Fork You (Part 3, Tying It Together)

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Fork You (Part 3, Tying It Together)

thedailycoin.org

by Karl Denninger, Market-Ticker So if you’ve read the other two parts found here and here you know that they boil down to one thing when it comes to metabolic processing, in my opinio…

by Karl Denninger, Market-Ticker

So if you’ve read the other two parts found here and here you know that they boil down to one thing when it comes to metabolic processing, in my opinion:

Thou shalt not completely fill thy glycogen reserves.

Everything follows from this, as I see it.

I want to note that I didn’t make this up:  I observed it as a matter of historical fact looking at evolutionary timeframes.

Therefore, I want to take this last component as an expand on that, as well as taking all of the folks in the so-called “medical” and “dietary” establishments out behind the philosophical woodshed and boffing them within an inch of their lives.  After all, their recommendations have only killed millions of Americans over the last decade and many more worldwide.

In short, I am going to put a challenge before them — and you.

We will start with that which we know to be true:

• Homo Sapiens evolved over a very long period of time but our species, and all of the structures in our body, were more-or-less fixed about 100,000 years ago.
• The first evidence of processing grains, that is, crushing wheat seeds to make flour, has a history of approximately 8,000 years; the first evidence of this practice was approximately 6,000 BC.  Until the industrial revolution, however, which is only about 100 years ago, the fact that milled grain had a short shelf life made long-distance transportation and long storage impossible.  Note that at the outside this means that processed grains have only been available to us for less than 10% of our evolutionary life, and modern grains for a tiny fraction of 1%.

Now look at a chart of glycemic index and load.  You will note that with the exception of processed grains, starches and sugars virtually all of the food sources listed on it have a low to moderate glycemic index and more importantly, a low glycemic load.

There are two further characteristics which are mutually exclusive among non-processed foods.  They are either (1) high in fat and/or protein, and thus energy-dense but very low to absent in carbohydrate (meats, fish, nuts, etc), or (2) they are very low in caloric density, high in carbohydrate as a percentage of energy content but very low in glycemic load due to their caloric density.

In category #2 we have virtually all vegetables (excepting a few starchy ones) and fruits.  Fruits are on the higher end of caloric density and glycemic load as natural foods go but they are all seasonal and have short (days) shelf lives absent industrial intervention.  So while apples, for example, have a moderate glycemic response you can only obtain them in nature during the time they’re on a tree, and when removed from said tree they go bad rapidly (are attacked by pests, rot, etc.)

Now let’s look at energy requirements.  Your base metabolic requirement as a sedentary human is probably somewhere around 1,800 calories a day, or 75 calories/hour.  Since when sleeping you consume less we’ll call it 100 calories/hour during your time awake, which is a nice round number.  Remember that your blood only has 16 calories (about a teaspoon) of glucose in it at any given time, so there is always a metabolic process going on that either stores or retrieves energy from various places in your body; 16 calories of energy would only keep you going for about 10 minutes sitting in a chair!

Now you are going to eat.  Glycemic load tells you how fast the energy in a given carbohydrate load you take in is liberated adjusted for portion size by mass, while Glycemic index is a relative rating compared against white bread.  Glycemic load is the more important of the two because it adjusts for carbohydrate content per unit of mass where Glycemic index does not.  There are a few extreme cases where this matters; watermelon is very heavy in sugars (high GI) but since it has low mass it is moderate in GL (you don’t take in much in terms of mass-per-serving.)

If you are going to increase your glycogen stores you thus must digest (not eat) more than 100 calories per hour, assuming you are not active at the time.  (Note that the paradox is that during heavy exercise your digestion partially shuts down to shunt energy to your legs and cardio-pulmonary system, which is why trying to stuff your face during or just before a race can be a very bad idea and lead to a big brown problem!)

In short you must put more energy into your body through the digestive process than it consumes in a given unit of time, or you cannot fill your glycogen reserves.  If your glycogen reserves are empty and you require energy you will burn fat.  If your glycogen reserves are full and you take in additional energy, you will add fat.  Essentially your glycogen reserves serve as a buffering mechanism.

So now the question: Can you fill your glycogen reserves assuming you eat broccoli, brussels sprouts or other similar vegetative foods?

Not realistically.  Note that you would have to consume roughly 3 cups of broccoli in an hour in order to outrun your base metabolic demand, and this assumes that the broccoli is fully digested and the energy released in that one hour.  But it isn’t; it takes quite a bit longer than that.  The same is true for the brussels sprouts and even carrots that are seen as being relatively high-glycemic — they carry 8g/cup of carbohydrate, but to start to fill your glycogen you would have to eat three cups within one hour and all of it must make it into your bloodstream.  Doubtful.

Equally important is the fact that to obtain 1,800 calories from these foods you’d have to consume approximately 34 cups of carrots.  That’s more than two gallons of carrots.  For brussels sprouts, if you’re wondering, it’s almost three gallons (by volume.)

So what’s quite clear is that it’s essentially impossible to give yourself metabolic syndrome by eating vegetables and fruits as they appear in nature, with the proviso that you have to treat fruits as you would if there were no airplanes and over-the-road trucks.  That is, you have to treat them as seasonal varieties.

But what’s also clear is that if you actually tried to subsist this way you’d starve to death unless you were eating almost-literally all the time.  Two to three gallons of vegetables, which is what you’d have to gobble up eating them for your base energy requirement, would leave you doing very little other than eating — well, that and crapping out all the excess fiber.

Ok, so let’s be reasonable here.  Let’s assume we limit our consumption of this part of our diet to that which we reasonably can consume in a given day and actually have time to do other things.  We’ll assume, therefore, that we eat four to five servings a day of foods in this category.

We have now consumed approximately 20-40g of carbohydrate but all of it was digested over the space of two to four hours post-ingestion, and thus the net impact on our glycogen reserves and our insulin level is basically zero.  We have also consumed 200-300 calories out of our budget.

We need, assuming we’re not active, about 1,500 more calories.

Where do we get them?

The only two other choices that are not industrial are proteins and (natural) fats.  But these sources have no, or effectively no, carbohydrate content and thus do not load our glycogen at all.  They also don’t spike insulin.

So you fill out your daily caloric requirement with those two.

Note that irrespective of exactly how you divide things up you’ll never overload your glycogen storage system nor will you produce huge insulin spikes because none of what is naturally occurring that you can eat (not choose to eat!) is capable of producing those spikes or loading.

And, I might add, you’re eating low-carb.

Where does it go wrong and why are so many people fat?

It goes wrong as soon as you start eating anything that we manufactured throughout our short time as “the smartest animal around” for convenience without taking into account the fact that our bodies were not designed to process that sort of food in that way.

Guess what?

The more we’ve made this “possible” the fatter we get as a world because our bodies are not designed to be able to properly process the alleged “food” we are taking in.

Those who wish to argue that eating things such as potatoes, pasta and any form of grain (cereals, breads, crackers, cookies, etc) or any form of oil created from plant materials by gross concentration over what you’d get from simply eating the plant have the burden of proof that said nutritional profile and how it is digested is similar to that of any of the foods that we ate in reasonably-comparable amounts prior to said industrial process.

They can’t meet that burden because none of those foods in fact are digested in such a similar fashion.

Further, if you claim to eat “vegetarian” or “vegan” then by definition you are eating a diet that is obtaining roughly three quarters or more of its caloric intake from engineered foods that do not exist in nature in the form you are consuming them, unless you are eating the aforementioned three gallons a day of broccoli or similar — you’re not, and you know it.

To those who disagree: I challenge you to show me your list of foods you believe meet the above metric in the comment section below.  Do not attempt to include rice; historically speaking if you eat that as a staple, which is a starchy food (and many people have including the Japanese and Chinese) you can do so provided you eat almost-no animal product of any sort nor any refined grain.  As soon as those two foods were added to both population groups metabolic disease exploded upward and is now becoming an epidemic in China where it was formerly almost-entirely absent.  Never mind that working in a rice paddy is very difficult manual labor!

All of the “engineered foods” that are carbohydrate based are, by virtue of their processing, digested at grossly accelerated rates compared against the raw material.  They thus release their energy much faster and most are far more-dense too.  A pound of pasta takes up a lot less volume than a pound of broccoli, and yet it releases its energy much more quickly in your gut.

It’s not that hard folks.  It is, in fact, math, and those who claim that we should eat grains and starches rather than meats are in fact proposing that we eat engineered things that do not and cannot exist in nature and which our body was never designed to process in the form they’re being consumed.

- See more at: http://thedailycoin.org/?p=49280#sthash.JhOsDLIl.ZD99We1V.dpuf