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Why Do We Get Fat? • Big Picture • Financial • Practical Preparation • Environmental News • Health

WHY DO WE GET FAT?

Last week I pointed out that the energy in wheat primary comes from starch, which is a polymer of glucose. Glucose is sugar and when the body sees glucose, because it is toxic to the body in high quantities (that's why diabetics have to manage their blood sugar so closely), it immediately gets to work to get rid of it.

If the liver or muscles are low on glycogen, those reservoirs will get recharged using this sugar. But what about the rest? And, typically, since modern-day humans are eating far too many carbohydrates, the rest amounts to quite a bit of sugar that must be dealt with.

The body is continually moving energy in and out of fat cells. One job the hormone insulin has is to help regulate this movement and thus the amount of sugar in the blood stream. The pancreas secrets insulin to remove the sugar and store it in fat cells. When insulin is low, the body pulls energy out of fat to use. When insulin is high, the excess sugar is shunted into fat, otherwise known as adipose tissue. You can look up insulin's job in any human biology textbook.

And that's how you gain weight. By eating too many carbohydrates, you add excess sugar to the blood and that must be stored somewhere or it will damage your body's metabolism. The worst carbohydrates are the simple ones like sugar, wheat flour (even whole wheat flour) and fructose, the sugar particularly found in fruit. Other carbohydrates like rice and tubers aren't far behind because they enter the blood stream only slightly slower than the previous three simple carbohydrates. (A big debate is currently raging over rice and tubers…some people seem not to be as sensitive to them but many, many people are.)

Over time, if you continue to eat too many carbohydrates, the insulin stops working as well as it used to. The insulin receptors get burned out from overuse and you develop insulin resistance. Increasingly more insulin is required to move the sugar out of the blood and into fat cells. The next step, if this continues without a dramatic change in diet, is something called metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome includes insulin resistance and, depending on whose definition you are using, it also includes obesity, high triglycerides, high blood pressure and more.

When a person suffers from metabolic syndrome, he or she really has damaged their metabolic systems. The good news is that, for many people, this is completely reversible without drugs like statins. They simply have to change their diet to exclude carbohydrates that aren't colorful vegetables and some types of nuts.

Now, isn't it interesting that I haven't mentioned dietary fat at all? In fact, the mistake the medical community made forty years ago was telling people that fat made them fat and leads to heart disease. It doesn't…carbohydrates make a person fat and this was known to our grandparents, who would tell you to stop eating potatoes and bread if you wanted to lose weight.

I'll explore more of this in the future but for now, watch a video of one of the many clinical trials that show that the best way to lose weight and improve every marker for heart disease is to eat a diet low in carbohydrates that completely excludes sugar, wheat flour and other starches. The study was conducted by the Stanford School of Medicine and included 311 women. It compared low-fat diets with low-carbohydrate diets.

Battle of the Diets: Is Anyone Winning a Losing?

Are there some wrinkles to this general advice? Yes, there are. Early in my research of this topic it became clear that almost any diet will produce some weight loss…at least for a little while. But after a great deal of study, and understanding the biochemistry involved, it's become increasingly clear that, for most people, carbohydrates cause people to gain weight.

Gary Taubes does an excellent job describing how we got to this place (demonizing fat and exalting carbohydrates) and how to reverse course:

• Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It, Gary Taubes

Big Picture

Deepwater what? | Transition Voice, April 20, 2012

"The Deepwater Horizon was all about peak oil. And climate change. And economic collapse. How soon we forget."

The Future Is Unknown, But We Know the Unsustainable Will Implode | Of Two Minds, April 21, 2012

The Wisdom of Deathbed Conversion | Contraposition, April 21, 2012

53 Percent Of All Young College Graduates In America Are Either Unemployed Or Underemployed | The Economic Collapse, April 22, 2012

Financial

Charts: It's Starting To Look Like This Notorious Book On The End Of Growth Was Right | Business Insider, April 12, 2012

Layoffs, freezes, retirements for U.S. public sector | Yahoo! Finance, April 18, 2012

Harvey Organ: Get Physical Gold & Silver! | Chris Martenson, April 20, 2012

Spain Is Struggling With Its Debt, and You Should Be Worried | Daily Finance, April 23, 2012

Practical Preparation

April Skill of the Month: Make Your Own Cheese | The Survival Mom, April 20, 2012

How to Store batteries | Preparedness Advice Blog, April 20, 2012

Instant Survival Tip: Use the Rule of 3 to ID Your Disaster | The Survival Mom, April 20, 2012

Solar Oven Cooking | Preparedness Advice Blog, April 22, 2012

The Art of Prepping | Preparedness Advice Blog, April 23, 2012

Environmental News

Climate change making conservation more costly | Environmental News Network, April 18, 2012

GMO and the Devastation of Bee Colonies: Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto Buys Leading Bee Research Firm | Global Research, April 21, 2012

Discovery Channel Refuses to Address Causes of Polar Warming | AllGov, April 22, 2012

Health

Protein Toxicity | The Paleo Diet, March 23, 2012

5 Common Nutrient Deficiencies (and What to Do About Them) | Mark's Daily Apple, April 19, 2012

The “Additive Effect”: Artificial Is Not Intelligent | Robb Wolf, April 20, 2012

Battling Rheumatoid Arthritis With A Paleo Diet | Robb Wolf, April 23, 2012

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