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May 11 - July 6, 2020
Insulin and Leptin
How insulin may lead leptin resistance
However, the strength of the leptin signal to the hypothalamus can be diluted by the hormone insulin.
So if insulin is acting on the cell receptor, then there is no room within the cell to read the leptin signal as well, even if leptin is present and posting its message. The leptin message therefore goes unread.
TNF-alpha is released by cells that act as police against infection or injury.
However, in obesity, once fat cells reach a critical size, the cellular police are called into action to investigate.fn3
When the level of TNF-alpha in the blood increases (as it does with obesity-related inflammation), it acts to block the effectiveness of insulin.fn4 7 Insulin becomes inefficient at doing its job of transporting glucose into cells (this is called insulin resistancefn5 in medical language). The result? More insulin is produced by the pancreas to compensate.
Summary
We learned in chapter 4 that leptin, the hormone produced by our fat cells, is constantly working to try and keep our weight on an even keel. When we over-eat, and lay down too much fat, our leptin level increases. This is sensed by the weight-control area in our brain (the hypothalamus) and leads to powerful unconscious changes in our behaviour. Hormones work to decrease our appetite and increase our metabolic rate. Our food intake is lowered and energy expenditure increased – thus regulating weight gain. This is how most people, with only moderate effort, can maintain a regular weight for
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Studies show that leptin resistance can be reversed by changing the quality of the food that is consumed.
We have learned that it is impossible to sustain weight loss in the long term unless you have first reset your weight set-point to a lower level. The basic premise of this book is that we can only do this by adjusting the type of food we eat, changing our food culture, de-stressing, improving our sleeping habits and maintaining good muscle health.
Sleeve Gastrectomy and the Gastric Bypass
Working procedures by changing the appetite and satiety hormone levels
There are currently two main types of bariatric surgery that really do work, and they work by permanently changing the weight set-point: the sleeve gastrectomy and the gastric bypass.
Our one-celled ancestors were stuck in this evolutionary jam, remaining single celled for 2.5 to 3 billion years …
Due to lack of oxygen - for better energy production
The process of evolving a large brain in a new species is called cephalization (from the Greek word enkefalos for brain).
One of our other organs would have to be sacrificed in order to free up this energy within our confined budget.
In order to evolve a larger brain
The amount of energy that an animal can use up over time is called its metabolic rate.
Their conclusion therefore was that the metabolic room necessary for brain growth and evolution came from a decrease in the size of our guts – to evolve our large brain, our gut was sacrificed.
Cephalization, the evolution of our big brain, coincided with the discovery of fire (800,000 years prior to the first humans, i.e. plenty of time for our species to develop from Homo erectus) and with our increasing mobility and improving vision.
Raw foods take more energy for our digestive systems to process than cooked foods. This is because the very process of cooking is almost like a pre-digestion. Cooked foods required a less effective intestinal tract to extract the same energy compared to raw foods.
All three of them have the same energy budget per day because they are all mammals and weigh the same. They all need about 2,000kcal per day.
Not only that but he can take in all his daily nutritional requirements much faster than the chimp, and particularly the gorilla, who spend large parts of the day eating.
The release of energy from cooked foods not only enhanced our ability to evolve larger brains but also gave us the time to use that brain while other animals were eating.
Without roasting, frying, boiling or baking our food we would not have been able to evolve a small gut and a large brain.
Could We Survive on Raw Food?
What happens to raw foodists?
Human males are not as fast as their prey, but they have two advantages. The first is that after learning to stand and balance on two feet, the early humans rapidly became the most efficient animals at moving. They lost their insulating hair as they discovered warming fires and clothes, meaning that they could cool themselves very efficiently by sweating, compared to most animals that rely on panting to cool their bodies when running. Humans take less energy per unit weight than any other mammal to move distances.
Why did early humans organize their male and female tribe members to go looking for different foods?
Once they had killed an animal, quite often they would eat the most prized part of it raw immediately, before carrying the rest back to camp.
The food quality of these organs, many of which we now commonly discard, is exceptional – they contain many essential fats, vitamins and minerals. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors prized one nutrient above all others – even above the sugar in honey – fat.
In today’s world, up to a third of all fresh foods grown for supermarkets do not reach us because they do not measure up to the supermarkets’ standards, because they either do not look right, or are bruised, or are just not fresh enough.
The dietary amount of carbohydrate consumed by our ancestors was much lower than today and the carbs that they did manage to obtain were totally unrefined
This shows what the real Palaeolithic diet consisted of: lots and lots of meat, fatty offal and bone marrow, with a top-up of a staple unrefined carbohydrate and seasonal foods as a treat.
Real paleolithic diet
They started to solve their food supply problem in around 20,000 years BC.
When agriculture has been started in Egypt.
Agriculture meant that much of the population of a town did not have to spend their day in the pursuit of food, unlike their nomadic ancestors. Their time was freed up for tool-making and later to develop the other benefits of civilization such as science and education.
However, something unusual happened to the health of the populations in the new towns and cities. Even though they were safe from predators and from famine, the populations of the early post-agricultural age were weaker and shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Many became poorly nourished as they were now eating the limited foods that were available from farming, instead of the wide variety of plants and animals that the hunter-gatherers had consumed.
They needed to know what was nutritious and what was poisonous – and to facilitate that our ancestors developed sensors in the mouth that would give them clues as to whether something was safe to eat or poisonous, and whether it was nutritious.
Evolution has hard-wired our sweet taste buds straight to the pleasure area of our brains. If the signal is strong enough – if the sweet food is sweet enough – the signal we get, straight to our brain, is the same as if we had taken an opiate drug like morphine or heroin (maybe not a large dose – but the signal is the same). The sweetness signal calms our emotions and improves our mood.
Then, 10,000 years ago in Indonesia, farmers first cultivated a type of stout grass that accumulated sugar in its stalk: sugar cane.
Discovery of sugar cane
European civilization was not exposed to sugar until much later. Probably the first contact with sugar traders was during the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. French, Roman and English soldiers started to bring ‘sweet salt’ back to Europe, stimulating the interest of royalty and other wealthy citizens. Spain, Cyprus and Portugal (Madeira) started to produce their own sugar, but the price remained extremely high due to intensive labour costs in growing and processing it. It remained a rare, expensive delicacy.
eventually 10 million Africans were forcibly transported to work on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil.
Late 15th century
The merchants lined their pockets with every transaction – filling slave ships in West Africa and selling the slaves to plantation owners in the Caribbean, then loading the ships with sugar (and rum) in the Caribbean and selling it in Europe. Finally, they would complete the triangle by transporting guns and munitions from Europe and trading them with African warlords for the slaves they had captured from neighbouring tribes. It became a highly profitable trade in misery.
Dark sugar slavery triangle
The presence of black and rotting teeth in a person signified that they had the financial means to have bought enough sugar to rot their teeth – at the time this was deemed a desirable look!
Even without the benefits of modern medicine Victorian life expectancy mirrored ours.
Read below to see victorian diet
Most of the meat they consumed was in the form of this cheap offal – rich in essential micronutrients and in saturated fats, especially cholesterol.
Victorian's meat consumption
Combine all this with an active job and soon you get to live the same age as we do now without having access to modern healthcare to achieve it.
Victorian diet
For the first time in human history the population had access not only to locally produced fresh foods but also to foods from long distances away, sometimes from different countries or even different continents.
Started with the industrial revolution
This food had to remain edible, despite the long distances travelled. Ideally, food would be produced that could have a long-term shelf life. This meant that the food had to be altered to extract the parts that would make it go off (in most food this includes omega-3 ‘good fats’ – we’ll discuss this later) which would then be replaced with a substitute that could act as a preservative (various of the E-numbers you now see on food packaging) and other ingredients that would make the food more palatable (mostly sugar, salt and fat combinations).
Replacing foods ingredients with preservatives
Hybridization and Genetic Engineering
The story of changing wheat
They are addicted to the reaction their body gives them to this highly processed food, just as some people are hooked on the buzz they get from sugar, and still others hooked on opiate drugs – the brain-signalling pathways are just the same.
Sugar addiction: the same brain signalling pathways
Summary
It also explains why we, as humans, are so inquisitive about food, why we love to prepare and cook and experiment with it, why it fascinates us so much. Cooking defines us.
