Fat is a fall guy - carbs are the real culprit
Re: "Counter with a Parisian accent", Sunday Leisure, November 2.
Pattarawadee Saengmanee writes that a new Bangkok French restaurant offers healthy meals by their “cutting down on the calorific load, replacing sinful cream with skimmed milk”.
With such misinformation, is it any wonder that Thailand has an obesity epidemic?
“Human Physiology”, a basic textbook for medical universities, notes that it is the carbohydrates that fatten. Digested carbs first top up the muscle and liver glycogen – stored sugar. The rest is then rapidly converted to body fat in the cells’ mitochondria, via the Krebs cycle. Digested fat only slowly converts to useable energy molecules in the liver. Fructose converts directly into body fat in the liver.
Calories don’t count because in human physiology there exist various “homeostasis” mechanisms that attempt to maintain body-fat stores, this by varying the metabolic rate, MR. MR is thus affected by what, when and how much is eaten. When one reduces calories, within days the MR slows to conserve fuel stores for an assumed upcoming famine. One such mechanism, thermic effect, is bone-structure dependent. A light-boned “ectomorph” can gulp down half a gallon of 60-per-cent-sugar ice-cream and weigh exactly the same next day, as they have a very high MR rate rise after a meal. A heavy-boned “endomorph” will gain fat on a slice of apple pie, due to a very low MR rise after a meal.
When a meal is low in fat, stomach emptying speeds up by 100 per cent, as there is no digested fat to be slowly absorbed. This means that one is soon hungry after a meal, and will then eat more fattening carbs!
As regards health, cream and butter synthesise vitamin B6 in the gut. B6 lowers artery-calcifying homocysteine (see research by Dr SL Malhotra published in The Lancet).
Thomas Turk
Phuket
