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What is a slice of bread? A slice of sugar. Does it have anything else good about it? Virtually nothing.
Somebody e-mailed me who had decided to do a little research. And there are over 50 essential nutrients to the human body. You know you need to breathe oxygen. It gives us life and it kills us. It’s the same thing with glucose. Certain tissues require some glucose. We wouldn't be here if there were no glucose, it gives us life and it kills us. We know that we have essential amino acids and we have essential fatty acids. They are essential for life, we better take them in as building blocks or we die.
So this person took all the essential nutrients that are known to man and plugged them into a computer data bank, and he asked the computer what are the top 10 foods that contain each nutrient that is required by the human body. Each of the 53 or 54, depending on who you talk to, essential nutrients that there are were plugged in, and did you know that grains did not come up in the top ten on any one?
What is the minimum daily requirement for carbohydrates? ZERO.
The food pyramid is based on a totally irrelevant nutrient.
Why do we eat?
One reason we eat is for energy. That's half of the reason. The other essential reason (Not just for fun! Fun is a good one, but you won't have much fun if you eat too much) is to replace tissue and gather up building blocks for maintenance and repair.
Those are the two essential reasons that we need to eat. We need the building blocks and we need fuel, not the least of which is to have energy to obtain those building blocks and then to have energy to fuel those chemical reactions to use those building blocks.
The building blocks that are needed are proteins and fatty acids, not much in the way of carbohydrates. You can get all the carbohydrates you need from proteins and fats.
There are two kinds of fuel that your body can use with minor exceptions, sugar and fat. We mentioned earlier that the body is going to store excess energy as fat. Why does the body store it as fat? Because that is the body's desired fuel that will sustain you and allow you to live. The body can store only a little bit of sugar.
In an active day you would die if you had to rely 100 percent on sugar. Why doesn't your body store more sugar if it is so needed? Sugar was never meant to be your primary energy source, it is meant to be your body's turbo charger.
Everybody right here, right now should be burning almost all fat with minor exceptions. Your brain will burn sugar, though it doesn't have to, by burning by-products of fat metabolism called ketones. That is what it has to burn when you fast for any length of time. It has been shown that if your brain was really good at burning ketones from fat that you can get enough sugar from eating 100 percent fat.
You can make a little bit of sugar out of the glycerol molecule of fat. Take two glycerol molecules and you have a molecule of glucose. Two triglycerides will give you a molecule of glucose. The brain can actually exist without a whole lot of sugar, contrary to popular belief. Glucose was meant to be fuel used in an emergency situation if you had to expend an extreme amount of energy, such as running from a saber tooth tiger.
It is a turbo charger, a very hot burning fuel. If you need fuel over and above what fat can provide, you will dig into your glycogen and burn sugar. But your primary energy source as we are here right now should be almost all fat.
Another major effect of insulin on fat is it prevents you from burning it. What happens when you are insulin resistant and you have a bunch of insulin floating around all the time? You wake up in the morning with an insulin level of 90.
And how much fat are you going to be burning? Virtually none. What are you going to burn if not fat? Sugar coming from your muscle. So you have all this fat that you've accumulated over the years that your body is very adept at adding to. Every time you have any excess energy you are going to store it as fat, but if you don't eat, where you would otherwise be able to burn it, you cannot. You will still burn sugar because that is all your body is capable of burning anymore.
Where does your body get the sugar?
Well you don't store much of it in the form of sugar so it will take it from your muscle. That's your body's major depot of sugar. You just eat up your muscle tissue. Any time you have excess you store it as fat and any time you are deficient you burn up your muscle.
So where do carbohydrates come in?
They don't. There is no essential need for carbohydrates. Why are we all eating carbohydrates? To keep the rate of aging up, we don't want to pay social security to everyone.
I didn't say you can't have any carbs, I said fiber is good. Vegetables are great; I want you to eat vegetables. The practical aspect of it is that you are going to get carbs, but there is no essential need. The traditional Eskimo subsists on almost no vegetables at all, but they get their vitamins from organ meats and things like eyeball, which are a delicacy, or were.