This is going to be the first in a series of ongoing posts about diet, nutrition, exercise and the conventional wisdom about these things.  First, let’s take a little gander at conventional wisdom and then have a little rebuttal and some anecdotes.  I won’t put this all in one post, I’ll spread it out.  Also, don’t take my word for it.  Read this really fantastic book by Gary Taubes called Good Calories, Bad Calories.  You may be really made and find yourself quoting Homer Simpson (”DOH!”) but you’ll also want to write Mr. Taubes a huge thank you note.  He’s no light weight writer, either.  Be prepared to go down some metabolic pathways.   What does this have to do with herbs?  Well, nothing really but being that I’m a justice kinda woman, this story just bears telling!

We’re told, if we want to lose weight we should cut our calories and exercise more.  That shouldn’t be too hard, right?  It’s very hard as it turns out.  Once a person goes on a calorie-restricted diet, called a “semi-starvation” diet in clinical articles, that person starts to experience starvation symptoms:  fatigue, low energy, fascination with food, fantasies about food, wanting to overeat and binge.  Most people who go on this kind of diet do lose some weight at first  but then “plateau” as their metabolism slows.  Once a person’s basal metabolism goes down, so does his or her energy.  Exercising doesn’t help because it drives hunger in the end.  Exercising might squash the hunger while a person’s exercising but then she’ll be even hungrier later.   And then, depending upon what’s eaten, her body may really get busy storing away some fat.  Yup, the muscles will get their glycogen back, but everything else will be stored as fat.  Did you know that every study on this method shows that it works less than 10% of the time?  Most people really do gain their weight back plus some.  And it doesn’t matter what age or sex you are.   To keep the weight off you’d have to stay on caloric restriction, and possibly keep reducing, forever.  Those psychological symptoms of starvation don’t go away, either.  I’ve tried this.  I’m sure you have, too, or known someone who did (probably someone very close to you).  Did it really work for them?  Were they happy while doing it?  I’m guessing that the answers to both are either “No” or “For a while” and then they gained their weight back.

Well, I’m on a low-fat diet, you say.  Um, that’s not too hot, either.  Most people on a low-fat diet feel very unsatisfied.  Plus, what do you replace the fat with?  Usually carbohydrates.  I also fee l that this diet can also be called the “calorie-restricted, low nutrient” diet because many people do replace fats with carbs.  And the nutrient-low carbs, too - breads, pastas, grains.  You know, I’m an herbalist, we’re all kind of weird anyway but my take on grains and starches in general is there is just not much nutrition there.  There’s not and none of it isn’t something you can get somewhere else.  Fats, on the other hand, do have some nutrients you can’t get anywhere else - the fat-soluble nutrients:  vitamins E, D, K and A.  Have scaly skin and you’re on a low-fat diet?  Does your hair feel yucky?  Have  a lot of fatigue?  Catch a lot of colds?  You may be low in some of those fat-soluble vitamins.  If you have extreme fatigue and have been a vegetarian for a long time or haven’t eaten red meat in a long time, get your vitamin B-12 levels checked.  If you don’t go out in the sun much and when you do, you wear sunscreen, get your vitamin D levels checked.  Most adults in the US have seriously low vitamin D levels.  If you’re eating low fat, you’re going to be low in these nutrients.  You need fat to fully absorb the minerals in your diet, too.  According to the Nurses Study saturated fat consumption has no correlation to breast cancer, either.  Polyunsaturated fats…well, that’s anther story.  Corn oil specifically may be implicated in tumor growth and accelerated tumor growth.  Read the above mentioned book to get a fuller scoop. 

So, when you carbohydrates your body will be pumping out insulin to deal with those carbohydrates.  What does insulin do?  In a nutshell, tells your body to sock away fat RIGHT NOW and stop burning fat (ideally, in between meals and overnight the body should be burning fat  stores).   When you eat all that pasta and you feel nice and lazy, that’ s the insulin.  It’s really hard to do anything after a meal like that, isn’t it?  Your body is so busy taking all that glycogen from the past and making it into fat (yes, fat!) that it doesn’t have a lot of energy to do much else.  And if you eat alot of sugar, it’s like the “perfect storm’ of fat accumulation!  The fructose in the sugar (or HFCS or fruit-sweetened jam or maple syrup) goes straight to your liver where it’s processed just like alcohol resulting in triglycerides (for fat storage) and hormones that tell your body to make more fat.   The glucose in the sugar (remember, sucrose = glucose + fructose) gets absorbed by the small intestine, goes into the bloodstream and causes causes a huge insulin rush.  As soon as you eat anything sweet (and I mean anything, regardless of what causes it to be sweet) it starts an insulin cascade.  The second the sweet molecule hits your tongue.  That little piece of information stopped me from having “just a little bit” or even just licking honey off my fingers! 

Well, this isn’t all that bad, right?  The problem comes in when your insulin level is chronically high.  Remember when we were all told that mini-meals were good and that eating 3 -6 meals a day was ideal because it kept your blood sugar “stable”?   What that really does is keep your insulin levels high (remember eating carbs = insulin response).  Chronically high insulin (hyperinsulemia) levels creates insulin resistence in someof the cells in your body, notably your muscles, while other cells are still sensitive to insulin - your  fat cells and epithelial cells.  Epithelial cells, by the way, never become insulin resistant.  These cells line your veins and arteries.   So, essentially your muscles starve (= no energy), your fat cells get big  and your epithelial cells have way too much energy.  Net result:  you’re fat, you’re never fell satiety (you’re never really full) and you have no energy.  Well, for some of us, or maybe most of us.  Some people just don’t respond that way and are fine.  Herbalist Paul Bergner supposes 1/3 of our population is very sensitive to carbohydrates, they become obese; 1/3 of people aren’t quite as sensitive and they end up overweight; the remaining 1/3 then say “why don’t you fat people just eat less and exercise?!”  The result being most of us end up overweight, myself included.

So, now you are thinking “Well, I didn’t learn any of this in school.  You’re full of it, Deb!” .  Of course you didn’t learn it in school because many of these pathways were not known when you went to school, especially if you’re in your forties like me.  And our society is heavily, heavily invested in time, energy and money in the “fat is bad’  and “overweight = eating too much + no exercise” hypotheses.  This would be a complete turnaround of all dietary advice given for the last, what, 25, 30 years?   Well, I don’t know what you thinks, but the low-fat/high carb thing just wasn’t working for me.  In fact, it was probably making me sick.  Just like it made my mother sick.  She was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in her forties.   Next up, my crappy struggle with being overweight and how I’m fixing that.

If you want to see a detailed version of sugar metabolism and how it works in the liver check out University of California’s Medicine for the Lay Person Series Lecture “Sugar, the Bitter Truth”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

References for this article:

Taubes, Gary. 2007.   Good Calories, Bad Calories:  Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease.   Borzoi Books, New York.

Lustig,  Robert H.  2009.  Video Lecture.  “Sugar, The Bitter Truth”

Lecture Notes from Paul Bergner’s lecture at the 2009 International Herb Symposium.  Insulin Resistance:  Pathophysiology.