Fork You by Karl Denninger

I really ought to just give up and live the way I've been living since I discovered just how full of
crap virtually everyone is in the so-called "medical" and "dietary" field.

Let's just take one example here:

When I ask my patients what their downfall is, when it comes to weight loss, they unanimously
blame carbs. Their diet log will read: eggs-and-bacon breakfast sandwich, Subway sandwich and
chips for lunch, and a pork roast with potatoes for dinner. When asked the part of that menu that
is causing them to gain weight, they blame the bread from the sandwiches, the chips, and the
potatoes. It is always the bun, never the hamburger. Now don’t get me wrong; there is nothing
healthy about chips, loaded with fat. The sandwich bread is likely bleached flour with little, to
no, nutrient value.

However, the vast majority of the calories are coming from fat and protein. Pizza and donuts are
considered carbs despite the fact that they contain as many (or more) calories from fat as carbs.

So from this he blames the..... fats.

But that's wrong.

The reason is metabolic and we must start from the bottom up. At the bottom is what your cells
actually use for energy. It is not, as is often claimed, glucose. Cellular respiration runs on a
substance known as ATP.

Glucose is turned into ATP. So are lipids (fats); if they weren't it would be impossible to lose
weight as you couldn't use fats for energy. But you can, and you do.

Now here's the gotcha: Your cellular metabolism will prefer glucose as a fuel source if it is
available but you only have about a teaspoon of sugar (glucose) circulating in your blood at any
given point in time.

So where does it come from? Glycogen.

When the blood has the proper amount of glucose in it but there is more available in the digestive
system it is turned into glycogen and stored, mostly in the liver. Your liver can store about 100-
120g of it and your muscles can store anywhere from roughly that much to materially more,
depending on muscle build. However, while the liver reserves are global, that is, they are
broken back down into glucose and circulated by the blood as required, muscle stores are not;
they are local to that specific muscle as the muscles lack the enzyme necessary to release the
glycogen back into the bloodstream.
What this means is that while technically you may have 2,000 calories of glycogen in your body
if you are running (and thus your leg muscles are the largest consumers of energy during that
activity) only the liver-stored glycogen plus that in the leg muscles is available to the legs.

The roughly 2,000 calorie storage limit (in a very muscular person), or the roughly 1,500 calorie
limit in an average or even moderately-athletic person, has another important implication: Your
body can only store 1,500 calories of carbohydrate-generated energy at any given time.

If you eat a carbohydrate-based diet and are not a peasant (that is, you have plenty of food
available to you) then you almost never fully deplete those stores. Yet in order to burn the fat on
your body you must deplete those stores first because your body will prefer to use them rather
than break down and consume the fat.

This is very important because if you ever fill your glycogen reserves completely your body
has only two things it can do with any additional energy intake: crap it out or store it as fat -
- that is, make you fat.

Remember always that your body prefers to burn carbohydrate (glucose) if it's available.
Therefore if you eat a carbohydrate-based diet you have one cardinal rule you have to follow:

You must not completely fill your glycogen stores because if you do then you are forced to
run those stores completely empty before any weight loss takes place.

This is a viable strategy for eating provided you do not consume "fast" carbohydrates. That is, if
your diet consists primarily of green vegetables and similar, for the simple reason that those
foods are not particularly calorie-dense. In fact if you actually had to walk and pick said green
vegetables you might well find that your endeavor is calorie negative on balance. (Look at the
label on a package of brussels sprouts and do the math.)

Unfortunately as soon as you add any form of "fast" carbohydrate to the mix you have a problem
because consumption of these foods creates an immediate spike in insulin level to prevent your
blood glucose from going out of range. Your body goes into overdrive withdrawing the glucose
from the blood to store it in the form of glycogen.

However, when that glucose is all stored you now have a large amount of insulin circulating in
the blood and thus your blood sugar falls. This makes you hungry and that's a big
problem because your glycogen stores are full; if you take in additional food at that time your
body has only two possible responses -- store it as fat or (if you really overwhelm things) fail to
digest it and crap it out.

Now if you eat like a peasant because you are one then this is not a problem because you
don't have any more food. Whether you'd like some is immaterial; you can't eat what you don't
have. And this, my friends, is why the cited article that quotes Ghana is horsecrap; sure, those
people can eat starches but they have no fats to go with them to any material degree and they
also don't have freezers and refrigerators full of high-glycemic foods to grab for when they get
hungry!
You do.

Now let's dispense with the other side of it; there exist a historically large number of population
groups who all ate starch-based (that is, carbohydrate) diets and there were no material amount
of "western diseases" (metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, etc) in those populations.

True but misleading, for two reasons.

First, their life expectancy sucked and these diseases (particularly heart disease) tend to get you
once you make it past 50-60 years old. If the mean life expectancy is 55 then statistically
speaking heart attacks are going to be rare simply for the reason that few people live long
enough to have one. Second, if you're intake limited by your wealth and food access then you
also won't develop metabolic syndrome or get fat because irrespective of how hungry you are
you can't insult your body's metabolic functions often enough and deeply enough to do the
damage that causes same, nor can you afford the calories required to become obese.

However, this doesn't mean the mechanism isn't there -- it is, you're just never abusing it. And
for evidence of this, and that the mechanism of damage isn't saturated fat consumption we can
look at the Inuit.

The Inuit historically lived on a nearly-carbohydrate-free diet. It featured, mostly, seal

meat which is very high in fat, has zero carbs and is moderate in protein. Yet they had
nearly zero obesity and diabetes rates until one thing changed -- they were introduced to
carbohydrate-based foods that became available to them on a "all you wish" and inexpensive
basis, just as with western eating.

What happened? Their rates of obesity and diabetes skyrocketed over a very short period of time
to the point that the Inuit are now listed as a group of people who have one of the highest rates
of metabolic disorder in the world.

But wait a second... if fats and animal consumption was the cause of this then the Inuit would
have always had massive obesity and diabetes problems in their population. The fact is that they
didn't until they violated the cardinal rule of eating carbohydrate-based diets: THOU SHALT
NOT FILL THY GLYCOGEN STORES, ESPECIALLY WITH HIGH-GLYCEMIC
CARBOHYDRATES, WHILE OTHER FOODS ARE AVAILABLE.

I have long maintained that you can eat a carbohydrate-based diet if you wish but you have to
follow the rules. Essentially, you have to eat like a peasant, because it is virtually impossible to
know where your glycogen reserve level is at any particular point in time with accuracy and you
must eschew "fast" (high-glycemic) carbohydrates, which means any sort of added or raw sugar
must be avoided. Further, unless you're going to eat like and stock your pantry like a peasant,
you must also avoid most starches such as potatoes and refined carbs (such as breads) that
convert quickly to glucose in the gut. It also means that fats must be assiduously avoided
almost in their entirety because they are energy dense and thus you are great risk of exceeding
glycogen storage limits with them in your gut, which inevitably will lead to weight gain.
The other alternative is to remove the insulin spikes from your metabolic profile and thus also
get rid of all of the false signals to eat when you have no food requirement. If you do that there
is no reason whatsoever to evade the consumption of saturated fats because your body will run
on them just fine and you will not have a desire to overeat.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't eat fruits and vegetables, especially green vegetables. But
just remember that fruits were seasonally available throughout human history; that is, when they
were ripe and on a vine or tree. As recently as my youth if you wanted oranges in February they
were both terrible in quality and expensive. Now you can have them year-round but that's
definitely not what nature intended for anyone living in any given place. The same is true
of all fruits in a given area; to pretend that they're good in unlimited quantity at any
time, especially if you "process" them (e.g. by juicing or similar) flatly contradicts the reality of
nature.

How many of you could get up in the morning, having not eaten the day before since the supper
hour, and go run 13 miles in under 2 hours while eating a carbohydrate-based diet? Most of you
wouldn't even think about it. Yet with my normal, near-zero carbohydrate diet, this was my
pattern a weekend or so ago:

Wake up, 0530. Consume 2 double espressos.

Go run a 10k race with the gun @ 0730. Complete it in 51.59, or an 8:21 pace.

Come home, eat two strips of bacon and a 2-egg cheese omelet. A few hours later grill and eat a
split chicken breast, skin on.

Go run a 5k race with the gun @ 1730. Complete it in 26:26 for an 8:09 pace.

Have some cheese and meatballs at the after-party. Near-zero carbohydrates taken in.

Go home, go to bed.

Next morning, have two more double-espressos and then go run 13.1 miles in 1:49:57, or an 8:23
pace with the gun @ 0730, then sit around for about two hours while awards and such were
handed out. Finally, at about 11:30, have a hamburger and salad plus a celebratory beer; I was a
bit hungry.

How much glycogen (glucose) do you think was in my system for any of that right up until the
beer went down the chute?

Effectively zero.

This very same eating pattern, of very limited carbohydrate intake and all of it in slow carbs such
as green veggies but "eat when hungry" for saturated fats with moderate protein (not high
protein!) more than four years ago led to the loss of 60lbs of body mass which has stayed off
since -- but my dietary intake pattern has remained as it was, with low carbohydrate intake.
I went from not being able to run a half-mile to running half-marathons in under 2 hours. The
half last weekend, incidentally, broke my March half-marathon time by more than five
minutes and that was coming off two races (which I intentionally ran as "pace runs" rather than
all-out for time) the previous day.

The difference was that in March I was being sorta bad from time to time before the race and
came into it not really keto-adapted. The last three or so miles of that race sucked as I was
clearly having fuel-related problems and by the time I came across the line I was done; that's
what I earned for allowing carbohydrates, that is glycogen, to fuel my attempt. Even more-
telling the Pensacola half was done clean -- that is, without two races the day before. Had I run
the half here "clean" I suspect my time would have been ten minutes faster since I would not
have had any muscle fatigue to deal with from the previous day.

This time, when I finished, I wasn't spent -- I could have run another five miles.

Yes folks, it works. And more to the point, the data says that the problem isn't saturated fat in
the diet, it's fast carbohydrates when you have an effectively-unlimited supply of food along
with, quite-possibly, engineered oils (that is, nearly all vegetable-based oil products, none of
which can be used as they appear in nature the way we use them today.)

If you're going to eat fast carbohydrates (including starches that can be turned into them) then
you have to stock your pantry and eat like a peasant.

Since few people are going go to do that voluntarily the only logical thing to do is get all that
crap out of your pie hole along with the engineered oils.

Fork You (Part 2)

So it appears that people basically can't read, or more like it, they read into things whatever they
feel like, instead of reading for content.

Or, maybe, I'm not specific enough. So let me try this again.

We'll go back to what I said was the cardinal rule of carbohydrates, if you're going to eat them
and have concern about your body mass:

Thou shalt not fill thy glycogen stores.

There. That's it. Finis.

Now, this means you basically divide foods that bear carbohydrates into two groups: Those that
can fill your glycogen stores and those that cannot.

Those foods that have no carbohydrate in them (that is, those that are comprised solely of fats
and/or proteins) cannot fill your stores, since they do not have anything in them that gets turned
into glycogen; you may therefore eat them freely. (Yes, I realize this is not strictly true, but it is
functionally.) You do not wish to eat a huge percentage of protein, however, because your body
will wind up*****ing it out (it cannot use that much) and this is hard on the kidneys. Further,
there's no point in consuming something that won't serve your nutrition needs and anything that
you eliminate without using it is in that category. For those people without kidney disease this is
not harmful, but there's no reason to put that stress on your body as it confers no benefit and it's
an expense (out of your wallet, for openers) that serves no purpose.

Ok, back to the the carbohydrate thing. Your blood has roughly 1 teaspoon of sugar (16
calories!) in it at any given time. That is only enough to power your body for a few hundred
feet. Your liver can store in the neighborhood of 100-150g of glycogen. This amounts to
roughly 600 calories worth of energy at most (4 calories/gm for carbohydrate.) The liver is the
only source of glycogen that is globally available to the body. The muscles also store glycogen,
and depending on your build that's anywhere from another 100g to perhaps four times that much;
so in a highly-trained athlete you might have 2,000 calories available via this method --
however, any storage in a muscle is local to that muscle because the enzymes necessary to
liberate it as free glucose into the blood are not present in the muscles -- they are only in the
liver.

Walking consumes approximately 100 calories a mile; running about 20% more (it's less
efficient on-balance than walking) so to consume your liver's store of calories, assuming it is full
of glycogen when you start, you must walk 6 miles or run about 5. It's actually worse than that
because your leg muscles are large and hold a goodly percentage of your total body glycogen,
and you use those while running or walking -- thus, to deplete your glycogen reserves if you start
with them full you probably need to run or walk somewhere between a 10k and a half
marathon worth of distance! That's a long way and most people don't exercise anywhere near
that much in a day on a regular basis.

What this means is that it is very easy to fill your glycogen stores; the average person may have
1,500 calories of total glycogen storage available while the highly-trained athlete, with far more
muscle mass, probably has just over 2,000.

This, by the way, is a very good thing because any material amount of sugar in the blood is bad.
In fact it's so bad that it's effectively poisonous; the presence of too much is diabetes and that
excess sugar is extremely destructive, resulting in the death of tissue all over your body. This is
why diabetics go blind, have their limbs amputated and ultimately die if they can't keep their
blood sugar under control.

In other words the glycogen mechanism in your body is a buffer that, when operating
properly, mediates carbohydrate absorption that occurs at a rate faster than your metabolic
processes can consume the energy in them, allowing that energy to be consumed at an
appropriate rate. If this buffer runs out of storage capacity then the remaining energy is
converted to fat for longer-term storage. When the buffer is empty then the body will consume
said energy (from stored fat.) While some fat is consumed under aerobic exercise conditions
even when glycogen is present the metabolic preference is to consume first free glucose then
glycogen as that is metabolically easier to process (it is more efficient) than fats are.
So what can you eat that bears carbohydrates without filling said glycogen storage and thus
forcing the storage of fat on your body (that is, weight gain)?

That's easy. Here's an example:

This is a label off a package of brussels sprouts. Note that it says there are 6 servings of 45
calories each, and each serving bears 8g of carbohydrates -- but three of them are insoluble
(fiber) and thus 5g per serving are carbs that will be liberated into your blood during the process
of digestion.

This is a 24oz package. Half of a package is a full, large cereal bowl of said sprouts, massing
3/4 of a pound, and if you eat those that's three servings or 15g of carbs, all of them slowly
released, for a grand total of 120 calories over the space of two or three hours - a rate slower
than the rate at which your body naturally consumes energy.

Now contemplate attempting to eat 1800 calories, most adult's base metabolic requirement
on a daily basis, in Brussels Sprouts. You would need to eat seven and a half bags of them
massing 180 ounces or more than 11 pounds!

In one day. More to the point you'd be burning some of that at the same time so even if you did
attempt this it is extremely unlikely that you could ever fill your glycogen stores.

Point being that not only would trying to sustain yourself on such a food require a ridiculous pile
of brussels sprouts and not only would you be eating nearly all the time it would be damned
expensive! That bag is about $2.50 at the local WalMart, which means I'd have to eat almost
$20 worth of Brussels Sprouts a day.

This is the conundrum that one must face when people start talking about eating "healthy vegan"
or, for that matter, any sort of vegetable based diet. You're talking about eating like a (wild)
horse or some other grazing animal that subsists in the wild (not on our "supplemented" farm
feeds) on vegetable matter. All they do is eat, and the reason is that the caloric density of said
food is so low that they're constantly shoving vegetable matter down their chute in order to
prevent starving to death.

In other words everyone who is making such a claim is not really basing their caloric intake on
said vegetables irrespective of what they might tell you.

All of them are in fact either using high-glycemic load carbohydrates as their base energy
source or they're eating a serious amount of both protein and fats from some source -- and it's
probably, if they're trying to eat "vegan", the former.

If you're a peasant (or eat like one), then you will not gain weight because until your glycogen
store fills your body, assuming you're not metabolically compromised, will preferentially fill
glycogen rather than add fat. The same applies if you have a lifestyle that burns calories fast
enough that despite your eating habits your glycogen stores never fill (e.g. you exercise a lot,
whether through your job or for fun.)

But most people are not in this category; they neither exert themselves at that level nor do they
eat like peasants, titrating their intake assiduously to avoid having a bare pantry because their
refrigerator and pantry are full of available carbohydrate calories.

And they don't, despite their claims, get anywhere near "most" of their intake from "good"
vegetables either. Most of their caloric intake is coming from fast, dense carbohydrates and
that's bad news for most of the population, which is why so many who claim to have a "healthy
eating lifestyle" are overweight and find that the weight does not come off.

Now think back to what I pointed out up above -- 1 mile of running is about 120 calories of
energy consumed. Yet you can easily consume 1,000 calories of fast carbohydrates in 15
minutes in a restaurant or at home if you eat those foods, and unless your glycogen stores are
completely depleted when you do so you're odds-on to store some of that as fat.

In short it is nearly impossible to outrun your fork which is why I see all sorts of people at
both fun runs and even races who are materially overweight.

Now let's add another piece to the puzzle: In order to maintain your body mass within one
pound a year, plus or minus, you must be able to control your caloric intake and expense to
within 10 calories a day. That's the math; there are roughly 3,500 calories in a pound and 365
days in a year. To neither gain or lose more than a pound you must, on average, be within 10
calories of "balance" daily.

That's impossible to do outside of strict laboratory conditions where every energy intake and
expenditure can be accounted for.

But your own body systems are quite capable of doing this exactly as they are capable of holding
all sorts of other metabolic levels within normal limits -- blood sugar, blood pressure and similar.
Your body systems as with those of all animals have managed to do this over the space of
millions of years, or you wouldn't be here.

You just have to stop tampering with those processes.

How are most people tampering with that process? Simple.

When you fill your glycogen storage your body is forced to convert whatever caloric intake
remains to fat and store it, because if it doesn't your blood sugar will rise out of control. The
rate of digestion of that material (conversion into glucose) matters; those foods that convert their
carbohydrate content more-slowly than your body consumes energy cannot fill your glycogen
stores because your body can burn the fuel at a rate that exceeds what your digestive system can
provide. Glycemic index measures the speed of digestion of carbohydrate content for a fixed size
serving by mass while Glycemic load also takes into account density and approximates the
actual glucose-adding impact of eating a given thing. The problem is that if you fill glycogen
stores quickly by eating high-glycemic-load carbohydrates then your insulin level goes up
markedly to drive that process and when the carbohydrates are gone it takes a bit of time
before insulin levels come back down; during that period you feel like you are starving because
your body is metabolically trying to store rather than release glycogen-based energy.

In other words despite having energy available to your body it is present inaccessible because
your body's processes are attempting to drive storage to rather than consumption of
reserves and thus you get hungry.

This almost-inevitably drives you to overeat despite having plenty of glycogen in your
system and if you do eat since your buffer is full virtually all of what you eat at that point will
go on as additional body mass.

So remember the cardinal rule and then add a secondary consideration: Thou shall not fill they
glycemic stores and thou shall not eat high glycemic-load foods for they drive outsized-insulin
responses and thus make you hungry.

This means:

 Eat all the green vegetables you wish; they are both low glycemic index and load and in
addition have a low caloric density. It is virtually impossible to consume a material
percentage of your daily caloric intake via these foods and they contain plenty of high-
quality nutrients.

 Eat fruits in moderation and only whole. "Moderation" means, for example, one whole
orange every few days or a half-dozen strawberries daily. No juices, no dried fruits, etc.
The reason is the same; they are high glycemic both in load and index, and are calorie
dense as well. This means they will fill said stores rapidly. The most-important of
nutrients in fruits is Vitamin C (ascorbate); due to an error in our genetic code we are
missing an enzyme required to produce it in our bodies naturally and thus must take it in
via our diet in some form. (There are many other examples of this in nature; for example,
cats cannot synthesize taurine due to an error in their genetic code.) Note that while
many fruits are relatively high in glycemic index in their natural state they are
reasonable or even low in glycemic load. A whole orange, for example, has a moderate
glycemic index but a low glycemic load. Orange juice, on the other hand, has a nearly-
identical glycemic index but three times the glycemic load -- and thus has a markedly bad
impact on both insulin response and blood glucose. Eat the orange but do not drink the
juice!

 Do not eat starches of any form, ever, period, and do not add sugars to your diet except
in very small portions used as a garnish. All of these are high-glycemic load and most
are also high glycemic-index. They contain nothing you need and cannot obtain from
other parts of your diet. These are the "insulin bombs" that vegetarians and others trying
to "reduce the fats in their diet" usually wind up eating, and they're directly counter-
productive to both metabolic control and maintenance of healthy body mass. Examples
are potatoes (including the sweet variety) and other tubers, rice and any grain-based foods
such as pasta, breads, cereals and similar. Most of these foods are processed (e.g.
 cereals and breads), all of them are calorie-dense, all of them have a moderately-
high to high glycemic index and all of them have a high glycemic load, with many
exceeding that of white bread! High-fructose corn syrup is arguably the worst of the
bad, but none of these are good. Get them out of your pie hole!

Now as I have pointed out above if you follow these three points there's no way you could
possibly eat enough to remain in caloric balance (or even lose weight at a reasonable rate) from
the "good list" above alone. You'd be eating almost-literally all the time and in volumes that
would make you look like a grazing animal.

So now we come to what's next -- protein and fats.

You need a decent amount of protein in your diet. Protein contains essential amino acids that are
necessary building blocks for every tissue and organ group in your body. Consuming roughly a
quarter to as much as a third of your caloric intake in the form of proteins is good. While
proteins do get consumed as fuel (as well as being building blocks) they are slowly broken down
and thus have a low glycemic impact (that is, glycemic load.)

Fats are the remaining category. These too have an extremely low glycemic load (materially
lower than protein, in point of fact.) And here people go off the rails because there are four
kinds of fats, basically. They are:

 Saturated fats. These are (almost all) from animals. They are also the fats that everyone
has been screaming about to limit for the last 30 years. However, as people have done so
the prevalence of heart disease and similar has gone up rather than down. With any
sort of actual scientific process one would think that when a change is prescribed, it is
made, and then the results are the opposite you'd re-examine the hypothesis. That would
be logical, but don't expect logic from zealots. If saturated fats are the cause of such
evil events then explain how the Inuit had extremely low rates of heart disease,
obesity and diabetes while eating a diet extremely high in saturated fats (seal
meat) right up until they added unrestricted carbohydrates to their diet -- then their
rates of all of the above exploded. Saturated fats are solid at room temperature or
slightly below and do not go rancid for a long time. I eat these on an unrestricted basis in
their natural form, and use them for cooking as they are suitable for same due to their
relatively high smoke point. If you like bacon you have a great source of lard for cooking
purposes in the form of the excess bacon fat from cooking it; reserve it in a coffee mug
and keep it in the fridge.

 Unsaturated fats that are naturally-occurring. These are found in plants on a natural,
that is, unprocessed, basis. Avocados, for example, contain these fats, as do many seed
kernels (nuts.) These are perfectly fine to consume in unlimited amounts as part of your
fat intake in their natural form (by eating said plant.)

 Unsaturated fats that are not naturally-occurring. IMHO these should not be eaten.
Vegetable oils generally cannot be produced by any sort of natural process. Most of
these are produced using a multi-step chemical process involving (usually) hexane and
sodium hydroxide (lye.) While these chemicals are later removed their use is not the
 salient issue -- it is the concentration of substances from what would be
an outrageous amount of the raw plant material into a small volume of resulting oil. Just
because something comes from a thing does not make it ok; water is essential for life but
in large enough quantities it is dangerous or even life-threatening. The problem with
most unsaturated fats that are produced from plant-based sources lies here; they are not
natural products in that there is no possible way for you to consume them in the quantities
used for cooking or eating today by consuming them in their natural form as the amount
of the source material you would have to eat is grossly in excess of what you would
otherwise take in. I attempt to eat none of these, but this is hard to do especially if you
ever eat out as all the jack-a-wad fools have driven fryers and such to use these oils rather
than saturated oils (which is, in my view, exactly backward.)

 Hydrogenated and trans-fats. IMHO these should not be eaten in any quantity, ever,
period. These are not naturally-occurring products in any form. It is not simply a matter
of concentration and extraction (as with the above category), these are also chemically
modified to produce a shelf-stable product that is not attacked by naturally-occurring
environmental bacteria. The rise of these products in our diet and their promotion as
being "healthier" than saturated fats is correlated with the gross increase in heart
disease worldwide. This began as a wartime measure with Crisco as the nation had
serious shortages of naturally-occurring fats during that period and unfortunately turned
into a huge business when peace returned. It is very, very hard to avoid these fats in
packaged products, although trans-fats are being phased out (thank God!) Nonetheless
hydrogenated oils proliferate, and you should carefully read labels and eschew any
product containing them.

I don't claim to be a doctor but I know how to read. I also know how to look at what the so-
called "experts" have told us for decades and what the result of following their advice has been.
The basics of how the body works is also a set of known public facts, in particular how glycogen
is stored and consumed, and what happens when that storage is full. I also know, from personal
experience, that the claims by many that it is impossible to perform athletically without
carbs are lies.

Finally, I have myself and many others as examples. Not only did I lose 60lbs by eating this
way it's five years later and the weight has stayed off. I went from not being able to run a
quarter-mile to running half-marathons. I'm in better physical condition now than I was when I
was 17. While there is no such thing as "no risk" of a bad health event in anyone's future I
require no medication, my blood sugar is normal, my blood pressure is normal and I'm of normal
weight. I don't count calories and when I reached what appears to be a reasonably-ideal weight
the loss of body mass stopped without conscious intervention on my part.

Humans, as with other animals, have evolved to fit their environment over millions of years. We
wouldn't be here if our bodies were not capable of taking care of themselves on a gross physical
level; the species would have never survived. Yet we did right up to the point where we were
capable of engineering our own destruction through stupidity and, in my opinion, outright
bull**** and fraud.
It's your ass folks -- literally, the size of your ass. I can't make this sort of decision for you and
shouldn't be able to. Nor should anyone else. But before you believe those screaming on this
matter with regard to what has been the "standard recommendations" over the years, whether it
be reductions in salt intake, limiting saturated fats or anything else ask that they square their
recommendations against known biological facts and if they can't, demand an explanation.

Good luck getting one.

Fork You (Part 3, Tying It Together)

So if you've read the other two parts found here and here you know that they boil down to one
thing when it comes to metabolic processing, in my opinion:

Thou shalt not completely fill thy glycogen reserves.

Everything follows from this, as I see it.

I want to note that I didn't make this up: I observed it as a matter of historical fact looking
at evolutionary timeframes.

Therefore, I want to take this last component as an expand on that, as well as taking all of the
folks in the so-called "medical" and "dietary" establishments out behind the philosophical
woodshed and boffing them within an inch of their lives. After all, their recommendations have
only killed millions of Americans over the last decade and many more worldwide.

In short, I am going to put a challenge before them -- and you.

We will start with that which we know to be true:

 Homo Sapiens evolved over a very long period of time but our species, and all of the
structures in our body, were more-or-less fixed about 100,000 years ago.

 The first evidence of processing grains, that is, crushing wheat seeds to make flour, has a
history of approximately 8,000 years; the first evidence of this practice was
approximately 6,000 BC. Until the industrial revolution, however, which is only about
100 years ago, the fact that milled grain had a short shelf life made long-distance
transportation and long storage impossible. Note that at the outside this means that
processed grains have only been available to us for less than 10% of our evolutionary life,
and modern grains for a tiny fraction of 1%.

Now look at a chart of glycemic index and load. You will note that with the exception of
processed grains, starches and sugars virtually all of the food sources listed on it have a low to
moderate glycemic index and more importantly, a low glycemic load.
There are two further characteristics which are mutually exclusive among non-processed foods.
They are either (1) high in fat and/or protein, and thus energy-dense but very low to absent in
carbohydrate (meats, fish, nuts, etc), or (2) they are very low in caloric density, high in
carbohydrate as a percentage of energy content but very low in glycemic load due to their
caloric density.

In category #2 we have virtually all vegetables (excepting a few starchy ones) and fruits. Fruits
are on the higher end of caloric density and glycemic load as natural foods go but they are all
seasonal and have short (days) shelf lives absent industrial intervention. So while apples, for
example, have a moderate glycemic response you can only obtain them in nature during the time
they're on a tree, and when removed from said tree they go bad rapidly (are attacked by pests,
rot, etc.)

Now let's look at energy requirements. Your base metabolic requirement as a sedentary human
is probably somewhere around 1,800 calories a day, or 75 calories/hour. Since when sleeping
you consume less we'll call it 100 calories/hour during your time awake, which is a nice round
number. Remember that your blood only has 16 calories (about a teaspoon) of glucose in it at
any given time, so there is always a metabolic process going on that either stores or retrieves
energy from various places in your body; 16 calories of energy would only keep you going for
about 10 minutes sitting in a chair!

Now you are going to eat. Glycemic load tells you how fast the energy in a given carbohydrate
load you take in is liberated adjusted for portion size by mass, while Glycemic index is a relative
rating compared against white bread. Glycemic load is the more important of the two because it
adjusts for carbohydrate content per unit of mass where Glycemic index does not. There are a
few extreme cases where this matters; watermelon is very heavy in sugars (high GI) but since it
has low mass it is moderate in GL (you don't take in much in terms of mass-per-serving.)

If you are going to increase your glycogen stores you thus must digest (not eat) more than 100
calories per hour, assuming you are not active at the time. (Note that the paradox is that during
heavy exercise your digestion partially shuts down to shunt energy to your legs and cardio-
pulmonary system, which is why trying to stuff your face during or just before a race can be a
very bad idea and lead to a big brown problem!)

In short you must put more energy into your body through the digestive process than it
consumes in a given unit of time, or you cannot fill your glycogen reserves. If your
glycogen reserves are empty and you require energy you will burn fat. If your glycogen
reserves are full and you take in additional energy, you will add fat. Essentially your
glycogen reserves serve as a buffering mechanism.

So now the question: Can you fill your glycogen reserves assuming you eat broccoli, brussels
sprouts or other similar vegetative foods?

Not realistically. Note that you would have to consume roughly 3 cups of broccoli in an hour in
order to outrun your base metabolic demand, and this assumes that the broccoli is fully digested
and the energy released in that one hour. But it isn't; it takes quite a bit longer than that. The
same is true for the brussels sprouts and even carrots that are seen as being relatively high-
glycemic -- they carry 8g/cup of carbohydrate, but to start to fill your glycogen you would have
to eat three cups within one hour and all of it must make it into your bloodstream. Doubtful.

Equally important is the fact that to obtain 1,800 calories from these foods you'd have to
consume approximately 34 cups of carrots. That's more than two gallons of carrots. For
brussels sprouts, if you're wondering, it's almost three gallons (by volume.)

So what's quite clear is that it's essentially impossible to give yourself metabolic syndrome by
eating vegetables and fruits as they appear in nature, with the proviso that you have to treat fruits
as you would if there were no airplanes and over-the-road trucks. That is, you have to treat
them as seasonal varieties.

But what's also clear is that if you actually tried to subsist this way you'd starve to death unless
you were eating almost-literally all the time. Two to three gallons of vegetables, which is what
you'd have to gobble up eating them for your base energy requirement, would leave you doing
very little other than eating -- well, that and crapping out all the excess fiber.

Ok, so let's be reasonable here. Let's assume we limit our consumption of this part of our diet to
that which we reasonably can consume in a given day and actually have time to do other things.
We'll assume, therefore, that we eat four to five servings a day of foods in this category.

We have now consumed approximately 20-40g of carbohydrate but all of it was digested over
the space of two to four hours post-ingestion, and thus the net impact on our glycogen reserves
and our insulin level is basically zero. We have also consumed 200-300 calories out of our
budget.

We need, assuming we're not active, about 1,500 more calories.

Where do we get them?

The only two other choices that are not industrial are proteins and (natural) fats. But these
sources have no, or effectively no, carbohydrate content and thus do not load our glycogen at
all. They also don't spike insulin.

So you fill out your daily caloric requirement with those two.

Note that irrespective of exactly how you divide things up you'll never overload your
glycogen storage system nor will you produce huge insulin spikes because none of what
is naturally occurring that you can eat (not choose to eat!) is capable of producing those
spikes or loading.

And, I might add, you're eating low-carb.

Where does it go wrong and why are so many people fat?

It goes wrong as soon as you start eating anything that we manufactured throughout our short
time as "the smartest animal around" for convenience without taking into account the fact that
our bodies were not designed to process that sort of food in that way.

Guess what?

The more we've made this "possible" the fatter we get as a world because our bodies are not
designed to be able to properly process the alleged "food" we are taking in.

Those who wish to argue that eating things such as potatoes, pasta and any form of grain
(cereals, breads, crackers, cookies, etc) or any form of oil created from plant materials by gross
concentration over what you'd get from simply eating the plant have the burden of proof that said
nutritional profile and how it is digested is similar to that of any of the foods that we ate in
reasonably-comparable amounts prior to said industrial process.

They can't meet that burden because none of those foods in fact are digested in such a similar
fashion.

Further, if you claim to eat "vegetarian" or "vegan" then by definition you are eating a
diet that is obtaining roughly three quarters or more of its caloric intake
from engineered foods that do not exist in nature in the form you are consuming them,
unless you are eating the aforementioned three gallons a day of broccoli or similar -- you're
not, and you know it.

To those who disagree: I challenge you to show me your list of foods you believe meet the
above metric in the comment section below. Do not attempt to include rice; historically
speaking if you eat that as a staple, which is a starchy food (and many people have including
the Japanese and Chinese) you can do so provided you eat almost-no animal product of any
sort nor any refined grain. As soon as those two foods were added to both population groups
metabolic disease exploded upward and is now becoming an epidemic in China where it was
formerly almost-entirely absent. Never mind that working in a rice paddy is very difficult
manual labor!

All of the "engineered foods" that are carbohydrate based are, by virtue of their processing,
digested at grossly accelerated rates compared against the raw material. They thus release their
energy much faster and most are far more-dense too. A pound of pasta takes up a lot less
volume than a pound of broccoli, and yet it releases its energy much more quickly in your gut.

It's not that hard folks. It is, in fact, math, and those who claim that we should eat grains and
starches rather than meats are in fact proposing that we eat engineered things that do not and
cannot exist in nature and which our body was never designed to process in the form they're
being consumed.