10 Feb Metabolism Myths & Truths
Over the past 30 years, people have been following the guidelines of various “experts” to reduce protein, fat and carbohydrate increase, which are supposed to be a good source of energy, all they did instead of losing weight was to become overweight and worse their health. Over the past 25 years, the percentage of obese people has increased by 250%.
This alone is enough to understand that something is wrong.
Metabolism is the set of biochemical reactions that occur in the cells of living organisms. The process of disrupting substances is called Catabolism, while the one concerning compositions of new substances is called Anabolism.
These structural and complex biochemical reactions ultimately determine the energy at a cellular level as well as the state of web and organ functions.
The myth of carbohydrates being a good source of energy
According to the Nutrition Pyramid of US Department of Agriculture , published in 1992, we need to consume six or more portions of cereal (bread, cereals, pasta, rice) daily.
However, the Nutritional Pyramid is nothing more than a US effort, to promote their agricultural products worldwide. Its only utility is just for the case when you want to keep your glycogen levels high so you do not burn fat. Glucagon is called the carbohydrate stored in the muscles and the liver. We can compare it with a storehouse of sugar (glucose), where sugar is the form of carbohydrates your body uses as a fuel.
While fat storage is expanding, that’s why we are gaining weight, the glycogen storage has limited capacity for sugar. So, a full glycogen storage gives the body the signal to use incoming carbohydrates (rather than fat) and convert carbohydrates to fat instead of using stored fat.
This causes the body not only to stop burning fat, but also to maintain it, since by applying the Nutritional Pyramid you offer some fat and many carbohydrates. In short, typical diets keep glycogen storage in high levels and prevent the body from using stored fat as fuel.
This misconception about the value of carbohydrates as a good source of energy stems from the 1960s. Then, the importance of glycogen as a fuel for top-level athletes during prolonged exercise, such as long-distance running, was first observed.
Scientists have determined that high glycogen levels were associated with better endurance in performance than low glycogen levels. Therefore, the sports elite was encouraged to eat a lot of carbohydrates after workout to make up for glycogen. The whole idea was intended for optimal performance.
While it is true that glycogen is a major source of fuel for top sporting performance, more and more research findings question the theory that glycogen is just a storage form of carbohydrates. This is because the degree of filling of the glycogen storage has a direct impact on your ability to burn fat and on the health condition of your metabolism.
Fortunately, in 2005, Harvard University revised what was called healthy diet by putting it on the basis of gymnastics, weight reduction, and adequate water intake.
The grains, mainly whole grains, were limited to 1/3 of the quantity required by the Nutritional Pyramid and the value of good fat from sources such as olive oil, walnuts and fermented foods were highlighted. In 2011, two new dietary models of “Healthy Diet Plate” and “Nutritional Plate” replaced the Nutritional Pyramid and highlighted the value of vitamins, especially Vitamin D, in a balanced diet.
The myth of “good” foods with low fat
The recommendations of various scientific institutions, such as the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Society, have helped to preserve one more myth: the fat that is bad for our health.
While the guidelines clearly state that eating particularly saturated fats increases the risk of heart disease, people start to fear fat. Thus, new categories of food without, with low or reduced fat, appeared on the supermarket shelves.
What, in fact, does scientific research show?
At present, we are limited to just a few preliminary points, because shortly afterwards we will be releasing detailed investigations and then be prepared for one surprise coming after the other.
This is because the link between fatty acids, even saturated fats and cardiovascular diseases has never been proven. In fact, great studies show that replacing carbohydrates with fat – any natural fat, including saturated – actually reduces the risk of myocardial infarction and stroke.
The consequence of this is that even the highly conservative American Cardiology Society, no longer puts a limit on total daily intake of fat, but only on the intake of saturated fat, even if this is not based anywhere, anyway.
At the same time, a study by Johns Hopkins University concluded that high blood sugar is an independent risk factor for heart disease. That is, foods with a high glycemic index (which quickly gives sufficient quantities of sugar in the blood after eating) – such as sugar and cereal flour – is by nature unhealthy when consumed.
However, we continue to accept advertisements for the untapped benefits of low fat foods, with adverse effects on our health.
Proper nutrition is the hormonal “smart” nutrition.
But because health and normal body weight are of fundamental importance, achieving the right nutrition can only be done through the Hormonal “Smart” Nutrition.
Obesity is basically a pre-diabetic condition. For each patient with diabetes, there are other four pre-diabetic patients, usually obese. But even if someone is neither obese nor pre-diabetic, s/he gains many quality years of life by eating hormonally intelligently. That is because what we eat shapes our hormonal environment for the next 5-6 hours and how and how much we are going to live.
Accumulation of body fat is a purely hormonal hypothesis, which inevitably requires an extremely important hormonal power, insulin. Without insulin, no fat is produced in the body and no nutritional fat enters our cells. When too much insulin circulates in the blood (hyperinsulinemia), we accumulate body fat even if we limit calories or fat. Also, insulin will produce fat inside us from glucose, even if we do not eat fat.
What causes the secretion of a large amount of insulin?
The bad calories, that is, foods that provide fast and large amounts of sugar (glucose) in our blood, the glucose – insulin twin that regulates our health and hormonal balance as a whole, and the careful and unbiased study of history and research findings shows that a person does not get fat becauses s/he eats a lot of calories or fat or because s/he does not work out, as conventional dietetics mistakenly assumes, but because s/he is eats many bad calories, that is, hormonally wrong.
The human body is not just a calorie burner. It is a hormone-complex machine that other nutrients will use as building materials to build and maintain valuable structures (bones, muscles, organs, vessels, skin) and others will use them as biological communication agents (signal receptors and signal transducers ).
Also, some of the nutrients will be burned out completely to produce energy, but will be burned in parts, while eventually, from the amount of energy produced by burning, a different amount of energy will be wasted as heat .
Consequently, conventional dietetics have failed miserably because in their course so far, the hormonal complexity of the human organism and the greatest biological force on Earth, that is our hormones, are ignored.
