growing up in texas, i thought that the weightgain of people around me was just something that naturally happened. though, i didn’t realize how big us texanswere getting until i saw morgan spurlock’s “supersize me!†and he mentioned how 5of the fattest cities in america were in texas. this was surprising, but i was chubby wheni was younger and then in high school i exercised
why am i never hungry, and slimmed up. i thought what to do to lose weight was obvious,so i unfairly figured people in texas were just lazy. then in 2010 i went to japan, and when i cameback 3 years later i realized people were
significantly bigger compared to when i wasyoung - if there was an obesity epidemic then i was looking at it. at this point, i started to think it couldn’tbe just a matter of not trying hard enough. because that would suggest that we reallyhave an epidemic of is not caring. maybe what actually happened is that the advicewe’d been given for losing weight doesn’t work. this may be hard to believe considering 80%of the usda’s $140 billion budget goes to the food and nutrition service program, buthear me out. in my previous video, i talked about how weightregulation isn’t just calories in calories
out, which is justified mainly by bad physics. as dr. blake donaldson suggests in his 1962book “strong medicine,†: continuous success in any line of endeavor, including weightreduction, demands rigid adherence to biological laws.†it is biology, not physics that will helpus to understand the human body, and that when your body is properly fed, it will notchoose to store fat in excess nor make you hungry all the time. first off let’s say you wanted to make ananimal fat. what would you feed it?
if you want your cows produce steaks withmore fat on them, you feed them corn and grain instead of grass. to make foie gras, they force feed ducks primarilycorn. in this study, they found the best way tofatten up rats was to give them a diet with ample amounts of cookies, cereals, chips,crackers as well as some processed cheese and meats. of course, animals are not the same as humans,so let’s look at a population of humans that intentionally try to get fat. japanese sumo wrestlers pack on as many poundsas they can in order to be able to push their
opponent out of the ring. according to the sugahara institutes’ examinationof sumo wrestler’s diet and lifestyle while in training camp, the wrestlers, as expectedare eating massive amounts of food. some days they are hitting as much as 15,000calories. but what macronutrient do they rely on topack on the pounds? they’re getting more than twice as muchcarbohydrates as they are fat or protein. it may not be surprising that carbohydratesdrive fat accumulation, considering low-carb has been a pretty big thing since 2002, whenthe new york times magazine published a cover story entitled "what if fat doesn't make youfat?"
what may be surprising is that “low carbâ€is not new in the least. for almost 200 years, reducing carbohydratesfor weight loss was a common practice. in 1797 the scottish military surgeon johnrollo successfully treated a diabetes patient with a low carbohydrate diet. jean savarin published a book in 1825 called“the physiology of taste†in which he talks about his patients not being happy thatthey need to reduce tasty things like flour, sugar, bread, and potatoes and cookies inorder to lose weight. in 1844 jean dancel published a book called“obesity, or excessive corpulence: the various causes and rational means of a cure†thatrecommended to avoid carbohydrates and eat
meat in order to “cure†obesity. there are dozens more examples i could listgoing up to the late 1900’s, but let’s jump to 1971. this is when charlotte young released a studyshowing that “with fewer carbohydrates and more fat in the diet, greater weight lossand fat loss would be observed in subjects†so for a while obesity was relatively undercontrol, if people needed to lose weight they knew what to do. that was until around 1977, when somethinginteresting happens. any graph you pull up on the obesity trends,you can see a very noticeable change around
that year which shows a clear increase inweight gain which leads ultimately to our current obesity epidemic. 1977 is the year when the usda put out thenew dietary recommendations to cut fat and replace it with “heart healthy†starches,bread, pasta and other carbohydrates. i guess it’s not that big of a surprisethat when you bury a method that worked for 200 years for reversing obesity and controllingdiabetes, that you get an obesity and diabetes epidemic. the history paints a pretty good picture,but it’s important that we understand the biological mechanisms behind this.
to save you the suspense, it’s not totalcalories, but your hormones that cause weight gain. particularly one called insulin, which you’vesurely heard of. it’s known as the fat storage hormone. where there’s insulin, there’s fat. and when people have to routinely inject insulinin themselves, they experience something called lipohypertrophy - the site at which insulinis injected has a clear accumulation of fat. so how does insulin work in the body? as you know, your blood glucose or blood sugarrises when you eat carbohydrates, particularly
ones low in fiber. this then causes insulin to be released sothe insulin can carry the glucose into the cells that have an insulin receptor, whichthen allows the cells to break down the glucose and produce energy in the form of phosphates. so far so good. however this process can only happen at acertain rate, so glucose needs to be put somewhere else. in the form of glycogen, you can store about200 grams of glucose in the muscle and 70 grams in the liver.
when those are filled up, insulin receptorsdecrease on those cells so glucose can’t go in. but the glucose still needs to go somewherebecause if it sits in the blood stream it will bind to proteins in a damaging processcalled glycation. glycation is a process where sugar in thebloodstream mucks onto proteins, creating something called advanced glycation end productsor age’s for short. it’s the cellular equivalent of pouringmaple syrup on your keyboard. one example is a banana. as it gets more ripe, you see some brown spotson the peel and if you peel the banana you
can see some dark spots which are particularlysweet. the same thing happens to your skin over time:proteins in your bloodstream get sugar stuck on them and the resulting age’s damage yourskin internally, creating age spots. you also see these spots from external damagefrom the sun. where these things become a real problem isin diabetics who have trouble controlling their blood sugar, and end up with a largeamount of age’s. this is why diabetics can lose sight in theireyes and may even end up having to amputate their toes because these are the places withvery small capillaries where it’s easy for these age’s to get stuck and cause seriousdamage.
so back to the glucose processing: your musclesand liver have stored as much glucose as they can, and your body really does not want glucoseoverloading the cells, so it decreases the insulin receptors on most cells preventingthe glucose from getting in. then, glucose is broken down and stored astriglycerides in the only place where insulin receptors are actually increasing- your bodyfat. so this is how carbohydrates and the insulinresponse cause you to get fat. a couple years back before i learned aboutintermittent fasting and this low carb business, there was an all you can eat yakiniku- japanesebarbecue place that i’d sometimes go to. it’s common to always have a bowl of riceto accompany the meat when you’re eating,
but one day i decided to skip the rice andjust focus on the meat. the next day i noticed something new: i feltstuffed the entire day and i didn’t want to eat until dinner. whereas when i usually had the rice with mymeat, i was already starving for breakfast by morning. now, i finally understand what was going on. to use the energy within our fat tissues,fatty acids are taken out of the tissue to be broken down for energy. which obviously would make you shed fat.
but when you have a high serum insulin levelfrom eating too much carbohydrate, you cannot break down your fat tissue because the enzymethat allows that - hormone sensitive lipase, is sensitive to insulin, which will not allowthe fat to be broken down. so you then have this situation where insulinwon’t let you use your fat for energy, so when you’re low on energy, you’re goingto feel very lethargic and hungry until you get new glucose. this is how high blood sugar and insulin keepsyou fat and keeps you hungry. people don’t get fat because they want toeat all the time, they want to eat all the time because they’re getting fat.
so then, are people staying fat because theydon’t exercise, or do they not exercise because they don’t have any energy availableto do so? i would argue the latter. so the diet and exercise recommendations we’vebeen getting the past several decades ignore basic endocrinology and something naturalto all animals: the desire to keep their biological processes balanced and remain in homeostasis. for example: your body always wants to stayat a constant temperature, so when it’s too hot, your metabolism slows down so youdon’t overheat from the inside. when it’s cold, you start to shiver so theglycogen stored in your muscles breaks down
and produces heat to maintain your body temperature. your body will also auto regulate your bloodpressure, as well as your sodium and other mineral levels. physiologist edward f adolph back in the 1940'sfound that however he tried to trick his lab rats, he couldn’t get them to take in morenutrients than usual. he would dilute their food with water andthey just drank more of it until they got the same amount of nutrients, and he wouldeven pump food into their stomachs and they would then just eat less. so why would we humans, the smartest and mostevolutionarily successful creatures on the
planet, have to expend willpower and consciouslyregulate how much we eat? the simple answer is that if you feed yourbody properly, it will regulate consumption for you. in the 1960’s ethan sims conducted experimentswhere he took prisoners from the vermont state prison and tried to overfeed them with eithercarbs or fat on top of their normal diet. he could get them to eat an excess of 7000calories in carbs per day, yet getting them to eat 800 calories of fat, about 1 stickof butter, took a heroic amount of effort. it takes willpower to overeat if you are onthe right diet, but it takes even more willpower to not overeat if you are on the wrong diet
this is the issue. humans have not had time to adapt to the massiveamount of low fiber carbohydrates recently introduced to our diet. the low fiber aspect is important becausefiber reduces the rate of intestinal carbohydrate absorption, reducing the insulin response,and essentially preventing all these problems i just talked about. way back when we were hunting and gatheringand before the cultivation of sweeter and juicier fruit, we were getting about 100 to300 grams of fiber a day, whereas today the average is more like 15 grams.
so no, the people of texas and others strugglingwith their weight are not just lazy, we’ve just had the wrong food and the wrong advicepushed on us the past 40 years. by the way, remember how i said i slimmedup by exercising when i was young? that wasn’t really me, it was my hormones. i went through a massive hormonal change called..puberty, which slimmed me up and gave me the energy to exercise- not the other way around. if you liked this video, make sure to subscribeand if you’d like to help the channel please check me out on patreon. if you still have some questions about thesignificance of calories, or the potential
harm from fats, take a look at these othertwo videos of mine.
credit for some of the information in heregoes to albert lehninger’s principles of biochemistry textbook, gary taubes’ book“good calories bad calories,†his other book “why we get fatâ€, robert lustig’sbook “fat chance†and johnathon bailor’s book “the calorie mythâ€
