Posted on 01/05/2012 7:50:58 AM PST by Brookhaven
I had a bit an epiphany yesterday, but it seems so contray to what I've been told about eating all my life, I'm having a hard time believing my analysis is corret.
I've been working on changing my diet. One of the things I ran across was the fact that eating carbohydrates spikes your blood sugar. Then I heard someone make the comment (and it was almost a throw-away side comment) "of course, carbohydrates are just complex forms of sugar." Really?
The following lines are pulled from here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/161547.php, my insertions are in brackets [my comment].
Saccharides, or carbohydrates, are sugars or starches.There are various types of saccharides:
Monosaccharide - this is the smallest possible sugar unit. Examples include glucose, galactose or fructose. When we talk about blood sugar we are referring to glucose in the blood; glucose is a major source of energy for a cell. In human nutrition, galactose can be found most readily in milk and dairy products, while fructose is found mostly in vegetables and fruit.
Disaccharide - two monosaccharide [simple sugar] molecules bonded together. Disaccharides are polysaccharides - "poly…" specifies any number higher than one, while "di…" specifies exactly two. Examples of disaccharides include lactose, maltose, and sucrose. If you bond one glucose molecule with a fructose molecule you get a sucrose molecule.
Sucrose is found in table sugar, and is often formed as a result of photosynthesis (sunlight absorbed by chlorophyll reacting with other compounds in plants). If you bond one glucose molecule with a galactose molecule you get lactose, which is commonly found in milk.
Polysaccharide - a chain of two or more monosaccharides [simple sugar molecule]. The chain may be branched (molecule is like a tree with branches and twigs) or unbranched (molecule is a straight line with no twigs). Polysaccharide molecule chains may be made up of hundreds or thousands of monosaccharides.
So, carbohydrates are made up of sugar or starch. Monosaccharide, disaccharide, and polysaccharide are all forms of sugar. But, what is starch?
Starch - these are glucose polymers made up of Amylose [short chains of glucose] and Amylopectin [long chains of glucose]. Rich sources of starches for humans include potatoes, rice and wheat.
So, startch is a form of glucose. And, what is glucose? Remember the paragraph above about monosaccharides?
Monosaccharide - this is the smallest possible sugar unit. Examples include glucose, galactose or fructose. When we talk about blood sugar we are referring to glucose in the blood;
So, if carbohydrates are made up of one of the three saccharides (mono, di, or poly--all a type of sugar) or starch (which is made up of glucose--a type of sugar), doesn't that mean carbohydrates are--at the end of the day--just a complex type of sugar?
That's a hard fact for me to accept, because it contradicts everything I've been taught about nutrition. The current recommendation is that at least 50% of a person's calorie intake each day come from carbohydrats (as can be seen in the food pyramid).
But, if carbohydrates are just complex forms of sugar, does that mean 50% of my calories should come from sugar (a complex form of sugar, but sugar none-the-less)?
Given sharp rise in not just childhood obesity and diabetes, but obesity and diabetes in general (all commonly called an epidemic by the medical community), I'm starting to wonder if we just didn't make a mistake. By emphasizing grains (carbohydrates) so heavily in our diets, did we unwittingly emphasize sugar in our diets and cause these epidemics?
Yes, hunters and gatherers and some horticulture. This did not mean a diet that got a majority of calories from meat and fat. Modern hunter/gatherer and horticulturalist societies outside the arctic circle (where plant matter is rare) get the majority of their calories from non-meat sources that are usually lower in protein and fat and higher in carbohydrates.
Yes, Eskimos eat an almost all meat and fat diet. They are healthy with a traditional diet but have problems with a Western diet.
Similarly, people from India are primarily vegitarians. Why are they not all fat?
Biochemically we are set up to consume carbohydrates as our major energy source.
You could go one step further...
Suppose one contestant ate pasta for a month, and the other ate mostly meat and a small salad for a month, then both loaded up with pasta the night before a marathon?
Different from the requirements of a hundred yard dash.
Can you remember where amino acids are introduced into the cycle?
Depends on the AA...for instance, glutamine and glutamate get converted go alpha-ketoglutarate, while other AAs are converted to succinate, for instance.
Glycolysis isn’t a cycle, it is a linear pathway -— glucose to pyruvate. That doesn’t mean there aren’t intermediary points of entry, like maltose-6-phospate coming in at F6P, as an example. Moreover, the pentose phosphate pathway branches off glycolysis early at G6P — the PPP makes biomass and drives biosynthetic reactions by making NADPH.
the TCA (tricarboxylic acid cyle) is a cycle, but it is not self sustaining and needs replenishment....
Are you saying that AA’s do not have a path to get into glycolysis directly, (or perhaps indirectly via gluconeogenisis first, then glycolysis)?
It is not a preferred route. You can break down serine and glycine and feed into glycolysis at 3PG or, more likely, at pyruvate. By and large, however, these alternate routes are regulated in ways we do not entirely understand. We are finding out we don’t entirely understand glycolysis....still pretty amazing if you ask me.
My point is that many athletes “carbo load” - I know a pasta dinner before a Crew match was a regular occurrence during my college athletic days. Weather efficacious or not according to the latest study - it had a sound biochemical basis that “sugar loading” would not.
Thus I attempted to illustrate a fundamental difference between dietary intake of carbs and dietary intake of sugars.
Glycolysis is linear, with multiple entry points. Gluconeogenisis, (and storage as glycogen,) is also linear, but they do feed each other.
There are many pathways we are still working on, but we do have a fairly good handle on energy production and use in the mammalian body.
Carbs, protein and fats do have preferred pathways, as you are aware, but they do share and can (and when needed, will)all be burned for energy. We do get emaciated when not eating for a reason.
With a few exceptions due to metabolic defects due to disease or dna arrangement, most obesity is simply excess calories taken in vs not enough burned.
Our bodies were and are geared to take in all kinds of stuff, and make energy, repair parts, and store the rest as fat. When we take in stuff that costs less in atp to process, we are left with more atp to store.
If the race was long enough, the athelete would hit the wall when he ran out of sugar to burn. At that time, the advantage would shift to the athelete who had been training his body to burn the protien and fat, thus had his mechanism in place to do so, to minimally interrupt the energy transfer from carbs to stored fat and muscle.
Not sure I follow your logic entirely...
gluconeogenesis, aside from a few tweaks, is glycolysis in reverse...there is no way to feed into eachother, as they are one in the same, just opposite.
Ironically, however, the key to getting big, either developmentally or pathologically is not burning energy efficiently — it is backing glycolysis up by mucking the up the flux. That is when things (and by that I mean cells) start getting aggresive phenotypes (i.e., cancerous)...fascinating!
“They are the anti-vegitarians; just as self-righteous and pig headed in their near religious devotion to a restrictive diet they think everyone should adhere to.”
Thank you! I couldn’t put it better. Now, please pass me the butter for my baked potato...
Was a pleasure conversing with you, and welcome to Freerepublic. Hope you enjoy your stay!
http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/
and highly recommended library book:
The word is finally getting around. I was turned onto Atkins in the seventies but found the diet too harsh. Now, I just cut out anything made of wheat or with sugar (except special occasions, of course).
Cholesterol's fine and my weight sticks right to where it was when I graduated high school 40 years ago. Having pizza tonight -- crust is made of cauliflower rice and mozzarella cheese. It's surprisingly good.
Same to you!!! My PhD finally found a usefulness in this form.
Maybe you can fill me in on what a momma deuce is sometime....
“Check out the paleolithic diet to see how humankind naturally should eat.”
Yeah, I’m pretty sure paleolithic folks ate whatever the hell they could get their hands on and digest. I highly doubt they were following dietary principles that are superior to those based on 21st century knowledge.
45 is my target, but it cannot be sugars/fruits.
As a food-eating guy, I don’t find that high at all.
“Humans in the wild still gain the majority of their calories from carbohydrates.”
This is true. We don’t have to speculate about paleolithic diets when there are people still living in the paleolithic era today, and for a lot of those people meat is a treat, not a staple. Also, they often need to supplement their diets with grubs because eating wild game doesn’t give them enough fat intake to be healthy.
Protein is harder to digest than carbs. So, just because you take in more calories of protein does not mean your body will process and absorb all of those calories. A lot of what you eat on a high protein diet is going straight out the back door, so to speak.
Ever heard of tubers?
Remember, this isn’t a “lose weight” diet. It is a “keep at it for the rest of your freaking life” diet.
Compare 135 grams to the recommended healthy diet for everyone else by the Mayo clinic of 225 to 325 grams.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/healthy-diet/NU00200
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