Thursday, January 31, 2008

Get on the Bandwagon


I love popular diet literature's use of the term "metabolism." There is nary a more confused term batted about than this essence of cellular fuel useage, better known as aerobic and anerobic metabolism. Before diving into that distinction, what distinguishes human metabolism from numerous fuel burnning systems, is the lack of linguistic imagination. If automobiles were humans, and engines were cellular metabolism, then food would be . . . gasoline. Snap, it's linguistic genius. Yet the real motivation for the analogy is the examination of the gas tank or fuel source.


The analogy takes a twist when we consider the gas tank. Humans don't really have a gas tank or do they? Adipose tissue or fat serves as a reserve fuel when immediate fuel sources run low. Usually we cycle through all our glycogen first, but as that's running low an increasing futile cycle of protein breakdown sends amino acids into cells to be burned as fuel. Finally, at about 5 to 7 days of starvation, amino acid cycling slows down to conserve protein and fat from adipose is almost exclusively used by cells as a fuel source.


More when you're older,


WG
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A Point of View

Modern Western society is awash in a sea of food affluence. For many of us, from the moment we arise in the morning to the time we fall asleep at night, the one rhythmic pattern occurring daily with anticipated consistency is food intake—and in many cases very high quality food intake. Even the smallest of excess calories consumed daily translates over time to excess energy being stored as fat in adipose tissue. ______________________________________ Overeating has become the symptom of a cultural disease associated with conditioned food intake, not a mystical physiologic process involving genes gone wild. From one diet manual to the next, the book offerings to navigate this mess are fancied up versions of the same old thing, eventually returning the dieter to a conditioned system of eating behavior. The contention of this blog, is it's time to get off the merry-go-round of dieting and learn the ABC's of basic nutritional science. Teach your children what they need to know to navigate the gauntlet of foods in the 21st century. We encourage any experts in the field to contribute.

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