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Obesity: Carbs, Not Fats Cause Weight Gain
Introduction
There are many conditions in Western industrialised societies today that were unheard of, or at least very rare, just a century ago. The same conditions are still unheard of in primitive peoples who do not have the 'benefits' of our knowledge. There is a very good reason for this: They eat what Nature intended; we don't. The diseases caused by our incorrect and unnatural diets are those featured on these pages.
Dietary causes of obesity:
'Healthy', low-fat, carbohydrate based dietObesity: A 'healthy' diet increases body weight
Carbs appear to be the only foods that increase body weight. I know this is heresy to the 'healthy eating' dictocrats, but it is demonstrably true. This is how it works:
Carbohydrates — it doesn't matter whether these are in sugar, jam, bread, pasta, breakfast cereals, fruit or vegetables — are all exactly the same as far as your body is concerned: they are all ultimately converted to the blood sugar, glucose.
All carbs are digested very quickly — within a few minutes. This means that within a very short time after a carb-rich 'healthy' meal the level of glucose in your bloodstream will rise rapidly as is demonstrated in the graph at Figure 1. (Note that this shows very clearly that eating fat does not raise blood glucose.
Figure 1: Blood glucose after 100g of glucose or 40g of fat.[1]
High blood glucose levels are dangerous and, as levels of glucose rise rapidly in the bloodstream, your pancreas rapidly produces a large amount of insulin to take the excess glucose out as is demonstrated in Figure 2. Note that just as eating fat does not raise blood glucose, it doesn't raise insulin levels either. This is an important point as insulin is the hormone ultimately responsible for body fat storage. And as fats do not elicit an insulin response, they cannot stored as body fat. Those who tell you that eating fat makes you fat, just don't understand how the body works
Figure 2: Blood insulin levels after oral glucose or fat test.[1]
Insulin takes the glucose out of the bloodstream. It is converted first into a form of starch called glycogen which is stored in the liver and in muscles. But as the body can store only a limited amount of glycogen in this way, all other excess glucose is stored as body fat.
This is the process of putting on weight.
And there is a further aspect to be considered: There is an inevitable time delay between cause and effect. As you can see in the two graphs, when your blood glucose level is back down to normal, after about 90 minutes, the insulin level in your bloodstream is still near its maximum and continually stacking glucose away in your fat cells. As a result, the levels of glucose in your blood fall below normal, and you soon feel hungry again (it's called 'the Chinese meal syndrome', where an hour or so after a Chinese meal you feel like another one). So you have a snack, usually of more carbohydrates – bread sandwiches, biscuits or sweets – and start the whole process over again. You're getting fatter but feeling hungry at the same time.
The next problem is that insulin resistance caused by the continual high insulin levels in your bloodstream impairs its ability to satisfy a satiety centre in the brain. This contributes even more to overeating, obesity, and diabetes.[2]
This is the first crucial problem with the 'healthy eating' dogma. Eating the 'healthy' way, you can eat far more calories than your body needs as energy for the day, yet still feel hungry – and eat more. You enter a vicious cycle of continuous weight gain combined with hunger. Under such circumstances it is almost impossible not to overeat. Obesity is almost inevitable.[3]
Not surprisingly, a high insulin response to glucose has been shown to be a risk factor for long-term weight gain, and this effect is particularly so in people who are insulin-resistant.[4]
Healthy eating prevents weight loss
So far we have covered only half of the obesity problem. You've put the weight on, now you need to get it off again. Here again, 'healthy eating' hampers your attempts because eating a carbohydrate-based diet also stops you from losing that excess weight.
If you are overweight, what is it that you actually want to lose? That's not as silly a question you might think. You don't want to lose weight – you can do that by having a leg amputated; what you really want to lose is fat. Right?
The point is that, to lose fat, your body must use that fat as a fuel; there is no other way. And the only way your body will use its stored fat as a fuel is if you force it to. That means depriving it of its present supply of fuel – the blood sugar, glucose – so that it has no choice in the matter.
There are two ways to cut your body's glucose supply:
- you either starve — which is what low-calorie, low-fat dieting is, or
- you reduce the starches and sugars from which glucose is made and make it up with a source of a different fuel — fat.
This latter approach has two advantages over the traditional calorie-controlled approach: it means that you no longer have to go hungry and, by feeding your body on fats, it will stop trying to find glucose and change over naturally to using its own stored fat. This is by far the easiest way because:
'In the presence of dietary carbohydrate, the preferred fuel is glucose and the capacity to mobilize fat is limited. Factors that increase blood glucose during dieting may stimulate insulin release and all the metabolic sequelae of circulating insulin. Fatty acid synthesis is activated and lipolysis is profoundly inhibited by insulin even at very low concentrations of the hormone.'[5]
What this means is that, if you continue to eat a carbohydrate-based, low-fat 'healthy' diet, you force your body into a fat-making (fatty acid synthesis) mode, not a fat-using (lipolysis) mode. Insulin inhibits the production of hormone sensitive lipase, a fat-burning enzyme, thereby preventing your body's fat cells releasing their fat.[6] This effectively stops your body from burning your stored fat and makes it well nigh impossible for you to lose the weight you have put on.
References
1. Robertson MD, Henderson RA, Vist GE, Rumsey RDE. Extended effects of evening meal carbohydrate-to-fat ratio on fasting and postprandial substrate metabolism. Am J Clin Nutr 2002; 75: 505-510.
2. Bruning JC, Gautam D, Burks DJ, et al. Role of brain insulin receptor in control of body weight and reproduction. Science 2000; 289: 2122-5.
3. Odeleye OE, de Courten M, Pettitt DJ, Ravussin E. Fasting hyperinsulinemia is a predictor of increased body weight gain and obesity in Pima Indian children. Diabetes 1997; 46: 1341-5.
4. Sigal RJ, El-Hashimy M, Martin BC, et al. Acute postchallenge hyperinsulinemia predicts weight gain: a prospective study. Diabetes 1997; 46:1025-9.
5. Kreitzman SN. Factors influencing body composition during very-low-calorie diets. Am J Clin Nutr 1992; 56: 217S-223S
6. Meijssen S, Cabezas MC, Ballieux CG, et al. Insulin mediated inhibition of hormone sensitive lipase activity in vivo in relation to endogenous catecholamines in healthy subjects. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 2001; 86: 4193-7.
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