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To: Mr. Jeeves
I noticed that sentence too. If one considers the diets of steer, one remembers the most coveted meats come from steer that are grain fed. If grain adds the tenderizing component of fat to a steer, why would it behave differently when ingested by humans?
12 posted on 11/12/2003 6:43:07 PM PST by Sgt_Schultze
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To: Sgt_Schultze
If grain adds the tenderizing component of fat to a steer, why would it behave differently when ingested by humans?

Because grain doesn't "add" fat. Because human metabolism is different from that of bovine animals. Because humans make almost no de novo fat from carbohydrates, as do cattle and pigs. Virtually all the fat that people carry around is of dietary origin. It gets sent to the adipose cells for storage when the caloric intake of the diet chronically exceeds the caloric expenditure of daily life. The reason this happens is that the energy has got to be put somewhere and the body has no storage for protein, only a few days storage for carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen), and almost unlimited storage for fats. In a diet (meaning customary intake of foods, not weight-loss regimen) that is hypercaloric, the body switches substrate usage away from fats and toward carbohydrates and proteins. It does this to protect the liver. The long term result is that the excess daily calories get stored in adipose tissue in the form of fat from the diet. If you were to take a representative sample of all the fats and oils you've eaten, their chain-lengths and proportions, over the past couple of years and were to compare the profile to that of a sample taken from your adipose tissue, they'd be almost identical.

There's as much picture thinking and screwy reasoning going on with fat and carbohydrates as there is with bovine growth hormones. Why won't bovine growth hormones do anything to humans (or other primates) while it has an effect on non-primates? Because the bovine growth hormone is incapable of docking with the primate growth hormone receptor. Primate growth hormones, though, can dock with non-primate growth hormone receptors.
89 posted on 01/03/2004 8:21:50 AM PST by aruanan
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