Something Beats Nothing Every Time

Another medium day, status quo so far but next week I think we start adding 4th and 5th rungs to each ladder on medium and heavy days. I have also managed to get a copy of the Art Of Strength Providence DVD workout that I think I will be attempting. There are some pretty interesting moves on the video, I can’t wait!

In the Vancouver Sun today, other than the Tsunami warning there was a small tag line about a series they are running tomorrow:

“Sugar: Part 1 of a 6-part series

The way Canadians eat sugar has changed dramatically since the 1960s and growing obesity rates are evidence that we might be getting it wrong. In Saturday’s Vancouver Sun, read the first installment of a six-part series on sugar.”

Might? We MIGHT be getting it wrong… talk about your understatement. I stole this from Fitbomb who has written a great piece on the Paleo diet that contains links galore as to why all of our current thinking is as much garbage as the food we are told to eat.

“Admittedly, I’m no scientist, and I’m far from articulate on the subject of human metabolism. But my reading comprehension skills are decent, and I’ve gleaned quite a bunch from Gary Taubes, Michael and Mary Dan Eades, Weston A. Price, Loren Cordain, Robb Wolf, Kurt Harris and others:

• When eaten, neither protein nor fat — without carbohydrates — has any effect on blood glucose. But when we take in carbohydrates, our blood sugar levels shoot up. (This isn’t news; in fact, it’s the scientific basis underpinning the popular movement away from eating refined carbs like white bread, which have the effect of suddenly spiking blood glucose. But as we’ll discuss later, whole grains aren’t the bees’ knees, either.)

• Whenever blood glucose levels rise, the pancreas reacts by releasing a surge of insulin into the bloodstream. Insulin is a hormone that happens to be the primary mover and shaker in human metabolism. Among its many functions, insulin manages nutrient storage by driving excess blood sugar, fats and protein into the interior of our cells, where they can be used as energy or stored as fat.

• Although there are numerous factors that can affect how much insulin we produce, as well as how our bodies respond to insulin and blood sugar, the basic rule is this: The more carbohydrates we eat, the more insulin we end up secreting in reaction to the spike in blood sugar.

• As a result, two key things happen:

• • First, with all the excess blood sugar and surge in insulin, the liver no longer stores glucose as glycogen — a fuel source for the body. Instead, the glucose is synthesized into fatty acids, which are exported from the liver as lipoproteins. These lipoproteins are ripped apart as they circulate through the body, providing free fatty acids to be sucked up into the body’s cells — including the body’s adipose fat cells, in which the fatty acids are then bound up together to form triglycerides.

• • Insulin also inhibits the breakdown of fat in adipose tissue by interfering with the mechanisms that enable triglycerides to split into their constituent fatty acids. Triglycerides are bigger than fatty acids — and too big to escape our adipose fat cells. In other words, once triglycerides form in your adipose fat cells, the excess insulin produced by your body makes it difficult for you to break them back down. So when we eat more carbohydrates and produce more insulin, more triglycerides — which are also now prevented from breaking down into fatty acids — are synthesized and locked up inside our fat cells.

• And so, over time, our fat tissue swells.

In summary, if you take in carbohydrates in excess, your adipose fat tissue’s likely to expand. You get fat.”

There is so much evidence coming to light about the dangers of sugar, but only very slowly people are realizing that not only sugars, but things that your body turns into sugars are bad, like bread, pasta, grains of all kinds. We are not being betrayed by our bodies, quite the opposite, we are betraying our ancestry by eating foods that we were never designed to eat. Not only that, we are doing the same things to our animals, forcing them to eat grains to fatten them up so we can eat them.

Hang on…

We are feeding cattle grains to fatten them up? So they will produce fattier meat? But the food pyramid says…

You are getting the picture now cowboy (see what I did there…).