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I love fat!
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But not for the reasons you might expect.
For years, we assumed that body fat was nature’s way of storing energy for the winter. Even those of us in the evolutionary nutrition set thought that excess body fat may have been useful for Paleolithic man and woman as they trekked long distances with little sustenance – as sort of an anti-famine insurance plan. But when you do the math, you realize that the amount of fat required to trek long distances doesn’t really necessitate the levels of body fat we see on your average Walmart shopper. In fact, at 3500 calories per pound of body fat, and 100 calories expended per walked mile, a 165 pound caveman with 13% body fat could survive weeks and walk several hundred miles. There must be more to it.
As Art de Vany describes it, fat is actually a toxic waste site. That is, when we consume excess sugars and carbohydrates, the storage of body fat is our body’s roundabout method of dealing with the toxic stuff. When the body detects a toxic glucose load – and it doesn’t take much sugar to send “toxic” signals – insulin is secreted, which in turn takes sugar out of the blood and pushes it on the muscles. The problem is that most people don’t have enough muscle mass to use the ridiculous amounts of sugar consumed by most people in this country. If there’s not enough muscle, the sugar gets deposited in new fat cells. Body fat, we find, is the body’s mechanism for storing toxic sugars.
It’s a fairly ingenious adaptation, actually. See, the over-consumption of sugars is a relatively recent phenomenon for humans. Before agriculture made grains and sugars ubiquitous, early man lived for tens of thousands of years on meat, vegetables, and nuts. Seasonal fruit and the occasional piece of honey comb was pretty much their only source of sugar, and they lived fairly active lives, so what little sugar they did consume was put to immediate use.
The body’s adaptation is always one step behind, though, and it becomes a vicious cycle. Fat, inactive people get fatter because their muscles have no room for the sugar they’re consuming. And even the fat cells start to fill up faster than the body can create them, leaving plenty of toxic sugar coursing through the bloodstream until the next carb-laden meal. Next stop: type 2 diabetes. Yay!
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