengers, eating dead carcus and feasting on the meat and the fat we grew to develop in ways that were beneficial to development because of that meat and fat.  Slowly, evolution is incredibly slow, we evolved to hunters.  Hunters would  plan how to get more meat and fat and make weapons for that purpose.  Early man did not shun any edible part of the fallen animal.  While the muscle meat portion that we commonly eat today was lower in fat (leading to the myth that early man ate a low fat diet), our ancestors ate of every part of the animal including the organs and brains and cracked open the bones for the fatty marrow.

There are many types of fats including saturated fatty acids, monounsaturated fatty acids, and polyunsaturated fatty acids which also includes the omega-3 and omega-6 families (PPLP)

Monosaturated fats are found in foods such as olives, olive oil, avacados, nuts, lard and poultry fat.  They are stable at room temperature.

Saturated fats come from butter, lard, coconut oil, and palm kernal oil.  They are very stable and are rigid or solid at room temperature.  They keep a long time.  Our ancestors must have prized these kinds of fats.

Polyunsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature and go rancid quickly.  These, when consumed help in the creation of free radicals in the body which stiffens cell membranes and  more antioxidents are needed to combat this. This is getting a bit complicated for me....there are pages about it in Protein Power LifePlan.  There is also some great articles written by Dr. Mary Enig at Weston Price. The Skinny on Fats

Transfats are a man-made monster.  Trans fatty acids are made from unsaturated fats that have been heated to a high temperature with a nickel catalyst and they pump hydrogen gas into the mixture.  The finished product looks like a natural fat but isn't.  The trans fatty acids become solid at room temperature and have a long shelf life.  Many baked goods you find in the store have been using transfats for years.  It is only recently that you see products with 0 Grams Trans Fats! on the label....but if you read the actual nutrition label and ingrediants you might see partially hydrogenated soybean oil, and that is a transfat.  The manufacturers just make the serving size small so that the grams of transfat per serving is .9 they can claim 0 grams of trans fat.

What's wrong with trans fatty acids?  I'll make a list.
Trans fats lower HDL (the good cholesterol) and raise LDL (the bad cholesterol)  they raise lipoprotien, the only known substance to do so and raise total cholesterol in the serum by 20-30 milligrams/deciliter. (PPLP)
Trans fats interfere with reproduction and breastfeeding.  They weaken the immune response and increase the production of free radicals.  Trans fats decreases the body's response to insulin and contribute to insulin resistance (makes you fatter) and worsens essential-fatty-acid deficiency (like omega-3 and omega-6, we get too much of one and not enough of the other)

What foods contain trans fats?
Margarines, salad oils (any that say soybean oil), bakery goods (Crisco), potato chips, french fries, crackers, candies, even animal crackers that we give to toddlers, and the infamous Oreo cookie (now available trans fat free I heard, but I try not to look to closely at the cookies anymore),

According to Dr. Enig, approximately 70% of the soybean oil consumed in this country has already been partially hydrogenated.  (PPLP, as is most of this information)

CARBOHYDRATES

The actual amount of carbohydrates required by humans for health is zero. (Protein Power) 

Now that isn't to say that there aren't some health benefits from eating your vegetables, there are vitamins and minerals and antioxidents and trace elements that you need for optimum health (in my opinion) since modern people often do not eat the whole body of a hunted animal, we buy muscle meat cuts from the grocery store which almost all has been grain fed to make it grow faster and fatter and then the stores go and cut off most of the fat.

All carbohydrates are sugar.  Even broccoli and other vegetables if you read the label says eg:  5 grams of carbohydrate, 3 grams of fiber.  You can deduct the fiber since your body can't digest it leaving 2 digestable carbs for a serving of broccoli, making it a great low carb food.

What happens when you eat carbs?  "When you eat, the food travels from your mouth, through your stomach, and into your small intestine.  The job of your digestive system is to break the food down into its various molecular components--the protein into amino acids, the fats into smaller fatty acids, and the carbohydrates into glucose (sugar)--so that they are absorbed into the body.  Your body can't absorb complex carbohydrates as they are; it can only absorb them once they're reduced to their basic subunits--sugar molecules.  Each carbohydrate food, then, has a sugar equivalent.  A medium potato, for example, contains a little over 50 grams of starch and other carbohydrates (sugar).  When you eat a potato, your digestive track breaks the complex carbohydrate starch into its sugar molecules, which you can then absorb.  The 50+ grams of carbohydrate becomes 50+ grams of sugar, or a little more than a quarter of a cup.

When you consume over a quarter of a cup of sugar--weather it started out as a potato or a soft drink matters little--it goes through the walls of your small intestine into your bloodstream.  If you add a quarter cup of sugar to the amount already in your blood, your blood sugar will rise.  Your body doesn't really like it when your blood sugar goes up; in fact, your body likes to keep your blood sugar in a fairly narrow comfort zone--neither too high nor too low--and operates complex metabolic machinary to keep it there.  When your blood sugar jumps up out of this comfort zone, as it surely does when you eat the potato or drink the soft drink, this elevated sugar level puts in the call to the pancreas asking for insulin.  When your pancreas gets the message that the blood sugar is too high, it begins to release its stored insulin and starts making more.

The insulin travels through the blood, washing over the insulin receptors on the surfaces of the cells, and binds to them.  When the insulin binds to these receptors it activates them, and they begin to pump the sugar out of the blood, where it can cause trouble, and into the interior of the cells, where it can be used or stored.  Your pancreas continues to make and release insulin for as long as your blood sugar is above the comfort zone.  As soon as the insulin-activated receptors have pumped enough sugar into the cells to reduce your blood sugar level back into the comfort zonem the high blood sugar signal to your pancreas ceases, your pancreas stops releasing the large amounts of insulin, and the system goes back into idle awaiting the next load of sugar it will have to deal with.  When you eat another potatom sweet roll, bagel, ear of corn, or any other carbohydrate food, the cycle starts over again."
(Protein Power LifePlan)

This is how it's supposed to work, but if you eat a modern American diet, you get many more carbohydrates then the body was ever designed to compensate for.  My favorite analogy from the authors of Protein Power and The Protein Power LifePlan, Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades is we have a Fred Flintstone body in a George Jetson world.

Too much carbohydrate messes with your insulin.  Over a period of years if you continue to consume a lot of carbohydrates your pancreas gets tired and starts to work inefficiently.  At first it pumps out extra insulin and that results in low blood sugar.  Some might call it hypoglycemia.  You feel weak and tired and the usual recommendation is to eat sugar to bring it up fast.  Sometimes people with diabetes get low blood sugar because of too much insulin that they inject to counteract the carbs they have eaten.  One person I knew who was a low carber diabetic would take a spoonful of peanut butter if she started to feel weak and it worked to slowly bring up her blood sugar instead of spiking it.  I believe I have relative hypoglycemia and peanut butter works great for me (if I have some around).

Diabetes has two forms:  Type I and Type II. 

Type I diabetes may be caused by a virus or infection.  The pancreas is no longer capable of producing insulin.  Without insulin, every carbohydrate eaten just floats as sugar in the blood and  causes ketoacidosis (not to be confused with dietary ketosis).  Ketoacidosis occurs when there is a high level of blood sugar and will cause death in a Type I diabetic if not treated with insulin.  It wasn't until 1921 that injectable insulin was discovered and Type I diabetes was no longer a death sentence.  According to medical records before that time, the only way to extend your life as a Type I diabetic was to go on a low carb diet.  The other choice was starvation coupled with extensive exercise as a way to try to burn the sugar out of the blood stream.  Dr. Bernstein, a type I diabetic himself, rediscovered the low carb approach to treating diabetes though treating himself and quit being an engineer and went to medical school to study it more in depth and to give himself the necessary credentials.  His book, The Bernstein Solution should be the bible for people with diabetes.  Dr. Atkins also has a book for diabetics but I haven't read it yet.

Type II diabetes is caused by excessive carbohydrate consumption over years that the pancreas can not keep up with the demands of the blood sugar.  At first it puts out too much insulin, causing blood sugars drops and spikes and if the excessive carbohydrates continue the pancrease will lose its ability to create insulin.  Most type II diabetics have some ability still left to create some insulin but it depends on how badly damaged their pancreas is.  Now a days there are many things that diabetics can take including injectable insulin, and oral drugs such as Metformin. 

The one change a diabetic could make that would reduce or eliminated their need for drugs is a low carbohydrate diet.

So far, it seems that nothing will improve insulin sensitivity better or faster then reducing the amount of carbohydrates consumed.  "Less sugar in the mouth means less sugar in the blood, less sugar in the blood requires less insulin to deal with it, and less insulin bombardment of the receptors means that the receptors will up-regulate and become more sensitive.  More sensitive receptors means it will take less insulin to make them work, and less insulin makes even more-sensitive receptors.  It leads to whatever the polar opposite of a vicious cycle would be. A beneficial cycle?" (PPLP)

Sometime...after my holiday, I will cover specific plans and other health issues.