Nutrition News: 5 Simple Steps to INCREASED HEALTH
KIS(S) – keep it simple. The majority of us have heard of this and it is exactly what EFM Nutrition is all about. Many EFM members ask for some simple guidelines they can follow in terms of training and eating. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just commit to one simple thing and increase your health? Well, we have not only one, but five and each of them can be scaled to individual taste and even if you commit to just 50% you will see a significant improvement.
So what does increased health mean? Health tends to be linked to weight or body composition. Most likely because these aspects of health are measureable, whereas it is hard to put a number to how you feel, constantly tired, lacking energy and lethargic, dry skin, head and stomach aches, muscle pain, poor digestion, poor sleep and a consistent feeling of not being 100%.
For us, it is crucial that waist measurements are decreased, and the overall feeling of wellness is increased, with a rise in energy levels, increase in productivity (not just at work but also in the gym, in the garden, on the hikes) and also that lean muscle mass is increased. When you start feeling, looking and performing better, there is also a very good chance that your risk of metabolic syndrome, heart disease, diabetes, cancers and any other illness will decrease.
We recommend that you follow our 5 Simple Steps plan and you will begin to see real improvements.
The 5 Simple Steps:
- Eliminate sugars and reduce carbohydrates
- Increase your fat intake (read on to find out why)
- Increase your protein intake, preferable from grass fed free range meats
- Increase non-starchy veggies and moderate fruit intake.
- Get more sleep, train smart and fuel your activity.
Eliminating sugar and reducing carbohydrate:
By sugar, we mean the table sugar that you either add or the industry adds for you. Sugar in Australia normally comes from canes – but like with any other sugar original, we have taken all the fibres out of this product and kept the sugar. In nature, sugar is wrapped in fibre thereby making it harder to digest and resulting in a more controlled sugar release into the bloodstream when consumed as a whole. When the fibre content is removed, the metabolic disturbances are increased and we are not designed to handle an overload of sugar long term.
When sugar is digested within the body, it is broken down into glucose. The brain requires glucose to survive. When you eat pasta, you basically get a large dose of glucose (the carbohydrate in pasta is ultimately broken down into glucose) and the body packs and stores the glucose as glycogen. Any part of the body can use glucose but it doesn’t mean that it needs it – it runs just as well on fat (the end product of the body breaking down carbohydrate and fat is the same – glucose!).
The figure above shows 'simple' carbohydrates and starch and what they are broken down to. The important take on this figure is that most carbohydrates are broken down to glucose, fructose or galactose
In a well functioning body, an intake of glucose will automatically stimulate the release of insulin to metabolise the glucose – Insulin drives glucose out of the blood and either into the cells where it is used for energy or where it is stored as fat.
Too much sugar in your blood stream is toxic to the body, which is why the body converts it into stored fat if required. With a release of insulin comes leptin, a hormone that tells your brain that you have had enough, and it suppresses the hunger signalling hormone ghrelin.
Fat & Cholesterol:
When we say it causes fat storage, what really happens through a range of biochemical reactions, is that the excess glucose is ultimately converted into saturated fat. This increases the cholesterol called VLDL – remember cholesterol is a transport mechanism for fat and also very important to the whole body functioning. The outcome of VLDL is LDL. This one most people recognize as being the ‘BAD’ cholesterol and that might be true. More recent research has found that there are two different kinds of LDL- cholesterol; a pattern A which is large and buoyant and as far as we know, not harmful.
The other kind is called pattern B, which is small and dense and is lethal due to its ability to gain access underneath the endothelia layer in your arteries and cause the plaque that is potentially linked to heart diseases. Dietary fat increases your pattern A, the harmless one – whereas excess carbohydrates increase the pattern B, the dangerous small and dense fat.
Fruit, fructose and sucrose:
If you eat a lot of sucrose (a complex carbohydrate made from glucose + fructose, found in fruits and vegetables), the glucose can be metabolised by the muscles whereas the fructose can’t; fructose has to go through the liver and once it has filled up the glycogen stores in the liver, the leftover fructose will have to be converted into fat as mentioned above with excess glucose.
One of the major issues with fructose is that it doesn’t stimulate insulin and when there is no insulin released you will not stimulate leptin either. This means that you will not get the message that you have eaten something and don’t need anything else – you don’t feel full.
The other inconvenient side effect of fructose is that it is more likely to increase Advanced Glycation End products – in short AGE, which in essence is what happens in the skin cells that makes them go old. AGE is also what happens when your steaks go brown – it is the browning effect and that can happen to your arteries as well.
Furthermore, when fructose is metabolised it increases the levels of palmatic acid, and raises the LDL levels, but it also increases the amount of ‘fat droplets’ in your liver because of the excess triglyceride production in the liver. This means that your liver will store more fat and it can end up with what is known as non-alcoholic fatty liver (Ackerman et all, Hypertension 2005: 45: 1012-1018). The liver is like the factory in the body that is in charge of so many key elements, so you don’t want it to be fat storage site.
When examining scientific evidence there are strong correlations between the damage that ethanol causes and too much fructose (mainly from sweetened food and not eating fruit as such) on the liver. Some say that for the body fructose is like alcohol just without the buzz.
This list of effects of chronic, long term consumption of excessive carbohydrates and especially fructose from sweetened food products is scary and many of these come under the umbrella of Metabolic Syndrome:
- Leptin Resistance (no leptin – no ‘stop eating’ signale
- Insulin resistance (no insulin, more storage, more illness; diabetes, cardivascular diseases)
- Inflammation (heart disease, diabetes)
- High fasting blood glucose levels (and therby more inflammation and more insulin)
- High fasting insulin (as a result of 4)
- Increased adiposity (more fat storage)
- Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
- Dyslipidemia (too much fat in your blood)
- Hypertension (high blood pressure)
- Advanced Glycation End products
- Type 2 diabetes
Sources: Elliot et al, Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 2002, 76, 911–922. Bray et al, Am. J. Clin. Nutr., 2004, 79, 537–543. Johnson et al, Am. J. Clin. Nutr., 2007, 86, 899–906. Teff et al, J. Clin. Endocrinol. Metab. 2004, 89, 2963–2972.) Gaby, Alt. Med. Rev. 2005, 10, 294–306. Lê and Tappy, Curr. Opin. Clin. Nutr. Metab. Care 2006, 9, 469–475. Wei et al, J. Nutr. Biochem. 2007, 18, 1–9. Rutledge and Adeli, Nutr. Rev. 2007, 65, S13–S23
Our Advice on Carbohydrate and Fruit:
So what is a healthy level of carbohydrate and fruit? It depends on where you start and possibly also how your metabolism is functioning. Let’s say that you are currently consuming a combination of typical carbohydrate sources such as; bread, cereals, pasta, crackers, rice, potatoes, and sweet drinks, at every meal, this would be qualified as a high carbohydrates diet. All we encourage you to do is to take it down and substitute it with protein, veggies and fat! Yes, you read correctly – fat!
We have tried to keep this information short, precise and straightforward.
1- Eat better quality: How much? As much as possible.
* Instead of fibre from bread, use vegetables. Instead of cereal get up 3 min earlier and cook an omelette with vegetables in, some left over from last night (who says that we HAVE to have cereal in the morning – it is just a habit!) and maybe some natural yoghurt (if they can handle it).
* Instead of giving your children juice, give them an orange – juice is concentrated fructose!
* Instead of having potato chips, have a few nuts, a slice of coconut and a carrot.
* Instead of pasta, use cabbage, cauliflower or any other vegetable.
* Take it one step at a time, make a real commitment to change, monitor and evaluate. Give it some time, be patient.
2- Limit processed foods: Especially sugar sweetened items. How much? As much as possible.
* If you are to buy something, find one with no sugars added (check out the pictures below and see how many different words you can find for sugar! – funny thing is that one of the companies below is currently running a series of TV commercials where they promote how they use natural ingredients and so are taking care of you and your children). When you see they have added fructose, you should hear alarm bells ringing and immediately put it down!
* Substitute your processed food with real, free range, grass fed foods.
3- Eat some fruit, but choose the ones in season, and don’t go crazy: If you carry too much fat around the waist, go easy on the fruit for a while, until you start seeing and feeling some improvements. Fruit is mainly water, and 1-4 pieces of fruit is probably not where we need to emphasize our efforts, but it is also still sugar – fructose and if somebody has insulin issues as mentioned in this article, we strongly recommend a more cautious approach.
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- The figure above shows ‘simple’ carbohydrates and starch and what they are broken down to. The important take on this figure is that most carbohydrates are broken down to glucose, fructose or galactose
The bottom line is that we need to make some changes in the way we not only perceive food but also in our common understanding of what is supposedly bad or healthy. We humans are notoriously poor at acknowledging when we have made a mistake, but at some point, some one has to question what has happened over the last 30 years. We have been told to reduce fat intake to 30% of our daily intake and replace it with carbohydrate calories instead. Have we managed to reduce heart diseases as set out being one of the targets? Have we reduced obesity? Have we reduced cancers? Have we reduced cases of diabetes? You all know the answers, so step back, gather the information and most importantly, make a positive change
This information was provided by EFM Nutrition and Soren Kristensen. For more information, vist the efm nutrition website.
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