BESITY AND OVEREATING: CHICKEN AND EGG, PART II By Peter Mangiola Rn Msn

OBESITY AND OVEREATING: CHICKEN AND EGG, PART II

OCTOBER 24, 2014 LEAVE A COMMENT

In the first part, we talked about how the idea that people are fat because they overeat is exactly backwards — the fact is that people overeat because they are fat. Now we’ll take a look at the leading concept of how we get fat in the first place.

What Isn’t True

The obvious idea — that eating fat puts fat on your body — is simply wrong. There are dozens of studies that prove that dietary fat (fat into your mouth) is processed by your body and used for a wide variety of chemical purposes that range from building up cell walls to processing certain vitamins to being burned for energy. But what fat doesn’t do is cause your body to excrete insulin. Remember from Part I what insulin does? Right — it tells your body to create fat. So if eating fat doesn’t tell your body to create fat, what does?

Sugar.

Insulin, Resistance, and Fat Development

When you eat sugar, it is rapidly assimilated and added to your bloodstream. But excess sugar in your blood can damage your tissues and organs; that’s what makes diabetes a dangerous disease. So in a healthy body, the body executes the “get rid of the excess sugar” protocol: it releases insulin, which causes a series of reaction that packs that sugar up and stores it — in your fat cells.

Now, in a healthy person, those fats are released when needed, and the hunger hormones we mentioned in Part I aren’t produced until the fat stores have worn down to the body’s base level. But in a huge number of people, for reasons that science is still arguing over, there’s a glitch. Either the hunger hormones are produced before they’re needed, or the hormones that tell the body to access the fat in the first place aren’t functioning properly.

Whichever it is — and we don’t honestly know — the result is the same: your body packs on fat every time you load up on sugars (or, more accurately, carbohydrates, including rice, bread, pasta, and basically everything that American food uses as a vehicle to get the important part into your mouth.) And while that fat keeps getting added, it never comes back off like it does in a healthy body.

So you don’t get fat by eating fat. You get fat by eating sugar — which happens to be the single cheapest and the single most addictive kind of ‘food’ in the world. And once your fat, your hunger hormones cause you to overeat. Is it any wonder, given how cheap and addictive sugar is, that we have an obesity epidemic in the United States?

OBESITY AND OVEREATING: CHICKEN AND EGG, PART I by paeter mangiola rn msn

OBESITY AND OVEREATING: CHICKEN AND EGG, PART I

OCTOBER 24, 2014 LEAVE A COMMENT

Listen to people who aren’t certified nutritionists — like personal trainers, white-collar workers, and government officials — and you’ll hear a very simple and often-repeated refrain about obesity. It goes like this “Calories in minus calories out equals fat gained.”

Everyone in the world would really like obesity to be that simple: eat less, burn more calories, and you’ll lose weight. Unfortunately, a huge number of people in the world can tell you from experience that it doesn’t always — or even often — work that way. The truth is far more complex.

If you’re not sure how much more complex, think about this one thing: water has zero calories. If you drink a quart of water, you just gained two pounds. If pounds are purely a matter of calories in and out, gaining two pounds without consuming any calories wouldn’t make any sense at all.

But of course that’s just the simplest possible example. The deeper truth is that the shape of your body and the disposition of your fat is determined by hormones. Insulin in particular is actually 100% necessary for your body to create fat; your body simply won’t make fat without insulin in your bloodstream.

Now, hormones are also responsible for controlling our eating behavior. That’s right — you don’t overeat because you’re a gluttonous pig; you overeat because your insulin, leptin, and ghrelin levels aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Are you ready for thereal painful reveal? Those ‘hunger hormones’ are created by fat cells.

So what laypeople tell you is that you’re fat because you overeat, but what nutritionists know — and have known for decades — is thatyou overeat because you are fat.

That, of course, leaves us with the burning question: what makes us get fat in the first place? The controversy over the answer to that question is why we have so many diets in the world and so few of them work. We’ll talk about it in Part II.