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It's Not about the Amount of Calories, but the Type of Calories

H.A.L.A B.
on 7/11/11 12:29 am
of course, we, low-carbers know that, it is not how much you eat , but what you eat that is important:
from: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/07/1 1/what-are-the-best-and-worst-foods-for-healthy-weight.aspx

It's Not about the Amount of Calories, but the Type of Calories...

Conventional wisdom tells you that if you consume more calories than your burn, you will gain weight. But as you can see, the issue is more complex than that. It's really important to understand that the type of calories you consume is far more important than the number of calories.

If you eat a lot of fructose (and there's a good chance you are, considering it's the number one source of calories in the United States), it could be "programming" your body to become fat.

Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, has been a pioneer in decoding sugar metabolism. Here are a few important facts about fructose:

  • After eating fructose, 100 percent of the metabolic burden rests on your liver. With glucose, your liver has to break down only 20 percent. The fatty acids created during fructose metabolism accumulate as fat droplets in your liver and skeletal muscle tissues, causing insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Insulin resistance progresses to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
  • Fructose converts to activated glycerol (g-3-p), which is directly used to turn free fatty acids (FFAs) into triglycerides that get stored as fat. The more g-3-p you have, the more fat you store. Glucose does not do this. When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose, however, results in 40 calories being stored as fat. Consuming fructose is essentially consuming fat
  • The metabolism of fructose by your liver creates a long list of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which drives up blood pressure and causes gout.
  • Glucose suppresses the hunger hormone ghrelin and stimulates leptin, which suppresses your appetite. Fructose has no effect on ghrelin and interferes with your brain's communication with leptin, resulting in overeating. For further confirmation on this, check out this 2008 study published in the Journal of Nutrition. The researchers concluded that fructose turned into body fat much quicker than glucose, and that having fructose for breakfast changed how the body handled fats at lunch.

Ironically, the food products that most people rely on to lose weight—low-fat diet foods—often contain the most fructose! So beware, and always read the content labels.

Quality is More Important than Quantity

Another recent study illustrating the connection between your weight and the type or quality of the calories you consume (as opposed to just counting calories) was published last month, in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

As reported in Time Magazine:

"It matters, of course, how many total calories you take in each day, but the authors say the age-old advice simply to 'eat less and exercise more' may be naïve. To control weight over the long term... the study suggests that people benefit more by focusing on eating right, rather than less."

Hala. RNY 5/14/2008; Happy At Goal =HAG

"I can eat or do anything I want to - as long as I am willing to deal with the consequences"

"Failure is not falling down, It is not getting up once you fell... So pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again...."

hollykim
on 7/11/11 8:04 am - Nashville, TN
Revision on 03/18/15
Makes perfect sense to me...

 


          

 

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