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Home » Lose Weight Safely » GROWING OLD UNGRACEFULLY: Last Food Rant of the Year – Lost Coast Outpost

Realfood is low sugar and high fiber. Processed food is high sugar andlow fiber.

RobertLustig

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OK, Illget my food rant out of the way. Then no more for the rest of theyear, promise.

If itdoesnt work, do something different, has always seemed to meabout as obvious a maxim as any. In this season of make-and-breakresolutions, I think I can safely say that diets dont work, andmaybe its time to do something different.

Weretoo fat, right? Not you and me, of course, heaven forbid, but thecollective we. We as in the population of the US, withtwo-thirds of us overweight or obese. Thats according to the BodyMass Index system of assessing us. BMI is pretty crude, of course(using just two measurements, height and weight), but for mostpeople, BMI is related to the amount of fat in their bodies.

How do weknow diets dont work? Because theyre short-term solutions tolong-term problems. About 95% of people who lose weight by dietingwill not only regain it in a year or so, but most will end upweighing more. Our bodies are super-sensitive when they think theyrebeing starved (more people died from starvation than all the wars andepidemics combined), so they respond to diets by slowing ourmetabolism and craving food. Duh.

RobertLustig (quoted above) is an anti-sugar crusader; check out Sugar:The Bitter Truth. He offers a way of doingsomething different thats worthy of consideration, IMHO. Itsall about the hormones leptin and insulin. Leptin acts like athermostat: when it rises, you feel full. When it falls, you want toeat. (Its more complicated, of course were talking about thehuman body! Leptin also regulates metabolism and the rate of fatbreakdown.)

No leptin vs. leptin. The mouse on left is unable to produce leptin, resulting in obesity, constant hunger, and lethargy. (US Government/Bigplankton. Public domain)

Accordingto Lustigs model, most of us develop leptin resistance, whentheres plenty of leptin, but somehow the message isnt gettingthrough to our brains. Why? Blame insulin. Insulin blocks leptin,stopping it doing its job of messaging the brain about whether weneed to eat or not. And compared to 40 years ago, most of us haveinsulin levels two to four times what they were then.

Becausesugar. Sugar, as bloodstream glucose, tells the pancreas to releaseinsulin, the leptin-blocking hormone. Not only that, but high insulinlevels make the body store more food calories as fat. Turns out,were all OK, most of us are ingesting too much of the stuff,nearly 60 lb. a year on average in the US. Thats two or threetimes whats healthy, according to the World Health Organizationsguidelines on sugar.

You dontneed to know all this and Im just scraping the surface here.You (collective you) need to know that fiber is the antidoteto sugar. Yup, you can have your sugar, but only when it comeswith fiber. Fiber is, to a first approximation, the differencebetween processed and unprocessed food, see Lustigs epigraphabove. When we eat fiber that is, fruit and veggies it (1)slows the absorption of sugar in our intestines and (2) causes foodsugar to be processed farther down our intestines where its eatenby our microbiome bacteria.

And thatsthe magic of fiber. According to Lustig, a calorie isnt a calorie,because when you eat food with fiber, you dont absorb thecalories; your gut bacteria do! And they (being smarter than you)dont turn those calories into fat

So forgetthe short-term-solution diet. Itll just make you fatter andmiserable. Instead, eat your fruits and vegetables not exactlyrocket science. A good place to start might be the New York Times7-daysugar challenge.

Eitherthat, or move to Chad, wherethe diet is the healthiest in the world.

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GROWING OLD UNGRACEFULLY: Last Food Rant of the Year - Lost Coast Outpost

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