Obesity is becoming the scourge of modern living. Never has the Western world been so obsessed with diet, nutrition, health and exercise. We go running, cycling, we go to the gym, we are bombarded with healthy eating messages, supermarkets are awash with “low fat” or “fat free” foods. We are told to eat 5 pieces of fruit and vegetable day, how wholegrain is good for the heart, blah, blah, blah. Given all this, why then are people getting fatter? Why is obesity on the rise? Why are the number of people with diabetes increasing? Surely, the opposite should be true given our awareness of the importance of diet and exercise. And what’s most shocking is there is a growing belief that in the most Western societies the “Current Generation of Children has a shorter life expectancy than their parents”.

How is this possible? And more to the point, given the focus of the last 40 years on “healthy” high carb low fat eating, why have so few people not thought that maybe the “healthy” high carb low fat diets we’ve been following aren’t actually that healthy??

So maybe we need to re-evaluate what causes us to become fat.  I share the view of the American science writer Gary Taubes, author of “Why we get fat and what to do about it”. Yes, the quantity of food we consume clearly contributes to our weight – but it’s not just the quantity, it’s the type of food, and the prevailing view that we should be eating lots of carbohydrates is just pushing the majority of us towards obesity. One factor to be considered seriously in this space is the role of hormones on weight regulation and as we’ll see what we eat affects the impact of hormones on weight management.

What determines whether we are tall? It’s not what we eat obviously. It’s growth hormone.  When you look at growth disorders such gigantism or dwarfism, these are growth hormonal disorders.  These are vertical growth disorders if you like – if you start to think of obesity as a horizontal growth disorder, then by understanding which hormones regulate fat accumulation and fat tissue, we can understand the true causes of obesity. And what we find is that the single most important hormone for regulating this is Insulin.

Why do some people eat like horses and never seem to put on weight? We all know people like that don’t we, and let’s face it, it’s annoying! Again, it goes back to some people being better able to regulate fat accumulation than others.  One of the key problems I find with the way people look at diet and nutrition is that they consider the body to be an engine. You put fuel in, the fuel is burnt, energy is created and consumed. This is a very Western view of the body. I think the body is much more subtle and complex than that when it comes to “fuel”. I subscribe to the Eastern, more holistic view of the human body, where it is not an engine, rather it is a system, a collection of interconnected parts where various hormones carry out a very fine balancing act to make sure things function correctly, and when hormones are out of kilter with the way they should be, things start to go wrong. Like with Insulin.

Why is Insulin so important? Well, for starters Insulin stops you dying from glucose poisoning. When we eat carbohydrates, they are converted into glucose in the blood, which is the body’s easiest accessible choice of energy. The unfortunate fact is that too much blood sugar (as it’s more commonly known) is actually toxic and can kill you. That’s why we have the wonderful hormone Insulin which is produced by the pancreas to mop up the excess blood sugar and keep us alive. Insulin then helps turn the excess blood sugar into fat whilst as the same time making the body actually store the fat. So it stands to reason that if you keep your Insulin levels down, you should be able to keep your fat levels down. And therefore if you reduce the amount of carbohydrates you eat, you reduce the amount of Insulin you produce – ta da!

Gary Taubes uses quite a good analogy for this, which I’m simply going to quote verbatim:

“We tend to think of our fat cells as a long-term bank account, where your body stores excess calories as fatty acids, which you don’t use until you’re starving. But the reality is that your fat tissue is more like your wallet, and your meals are like going to the ATM. You know how you use the ATM: You put the cash in your wallet and gradually spend it, and when you get too low, you go back to the ATM. But Insulin locks the money in your wallet, so you’ve got to keep going back to the ATM. Your fat cells are getting fatter and fatter, but you can’t get at the fatty acids that are stored inside them. So you get hungry and you eat again.”

Now not all carbohydrates are bad – the problem is that in our drive towards cheap, convenience food with a long shelf life, we have applied modern processing methods to carbohydrates which have over time stripped many carbohydrates of their good qualities. We have two types of carbs – complex and simple. Complex carbs retain their natural qualities. So fruit, vegetables, pulses for example. These are high in fibre which is important for health and are generally very good for you. The key point here is these are “slow energy release” carbs – yes they cause blood sugar to rise, but in a slow manner so the amount of insulin that is released is correspondingly slow. These are good carbs if you like.

Simple carbs on the other hand are what you have to avoid and cut down as much as possible – these are sometimes called refined carbs or processed carbs. These are carbs that have undergone processing to make them more easily digestible – in effect anything containing white flour (e.g. white bread, pasta, and therefore derived from grain), white rice and sugar. Linked to these are what are called starchy carbs, such as potatoes which have the similar quality of being high in energy and of more concern in this debate is the fast release of energy. So unlike their complex cousins, these carbs cause a quick rush of energy when digested (the so called “sugar rush”), but then in order to bring the immediate spike in the level of glucose in the blood under control, a load of insulin is produced to mop it up. It mops it up very quickly, and that sudden rush of energy is gone, and you have your sugar crash! You know that feeling you get in the afternoon, a couple of hours after your lunch? Yep, that in effect was your carbohydrate come down, accompanied with the subsequent craving for more! What was I saying on my last blog about simple carbohydrates being addictive… Incidentally, this is the reason why when you got out on the beers, you get the munchies. Beer is derived from processed wheat, wheat is a simple carb, you get the picture…

Imagine over a period of years you are continuously getting your pancreas to overproduce insulin to manage these blood sugar spikes. Imagine also that these types of carbs were not around for the 99.5% of our species time on the Earth. And imagine therefore that are bodies are therefore not equipped to deal with this type of food. That is why diabetes type 2, where the body has developed a resistance to Insulin because of years of overproduction, is where so many people are now ending up.

You might be asking “what about brown bread, brown rice, brown pasta?” – well, these are complex carbs because they haven’t undergone a refining process (e.g. bleaching), but they are still very high in carbs so you have to be careful how much you eat. In a subsequent post, I’ll go into specifics of what I did and didn’t eat that helped lose the pounds.

But last thought for today – what do you do with animals you want to fatten up? Apologies in advance to the more squeamish of you, what do you do to geese if you want their livers to get super fatty so you can have foie gras? You feed them lots of grain.