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Carbohydrates – Part 3

By admin On October 24, 2011 · 41 Comments

We’ve covered a lot of ground. What we’ve discussed is that carbohydrates come in the form of simple sugars (monosaccharides) and more complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides). We know that the sugar names all end in “ose” (glucose, fructose, lactose, etc…). Polysaccharides are many of these monosaccharides linked together in a chain and are a common way plants store energy (similar to our fat) for later use.

I’m suggesting you stop thinking about “Carbs” as a food group; instead categorize meat, vegetables, grains, dairy, etc… Starch (potato) and Cellulose (wood) are made from IDENTICAL glucose molecules. They have a different saccharide bonds, only one of which we have the enzyme (amylase) to digest.

So in Part 3, I want to talk about another pseudo-carbohydrate that is critical for you – glycogen. Many of you are familiar with glycogen from athletics. It’s the “load” part of carb-loading in preparation for a race. It’s also the center of your glucose-centric metabolism and the reason I personally don’t think “carbs” are bad or unhealthy.

What is unhealthy is the way we process high-energy foods with even more empty calories and then consume them in excessive quantities.

So, let’s take a little step back to understand what glycogen is and why it’s important to your performance and your life. Your body has three basic storage points for energy: ATP (adenosine triphosphate), glycogen, and fat. the most immediate energy – what is behind the muscle explosion is ATP. You have about 250 grams of this stuff, about the same amount of energy as is contained in a AA battery, energy comes form popping off one of the phosphates to form ADP (adenosine diphosphate + energy)(1). We then use this other enzyme many of you will be familiar with, creatine kinase, to shuttle these phosphates back and forth.

Save the Liver

ATP is at the very basic level of your energy utilization. Just above this in the “energy food chain,” is our friend, glycogen. Think of glycogen as a “fuzzy protein.” It is made of a core protein, glycogenin, surrounded by fuzzy starch (poly glucose) hairs. It is located throughout your body. You have about 2000 calories at any given time; 500 or so is stored in your liver and the rest packed among your muscles where it can be readily accessed. I’m using approximate numbers because everyone is slightly different, but here is an interesting side fact.

It takes (about) 2600 calories to run a marathon. 2000 calories/2600 calories = 77%. Now using that number and knowing a marathon is 42.2Km/26.2M we see that 77% is 32.5Km/20.2 miles. Anyone that has attempted to run a marathon can tell you about that number: THE WALL. If you are like me and would rather freeze your ass off than run a marathon, that is the point where ATP can no longer be generated by glycogen stores (you’ve run out) and you MUST resort to stored fat.

Fat is then the highest level and quantity of stored energy in your body and the body has to work to get it into a primary glucose-based energy system. Conversely, fatty foods (Oils, lards, etc) have the densest energy reserves. It’s simple: fat is there for long term storage. Plants, and Humans have carbohydrate based reserves for the most immediate needs and that is in your blood sugar level and glycogen reserve.

Record marathoners have trained their bodies to dip into fat reserves much earlier and they use fat throughout the race. When we get back to fat metabolism and thermal loading, you’ll find this is a side benefit of conditioning your body to withstand cold – free fatty acids (FFA) liberated from your fat stores. You may remember from BATGirl, that the mitochondria of BAT and other tissue can use FFA in the presence of a special up-regulating proteins to create HEAT instead of generating ATP.

Your ability to regularly engage in this FFA economy can be significantly influenced by running marathons – extreme milage volume causes this switch as does mild cold stress. People make fun of me about cold all the time, but I just think this is far easier than running 50 miles/day. You may see it different.

What happens in Protein-rich diets is you have depleted your glycogen reserves and it’s energetically costly to refill glycogen from converting protein. Your body switches over to fat metabolism and voilà, you start losing weight. That’s how it works and the ultimate decision one should consider is what will be the long term health effects by using your body’s tertiary macronutrient, protein, to drive it into a secondary reserve, fat, by depleting it from it’s primary energy, glucose. The other direction works just as well and in a glycogen replete state, Chris Voigt lost weight eating 20 potatoes a day – all bad carbs. This is an interesting contrast to the high-fat approach and I think it’s far more important than a silly PR stunt.

Seems complicated, but I just want people to discuss this factually and make informed decisions.

We can equally manage 1) hunger (satiety) and 2) total caloric intake, while maintaining correct micronutrient intake, living permanently thin as opposed to yo-yo dieting. This does require modifications to your lifestyle and I won’t tell you it is trivial, but neither is bypass surgery, insulin shots, high blood pressure, or lugging around an extra 50-200 lbs.

So, there really is not debate that carbohydrate, particularly starch, is a perfectly natural food. As we process with cooking (or over process) ANY carbohydrate, the energy becomes more readily available and then we damn “starch” as the bad-calorie; it’s simply not true. What is interesting is there are many ways to put your body into “survival mode” and only two that have ever demonstrated longevity in laboratory animals: caloric restriction and mild cold stress.

We still have to cover proteins and fats and we’ll keep the rules engaged, neither are food groups. As well, I want you guys to jump in on new commenters in the future and explain when we discuss carbohydrate here, we are primarily discussing high-starch foods that are relatively unprocessed (heated, with no added fat, dairy, or sugar). If you don’t believe me, TRY to go find food in a restaurant that 1) contains a starch and 2) is not loaded with sugar, fat, or dairy. I did it as an experiment for 14 months and know first hand the difficulty.

Brain Drain

We are fat, but let’s not damn potato, squash, and rice – the very staples of Humankind – as the punching bag for of our epidemic obesity. Let’s acknowledge that preparation and added empty calories play the MAJORITY role. When I construct a new paradigm to consider for eating at the end, you’ll see that there is plenty of room for carbohydrate (starchy-foods) on the plate.

Starches are an EXCELLENT food option and contain glucose, the only fuel used by the largest energy consumer of your body: The Brain. When you run low on glucose (and glycogen), gluconeogenesis creates glucose from amino acids by stripping off the nitrogens and using what is left to synthesize glucose. Energy for this is driven through beta-oxidation of FFA. If you have a lot of beta-oxidation is occuring (untreated diabetes or starvation), acetyl-CoA builds up, and is converted to the ketone bodies. That’s the basis of ketosis and why ketones are found in your urine.

The brain-blood barrier is the separation of this distinctly different glucose metabolism from the rest of your body. So, I think is at least it is easily questionable to say carbs are “bad” or even the cause of obesity. At the same time, throwing your body completely into starvation mode, while certainly effective to lose weight, might not be the best long term. Of course we have to consider the implications of caloric restriction too. I just raise the question.

With that is it fair to ask if “carbohydrate” was so bad for you, why did we evolve one of the most advanced, energy-conuming brains of any species to use only a carbohydrate fuel?

Think about it.

(1) “On the prebiotic potential of reduced oxidation state phosphorus: the H-phosphinate–pyruvate system,” David E. Bryant, Katie E. R. Marriott, Stuart A. Macgregor, Colin Kilner, Matthew A. Pasek and Terence P. Kee, Chem. Commun., 2010, 46

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Carbohydrates – Part 2

By admin On October 21, 2011 · 41 Comments

In Part 1, we began the process of distinguishing the difference between a food group and a macronutrient. Carbohydrates (Carbs) are probably the most vilified of the macronutrients. This is probably due to the ubiquitous availability of starch foods throughout human history. For the most part, oils, fats, and meats were the food of the rich. Everyone else ate beans, rice and potatoes.

If we listed the many staple foods: grains, rice, beans, squash, quinoa, potatoes and corn we see a high amount of starch. Remember, starch is simply a long chain of glucose. We all need glucose to live and our primary energy is derived from glucose and stored glycogen or fat (more later).

I want you to know that a carbohydrate need not be fattening, nor lead to diabetes. In fact, Carbohydrates can be very satiating (1) for 4-5 hours after meals. What seems to be the big diversion, where the “bad carbs” come in, is the processing (blending, frying, flouring, pasting, etc) of carbohydrate. When we break down starch too much in the food preparation process, it leads to lots of simple sugars. These are both easy to overeat and can have other deleterious health effects.

Starch digestion begins in the mouth with the amylase in the saliva. The starch begins to break down to glucose. A great way to experience this first hand is to take a unsalted cracker and just hold it in your mouth. You will begin to generate a lot of saliva and as you hold it there, begin to taste sweetness as the glucose is formed. Remember, a termite can do exactly the same thing with cellulose in wood.

From an evolutionary biology perspective, the AMY1 gene that is responsible for making amylase is so important that you have as many as 12 copies of it (2). It was extremely important to our hunter-gather predecessors. While there’s been much put forward on the “hunting” side of the equation, some of the most recent anthropology suggest that the “gathering” side dominated. Underground storage organs (USOs – tubers, bulbs, corms, and rhizomes) played a significant role in our energy management of times past.

Men like the idea of beating their chest and running through the woods hunting and they write a lot of the stories, but gathering is actually a better (less sexy) explanation of our survival. It even allows the elderly to participate productively in the group, even grandmothers would have a significant role in the earliest tribes. Anyone can dig up a potato, they aren’t very fast, and they grow in predicable places.

The naked mole rat is found with archeology of hominid population explosions and points to USOs as a gathered food source. click photo for NPR Story

Many of the early tools used to process USOs were probably made of wood and didn’t survive in the archeological records, but the early Hominid starch crystals in teeth have. Also there are also fossilized populations of mole rats that surge with every human population expansion (3). We’ll also learn that the mole rat has some FASCINATING genetics that impacts thermal loading.

I don’t want to get into the Paleolithic debate. What I want everyone to see is that starch IS an important evolutionary part of your fuel system, but at the same time recognize french fries are NOT the starch I am talking about. Your view of carbohydrate has been jaded since the beginning of diets. In the earliest of diets (Banting) it was simple breads combined with butter/sugar that caused the excess energy to creep in. Processed starch (sugars) of all kinds can lead to excess caloric intake; it’s just easy to digest and pleasurable to overeat, especially when combined with salt and fat.

For today, understand that primary complex carbohydrates: squash, legumes, onions, carrots, whole corn, whole rice, and potato are all good bases of energy. They are satiating ways to make up for caloric deficit, but don’t confuse those items, “items your great grandmother would recognize as food,” Michael Pollan might say, with the “carbs” served at school lunch.

Most importantly understand that many of these “starchy” foods also contain significant proteins with complete compliment of the essential amino acids your body will use to synthesize your own protein. These complex carbohydrates are broken down by amylase to glucose: the fuel for your brain and many cells in the body. If they aren’t consumed with excessive alternate energy sources (like excessive fat or simple sugar), your body will tap into it’s own fat reserves. If too much pre-processing is performed, then you might see increased problems managing blood sugar.

Eating carbohydrate is convenient and pleasurable, and know there is room for “carbs” in your diet if you make the correct choices.

So, when we are putting this all together and I say carbohydrate, I want you to think about these whole, starchy food items that enter YOUR kitchen/cooking reasonably resembling how they came out of the ground or off the plant. Sugar, raw, brown…whatever, is refined. I challenge you to eat the 250 lbs of sugar a year gnawing on sugarcane, however; you might be able to do it with grapes or beets.

Others have commented on fructose, a simple sugar in fruit, and I think there is merit to the issues that come from too many simple sugars, especially highly processed. This likely includes high fructose corn syrup, apple juice, sucrose, agave nectar, etc…). Fruits are not found in nature year round, but USOs are. Similarly, think about what is easily stored (beans vs beets). It’s amazing to hear people rave about “natural agave nectar” (inulin/fructose squeezed from agave) and then begin to lambast the food industry for high fructose corn syrup (fructose squeezed from corn). Yes there are some differences, but we’ll debate it in 5-10 years. It’s all simple sugar to me and best avoided.

These simple sugars are energy without the fiber or micronutrients. Others, like Robert Lustig, have covered the issue of fructose in far better detail than I will, but likely our problem as a nation is probably more related to drinking, for example, too much apple juice, rather than eating too many apples. The same is true of french fries vs potatoes. The larger group health statistics just don’t separate the issues (e.g. apples vs apple juice or fries vs potato) with enough granularity and it is all complicated with saturated fats and other compounding, synergistic concoctions we now call food.

Many energy dense foods are now available year round (like fruits or avocados) and so we must be careful with these foods. We’ll see a similar trend with fats, oils, and nuts.

Starch is a wonderful molecule and has been around for millions of years. Starch is just one bond different from wood. You are designed to eat starch, with back ups systems in place (AMY1). We can identify paleolitic starch in teeth, even knowing the plants that produced it, and so there is nothing wrong with carbohydrate as a food – it highly processing it and combining with other energy-rich processed product that causes much of the issues.

You will inevitably hear more about the amazing work anthropologist, Nathaniel Dominy is doing with starch and USOs. I personally believe the depth and thoroughness of his work will have an impact on what many, like Loren Cordain, believe to absolute. Nate has a very uncanny ability to see past the obvious. For the record, he’s a meat eater, despite what he’s uncovered in the last few years about starch in anthropology.

In terms of the thermodynamics, most natural starches come with a compliment of other micronutrients that are beneficial. These are “energy foods” and so we absolutely CAN lose weight by eliminating them from your diet. I am not suggesting diets higher in fat or protein (atkins, paleolithic, slow carb) cannot be used to lose weight – I am diet agnostic. What I can explain is on whole the overall management of energy, heat (not temperature), that is responsible for your success.

If we stop isolating these foods based on our perceived/suggested notations of macronutrient content and return to simple food, A calorie will be a calorie. Once you learn to recognize what you are consuming at every meal (and snack) you’ll see the results you’ve been after. It doesn’t even take discipline once you understand the underlying principles.

Gauging on the comments/questions, I might dig in a little more (Part 3) on carbohydrate. Eventually I will post the overall biochemistry and some have written asking me to explain the TCA cycle (that complex part in the middle of a Lustig presentation if you’ve seen one). Otherwise, I will move onto fat and catch sugars in the wrap up.

Next week is TEDMED in San Diego. It’s hard to believe a year has past. I’ll probably have at least one update on what I learn there, but will *try* to write two posts on fat before I leave so they can post next week.

(1) Carbohydrates and human appetite, Blundell, JE, et al.,Am J Clin Nutr 1994;59(suppl):728S-34S.

(2) Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation, Perry, G.H., et al., Nature Genetics 39, 1256 – 1260 (2007)

(3) Communication/presentation with Dr Nathaniel Dominy, Dartmouth University Dept of Anthropology

Carbohydrates – Part 1

By admin On October 18, 2011 · 17 Comments

As we have been discussing, macronutrients are the basic energy, or fuel, our bodies need for all biological processes. This can be used for exercising, thinking or synthesizing the many biological molecules that keep the system smoothly operating.

Micronutrients are the building blocks – the stuff our body uses to create the many cells, tissues, and hormones. Like we discussed in our car analogy, macronutrients are the gas and micronutrients are the routine maintenance service for the car .

Today we are going to begin the discussion of Carbohydrates. What I hope to do, is change your reaction to that word. I don’t want you to say “carb” or think french fries, potatoes, or rice. I don’t want you to think about ANY food group. Forget glycemic index. Those are all useful bits of information for diet schemes, but not to understand how your body works. When we are done, we’ll move onto the other macronutrients: fat and protein.

So, do we have a deal? No discussion of FOOD for the conceptual understanding of carbohydrates, but I will give examples carbohydrates contained food so that we can understand the bigger picture.

Thermodynamics is the study of heat and energy and how these systems interact. We derive energy from the basic three macronutrients. Later, there will be detail of this complex process, but for now, it’s just a game of “pass the electron.” Every whole food you eat contains some amount of the three macronutrients. We call something a Protein or a Carb in response to its greatest portion of macronutrient by weight.

Now, we are discussing energy, the thermodynamics, and really weight has nothing to do with energy other than some means of quantifying the amount you eat. We’ll see that this macronutrient/weight is extremely useful for food labels, but not very indicative of either the amount energy or macronutrient you might derive from a given amount of food.Telt

Let’s dive into what a carbohydrate is and why we need it.

A Carbohydrate is a Carbohydrate

We’ll see that all this fuss about calorie a calorie is going to be a simple accounting issue, but if you have a negative reaction to the word carbohydrate, if you think that there are good carbs and bad carbs, if you’re worried about blood sugar, then fret no more. We aren’t going to discuss any of that here. Not going to even take questions on it.

Instead, I want you to return to 4th grade and think about that simple view of the world. You breath in oxygen, it’s combined with fuel (“burned”) to give energy and then you exhale carbon dioxide. That is in turn used by plants in photosynthesis, to yield sugars and other biologically active compounds and they return the oxygen.

See it?

We are all confused about the breathing oxygen and burning part, remember, a calorie isn’t a calorie? So, let’s start with the plant side of the circle. There aren’t many obese plants, maybe they’ve figured something out.

Plants take in carbon dioxide and form sugars, fats, complex carbohydrates (e.g. starch) and structural cellulose. With the exception of venus fly traps and pitcher plants, they just don’t eat. They also take in Nitrogen from the soil (fertilizer) creating proteins and even even psychoactive alkaloids, like mescaline (peyote buttons). It seems plants are a trip.

In fact plants synthesize every single protein, fat and carbohydrate you need to live. We eat them or we eat animals and bacteria that eat them and here we are. Perhaps this is what they didn’t tell us in 4th grade. Food and Macronutrients are somehow separated at birth of the concept, but we are here to discuss Carbohydrates, like starch and really understand what they are and how they work.

We all know the word sugars. There are natural sugars, bad sugars, processed sugars, and high glycemic sugars, but really, a sugar is just the simplest molecule that makes up the long chains of stored energy in plants. It’s their way of saving for a rainy day (literally). They all named to end in “ose” – glucose, galactose, lactose, fructose, maltose, etc. Once ingested, you extract energy from them to fuel ATP/ADP through electron transport chain.

For now, just know that your body MUST have glucose. That’s what we measure when we measure “blood sugar” and that is what your brain runs on as a fuel. It’s chemical formula, C6H12O6 is the building block of two very familiar compounds: Starch and Cellulose. Both of these “polysaccharides” (poly = many, saccharide = sugar) are simply long chains of the EXACT same sugar: Glucose.

House of Potatoes

Starch and Cellulose are made from the same building block, Glucose. They have a different saccharide bond that holds them together. Since many animals don't make the enzyme to break down cellulose, the fiber passes through. If you ever wondered how hippopotamus, rhinoceros, cows, and giraffes grow lean and muscular as herbivores, here's your answer.

That’s right, a baked potato and a wood are essentially the same thing. So why aren’t we whipping a wonderful Mahi-Mahi dusted in a fine pepper-birch sawdust and parchment-baked? It’s because we happen to be protein deficient. Yes, it’s true, a polysaccharide like cellulose or “poly-glucose” must be broken down by enzymes, proteins, into glucose so we can use them.

Cellulose is put together in just a slightly different way and we can’t break it down. To a termite, or the bacteria in the rumen (a stomach) of a cow, that piece of wood or grass fiber works as food JUST like a baked potato does for you. These bacteria and insects create the protein, cellulase, to extract glucose from cellulose. We create another protein, amylase, that breaks down the starch. You have as many as 4-12 copies of the gene that creates amylase enzyme, because it’s so genetically important for your survival.

Carbohydrate, fats, and proteins all enter the electron transport chain to deliver energy to your body in a set of reactions designed around glucose, the building block of carbohydrate.

What do I want you to take away? first, “Carbs” aren’t food groups and neither are proteins and fats. Theses very defined terms in organic/biochemistry, but have been popularized in order to help you “eat healthy. The irony is we’ve never been more unhealthy as a world. Proteins aren’t meat; there are also other bioactive proteins, for example enzymes like amylase or cellulase, that participate nearly every metabolic process keeping you alive.

We will eventually come back to food, and calories, and see that nearly every food you eat is a combination of these. You don’t “need a complete protein” and can’t “avoid carbs.” The truth is that what you need is energy to run the process, fuel. You probably have a few weeks (months?) supply of fuel you’ve been lugging around for some time. We need to find creative ways to burn it. None of them involve schemes of putting MORE energy in your mouth. You’ll never run empty if you fill up three times a week.

For today, here is what I want you to take away: carbohydrates are polysaccharides ( “many” “sugars”) that provide the basic energy currency precursor of your body, glucose. We’ll discuss some of the other (evil – lol) simple carbohydrates in the next blog. We use and need carbohydrate in our diet. There is a big difference between starches, like rice, squash and potatoes and donuts. Fruits, on the other hand, contain simple sugars as well and those come with their own issues. It is key to separate carbohydrates, especially complex carbohydrates, from simple sugars.

We’ll then turn to the other macronutrients, fat and protein, to fill in the basic metabolism energy cycle.

You shouldn’t feel uncomfortable with the idea that ultimately, cows eat grass, gain glucose and amino acids, and grow tasty, “grass-fed” beef. That beef is laden with amino acids. When you eat it, you can in turn use the amino acids (no significant glucose in beef) to create insulin or pus in pimples (also a protein), whatever protein you need, and metabolize the left over to supplement your daily energy requirements. You can even store it for “later.”

Perhaps, it’s not as simple as the CO2->Sun->O2 symbiotic respiration we learned in 4th grade, but it is plenty understandable. When you no longer see protein, carbohydrate or fat as food groups, your mind will be opened to lots of different options.

Equally important, we’ve all learned the hard way, you can’t out-exercise your mouth. It is simply put, impossible.

Until next time…

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