Fat and Refined Carbohydrates: Married to Your Waist

The body converts food fat into body fat quickly and easily:     100 calo­

ries of ingested fat can be converted to     97 calories of body fat by

burning a measly 3 calories. Fat is an appetite stimulant: the more you eat, the more you want. If a food could be scientifically engineered to create an obese society, it would have fat, such as butter, mixed with sugar and flour.

The combination  of fat and  refined carbohydrates  has  an ex­ tremely powerful effect on driving the signals that promote fat accu­ mulation on the body. Refined foods cause a swift and excessive rise in  blood sugar, which  in turn triggers insulin surges to drive the sugar out of the blood and into our cells. Unfortunately, insulin also promotes the storage of fat on the body and encourages your fat cells to swell.

As more fat is packed away on the body, it interferes with insulin uptake into our muscle tissues. Our pancreas then senses that the glucose level in the bloodstream is still too high and pumps out even more insulin. A little extra fat around our midsection results in so much interference with insulin's effectiveness that two to five times as much insulin may be secreted in an overweight person than in a thin person.

The higher level of insulin in turn promotes more efficient con­ version of our caloric intake into body fat, and this vicious cycle con­ tinues. People get heavier and heavier as time goes on.

Eating refined carbohydrates — as opposed to complex carbohy­ drates in their natural state — causes the body's "set point" for body weight to increase. Your "set point" is the weight the body tries to maintain through the brain's control of hormonal messengers. When you eat refined fats (oils)  or refined carbohydrates such as  white

flour and  sugar,  the  fat-storing hormones are produced in excess,
raising the set point. To further compound the problem, because so much of the vitamin and mineral content of these foods has been lost