It gets broken into smaller particles of fat and gets absorbed as fat. Good fats (like those found in nuts and fish) decrease your body’s inflammatory response, and bad fats increase it. That inflammatory response, which we’ll explain in the next posts, is a contributing factor to obesity and its complications. If you’re exercising and have used up all readily available carbohydrates (sugar), your muscles can use fat for energy, which is a great way to erode your love handles.
Posts Tagged healthy eating
Fat (as in funnel cake)
Jul 7
Protein (as in meat)
Jul 2
It gets broken down into small amino acids, which then go to the liver. If the liver can’t send them to your muscles (say, if you’re not exercising and don’t need them for muscle growth or maintenance), then, yep, they get converted to glucose, which then gets converted to fat if you can’t use it for energy.
They take longer to digest, so there’s a slower release of the carbohydrates that have been converted in your bowel to sugar to become sugar in your bloodstream. That means your digestive system is not stressed as much. Still, if your body can’t use this slower sugar when it’s released, it gets converted to fat.
Simple sugars (as in a cola)
Jun 22
When sugar, which is quickly absorbed and sent to the liver, meets the liver in the digestion process, the liver tells your body to turn that sugar into a fat if it can’t be used immediately for energy.
Oh, the Gall
Jun 17
Your gallbladder may seem as unnecessary as bad goatees, but one of its functions is to help store bile—that digestive juice that helps your body absorb nutrients. Obese people have a greater than 50 percent chance of developing gallstones. Why? An overworked liver caused by being overweight makes bile, which is more like sludge than liquid, and predisposes them to developing stones. It’s also more likely that you’ll develop stones when you lose weight fast, like after weight-loss surgery—because the gallbladder doesn’t empty enough when it doesn’t see any fat. So it’s not uncommon for a surgeon to remove the gallbladder during a gastric bypass procedure. The risk factors for developing the painful stones are easy to remember, because they sound like an R & B group. They’re the 4 Fs: female, fertile, fat, and forty. (We don’t mean this to be a gender issue, but the fact is that women are more likely to have gallstone symptoms than men.)
Contrary to popular belief, not all ingested protein becomes muscle, and not all the fat in your food gets stored on your hips. Everything has the potential to turn into fat if it’s not used by your body for energy at the exact time it is absorbed through your intestines.
In terms of weight gain, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. Calories not used immediately by your body for energy are either eliminated as waste or stored as fat. YOU-reka! But that doesn’t mean that all calories are treated equally by your body. For example, protein and fiber with high water content have a great effect on satiety, and simple carbohydrates have the least effect on satiety. (Fat, by the way, has an effect on satiety similar to that of protein and fiber, which is why low-fat diets leave people hungry all the time.) When it comes to converting calories, your body processes fat most efficiently—meaning that you actually keep more of it, because your body doesn’t need to expend as many calories trying to store it. On the flip side, your body works hard to process protein, to make it highly flammable to your body’s metabolic furnace.
Digestion
Jun 9
The average person has 10,000 taste buds, which are onion-shaped structures. People regenerate new taste buds every three to ten days, but these regenerate at a slower rate as people get older. Elderly people may have only 5,000 taste buds.
Now, don’t underestimate your stamp licker as a player in this digestion process. Back in the day of buffalo-hide cocktail dresses, people relied on their tongues (and their noses) for survival; if it tasted good, then it was safe, and if it tasted like dinosaur dung, then it could be poisonous or toxic.
We do the same things, but in slightly different ways. Since our bodies use our senses to process information, we rely on our tongue for information about food. The information we acquire sends messages to the brain, and then the brain sends messages to our forks: keep eating or stop eating. That message largely comes from our five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and unami, which recognizes the inherent deliciousness in foods like juicy filet mignon), but it also comes from what we smell. Some researchers say that three-quarters of how we “taste” certain foods actually comes from how we smell it. What’s this have to do with your waist growing? For one, there’s the obvious: the more you like a bad-for-you food, the more likely you are to keep eating it. But the genetics of taste and taste buds may play an even more subtle and fascinating role.
On your gastrointestinal interstate, everything enters via your physiological toll booth: your mouth. The nutritious powerhouses slide through the express toll to give you the power, energy, stamina, and strength to live your life. Toxic (though sometimes tasty) foods can enter too, but you’ll pay a heavier toll later for the damage they do along the way and after. Throughout its journey, your food and all of its nutrients (and toxins) will pull over at various organs, slow down on winding roads, speed up, merge with other nutrients, and even get pulled over by the bowel brigade for nutritional violations.
During every trip, your food hits a symbolic three-pronged fork in the road:
• Either it will be broken down and picked up by your bloodstream and liver to be used as energy.
• Or it will be broken down and stored as fat.
• Or it will be processed as waste and directed to nature’s recycling pot: the porcelain junkyard.