9
The Basic Food Groups
OR MUCH OF WHAT YOU’VE BEEN TAUGHT ABOUT DIET
IS PROBABLY WRONG
The advent of our agricultural society is comparatively recent in evolutionary
terms—that is, it began only about 10,000 years ago. For the millions
of years that preceded the constant availability of grain and the more
recent year-round availability of a variety of fruits and vegetables,
our ancestors were hunters and ate what was available to them in the
immediate environment, primarily meat, fish, some fowl, reptiles, and
insects—food that was present year-round, and predominantly protein
and fat. In warm weather, some may have eaten fruits, nuts, and berries
that were available locally in some regions and not deliberately bred
for sweetness (agriculture didn’t exist). If they stored away fat during
warm periods, much of that fat was burned up during the winter. Although
for the past two centuries, fruit, grain, and vegetables have, in one
form or another, been available to us in this country year-round, our
collective food supply has historically been interrupted often by famine—in
some cultures more than others. The history of the planet as best as
we can determine is one of feast (rarely) and famine, and suggests that
famine will strike again and again as it has in the last few decades
in a variety of places.
Curiously, what today seems in our society to be a genetic predisposition
toward obesity functioned during the famines of prehistory as an effective
method of survival. Ironically, the ancestors of those who today are
most at risk for type 2 diabetes were, during prehistory, not the sick
and dying, but the survivors. If famine struck today in the United States,
guess who would survive most easily? The same people who are most at
risk for type 2 diabetes. For those living in a harsh environment where
the availability of food is uncertain, bodies that store fat most efficiently
when food is available (for example, by being insulin-resistant and
craving carbohydrate, like most type 2 diabetics) survive to reproduce.
If you give it some thought, it makes perfect sense: If a farmer wants
to fatten up his pigs or cows, he doesn’t feed them meat or butter and
eggs, he feeds them grain. If you want to fatten yourself up, just start
loading up on bread, pasta, potatoes, cake, and cookies—all highcarbohydrate
foods. If you want to hasten the fattening process, consume dietary
fat with your carbohydrate. Indeed, two recent studies showed that dietary
fat, when consumed as part of a high-carbohydrate diet, was converted
to body fat. Fat consumed as part of a low-carbohydrate
diet was metabolized, or burned off.
The Insulin/Fat Connection
The primary source of body fat for most Americans is not dietary fat
but carbohydrate, which is converted to blood sugar and then, with the
aid of insulin, to fat by fat cells. Remember, insulin is our main fatbuilding
hormone. Eat a plate of pasta. Your blood sugar will rise and your insulin
level (if you have type 2 diabetes or are not diabetic) will also rise
in order to cover, or prevent, the jump in blood sugar. All the blood
sugar that is not burned as energy or stored as glycogen is turned into
fat. So you could, in theory, acquire more body fat from eating a high-carbohydrate
“fat-free” dessert than you would from eating a tender steak nicely
marbled with fat. Even the fat in the steak is more likely to be stored
if it is accompanied by bread, potatoes, corn, and so on.
The fatty-acid building blocks of fats can be metabolized (burned),
stored, or converted by your body into other compounds, depending on
what it requires. Consequently, fat is always in flux in the body, being
stored, appearing in the blood, and being converted to energy. The amount
of triglycerides (the storage form of fat) in your bloodstream at any
given time will be determined by your heredity, your level of exercise,
your blood sugar levels, your diet, your ratio of visceral (abdominal)
fat to lean body mass (muscle), and especially by your recent consumption
of carbohydrate. The slim and fit tend to be very sensitive (i.e., responsive)
to insulin and have low serum levels not only of triglycerides but insulin
as well. But even their triglyceride levels will increase after a high-carbohydrate
meal, as excess blood sugar is converted to fat. The higher the ratio
of abdominal fat (and, to a lesser degree, total body fat) to lean body
mass, the less sensitive to insulin you’ll tend to be. In the obese,
triglycerides tend to be present at high levels in the bloodstream all
the time. (This is sometimes exaggerated during weight loss because
fat is appearing in the bloodstream as it comes out of storage to be
converted into energy.) Not only are high triglyceride levels a direct
cause of insulin resistance, but they also contribute to fatty deposits
on the walls of your blood vessels (atherosclerosis). Research demonstrates
that if high concentrations of triglycerides are injected into the blood
supply of the liver of a wellconditioned athlete, someone very sensitive
to insulin, she will become temporarily insulin-resistant. (The most
important thing to note here is that insulin resistance, as well as
other risk factors for diabetic complications, can be reversed by eating
less carbohydrate, normalizing blood sugars, and slimming down, which
we’ll discuss in greater detail later on.)
If you become overweight, you’ll produce more insulin, become insulin-resistant
(which will require you to produce yet more insulin), and become even
more overweight because you’ll create more fat and store more fat. You’ll
enter the vicious circle depicted in Figure 1-1. Consider that steak
I mentioned earlier. As you know, the body can convert protein to blood
sugar, but it does so at a very slow rate, and inefficiently. Serum
insulin levels derived from the phase II insulin response or even from
insulin injected before a meal may thus be sufficient to prevent a blood
sugar rise from protein consumption by itself. Dietary fat cannot be
converted to blood sugar, and therefore it doesn’t cause serum insulin
levels or requirements for injected insulin to increase. Say you eat
an 8-ounce steak with no carbohydrate side dish—this won’t require much
insulin to keep your blood sugar steady, and the lower insulin level
will cause only a small amount of the fat to be stored.
Now consider what would happen if you instead ate a “fat-free” dessert
with exactly the same number of calories as that steak. Your insulin
level will jump dramatically in order to cover the sugar and starches
in the dessert. Remember, insulin is the fat-building and fatstorage
hormone. Since it’s dessert, you probably won’t be going out to run
a marathon after eating, so the largest portion of your newly created
blood sugar won’t get burned. Instead much of it will be turned
into fat and stored.
Interestingly enough, eating fat with carbohydrate can actually slow
the digestion of carbohydrate, so the jump in your blood sugar level
might thereby be slowed. This would probably be relatively effective
if you’re talking about eating a green salad with vinegar-and-oil dressing.
But if you’re eating a regular dessert, or a baked potato with your
steak, the slowdown in digestion would not prevent blood sugar elevation
in a diabetic.
Despite what the popular media would have us believe, fat is not evil.
In fact, many researchers are becoming quite concerned about the dangerous
potential of “fat substitutes.” Fat is absolutely necessary for survival.
Much of the brain is constructed from fatty acids. Without essential
fatty acids—which, like essential amino acids, cannot be manufactured
by the body and must be eaten—you would die. Fat substitutes such as
the recently FDA-approved olestra (sold under the
brand name of Olean and present in such products as Frito-Lay WOW! potato
chips) bring about the specter of people trying to subsist on a no-fat
diet, a diet that could kill them. (Olestra actually robs the body of
important fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids. The FDA has
required that it contain additives of those vitamins. In test markets,
some consumers have been made quite ill by the product, while others
don’t see any effect. I don’t recommend it—it’s at best
completely unnecessary.)
Diabetics are affected disproportionately by diseases such as atherosclerosis.
This has led to the long-standing myth that diabetics have abnormal
lipid profiles because they eat more fat than nondiabetics.* It was
likewise once thought that dietary fat caused all the long-term complications
of diabetes. For many years, this was taken as gospel by most in the
medical community. In truth, however, the high lipid profiles in many
diabetics with uncontrolled blood sugar have nothing to
do with the fat they consume. Most diabetics consume very little fat—
they’ve been conditioned to fear it. High lipid profiles are a symptom
not of excess dietary fat, but of high blood sugars. Indeed, even in
most nondiabetics, the consumption of fat has little if anything to
do with their lipid profiles.
* A lipid profile is the measurement of cholesterol, HDL (good cholesterol),
LDL (bad cholesterol), and triglyceride levels in the blood. Some physicians
now consider lipoprotein(a) to be an essential component of the lipid
profile. (See Chapter 2.)
On the other hand, high consumption of carbohydrate, as we will discuss
shortly, can cause “nondiabetics” to develop some of the complications
usually associated with diabetes.
When I was on a very low fat, high-carbohydrate diet more than thirty
years ago, I had high fasting triglycerides (usually over 250 mg/ dl)
and high serum cholesterol (usually over 300 mg/dl), and I developed
a number of vascular complications. When I went onto a very low carbohydrate
diet and did not restrict my fat, my lipids plummeted. Now, at sixty-eight,
I have the lipid profile of an Olympic athlete, apparently from eating
a low-carbohydrate diet in order to normalize my blood sugars. That
I exercise regularly probably doesn’t hurt my lipid profile, either—but
I was also exercising when my lipid profile was abnormal.
Dare your physician. Ask him or her if his or her lipid profile on
a low-fat diet can remotely compare to mine, on a high-fat, lowcarbohydrate
diet:
• LDL—the “bad” cholesterol—63 (below 130 is considered normal)
• HDL—the “good” cholesterol—116 (above 30 is considered normal)
• Triglycerides—45 (below 150 is considered normal)
• Lipoprotein(a)—undetectable (below 30 is considered normal)
Contrary to popular myth, fat is not a demon. It’s the body’s way of
storing energy and maintaining essential organs such as the brain. Without
essential fatty acids, your body would cease to function.
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