DOES SUGAR MAKE US FAT?

Depending on the serving size, rice can be both weight loss friendly and fattening. Almost any food can cause weight gain if eaten in excessive amounts. 

Eating food from large plates or bowls may unknowingly increase calorie intake without people perceiving themselves as full. Hence, rice and wheat, and all the other forms of grains, off late have gained a lot of negative publicity… poor grainees.

But here I am going to discuss something more controversial. My absolute favorite and super weakness and many peoples favorite, whose consumption has dual property; Complete blissful satisfaction but also brings in lot of guilt. Let me try and make this food item guiltfree and sweet… Sugar. Yes, I am going to talk about this innocent little baby called sugar or sweet which people love but hate to love too.

Does Sugar Make Us Fat?

Let’s see how we can make sugar safe & non-fattening.

It is a favorite and an ongoing discussion and debate, which I have with others that Sugar per se does not make you fat. It is important to know the important role it plays in our health.

We have all heard and repeated ourselves that sugar which one had, has made us gain so much weight. All weight watchers need to avoid all types of sugars, etc. So, what is it about sugar that causes such dramatic weight gain, year in and year out? Is all sugar dangerous? Or is there a way to make eating sugar safe? And that’s what (the latter) I want to discuss today through this blogpost of mine.

I did bit of research to help me prove my point and I shall be using inferences of these researches from experts, here.

Let me first introduce you all to this magic hormone called Leptin; the 'satiety hormone'. Not

sure how many of us have heard of this hormone, but it is an interesting hormone to study and this magic hormone will help prove not just my point but also enlighten many of us about few fat and weight related challenges.

Let us proceed. The reason sugar is so detrimental, and many even consider it as toxic to our bodies has to do with its effect on leptin (the 'full' hormone) and insulin. But let us first understand what is Leptin; it is one of the many hormones which is in our body but this one is made by fat cells (this is very important point to note and I shall refer to it later in this article too) in response to energy deposition. Interesting right, now listen to this, it is released in our bloodstream and goes to various organs in the body to tell the organs that there is enough energy in our body and it is safe to engage in high metabolic activities. In other words, it communicates to our organs that the person has consumed food, which has provided enough energy and it is safe to engage in energy-expensive metabolic processes, i.e. leptin ensures the body is not starving. (I suggest you read this paragraph again).

For instance, during puberty or pregnancy or for making our bones stronger our body requires lot of energy, these are examples of "expensive" bodily processes. Another interesting fact, if you don't have leptin, you don't go through puberty or you can't get pregnant and you can't make strong bones. Leptin allows all these things to occur because the rest of the body, whether it's the brain or bones, seize leptin which is the "hunger hormone". The way leptin works is when leptin rises, your appetite diminishes, which means leptin is crucial in controlling how much you eat. Let me explain this, when your brain sees the leptin signal, it says “I am not starving, I don't need to eat so much” and your body can procreate, menstruate, have a baby, build strong bones, have a normal immune system and so on. When leptin does not transmit this signal, then the brain says “I am starving, I need to cut down my expenditure and start storing up my food intake in order to source energy and be able to make leptin". Basically, leptin regulates your metabolism and the rate of fat breakdown. As leptin levels rise, your metabolic rate increases. As leptin levels fall, your metabolism slows. Consider Leptin like a thermostat; when the thermostat reads the temperature in the house to be too cold, it turns on the heat, and if it's hot enough it turns off the heat.

Now that you have understood what Leptin is and its role (very important, right) let me move ahead. 

Okay so you might have a question in your mind, what has leptin got to do with Sugar, wasn’t that the topic of discussion? Well yes and allow me to now introduce another hormone which am sure all are aware of, Insulin. Why am I introducing Insulin here along with Leptin, well it comes across that these two are friends who were not meant to be friends 😊, because insulin blocks leptin. How sad is that ☹.

Let me now explain what happens to our friend leptin when it comes in contact with sugar and insulin. So, basically what we eat (sugar) can negatively affect our leptin (our metabolism and appetite) levels, this is called Leptin Resistance. That is, there is plenty of leptin in our system, but the brain is not responding to it. That could either be because the receptor has a mutation, or there is something downstream of the leptin receptor that's causing something to not work right. That's what, unfortunately most of the obese people have. Why does this happen and what should we do? This happens because the villain hormone called insulin blocks leptin… Insulin, the hormone that converts food into glucose. The reason insulin blocks leptin is because insulin tells our fat cells to store energy and that my friend, leads to weight gain.

Insulin shunts the energy that you eat (sugar, if you will) into fat. The fat cells turn that energy into fat, fatty acids and triglycerides, and then the fat cell makes leptin (remember I mentioned earlier how Leptin is made). So, what’s wrong in that, right? Well too much of anything is BAD and so in here also too much of insulin can stop leptin from doing its job -- to keep us feeling full.

Now it starts to get bit confusing, let me try and simplify. If insulin's job is to store energy, then it makes sense that it's the thing that stops leptin from working. Otherwise we would not be able to store the energy, as we would stop eating because the leptin is working.

Important question to ask is what made the insulin? Why is everybody's insulin 2-4 times higher today than it was 40 years ago? That's the problem?

If you have started to think that leptin resistance is a problem, well no it is not. Leptin resistance is the symptom of the problem. What made the leptin resistant? That's where sugar comes in. Sugar (glucose and fructose), it is in most of our favourite foods -- biscuits, doughnuts, cakes, pastries, chocolates. Let us now try to understand Sugar. Sugar is made of two molecules, one is called glucose and other is called fructose. We all know or are aware of that, right? Glucose is what I call as the energy of life. Every living cell of a human (not sure of other living beings and creatures) on our planet Earth (discounting alien species for now, let me encounter and befriend them to study their cellular structure before commenting on them) needs glucose for energy. Now see the beauty or magic of Glucose, it is so important that if we don't consume it then our body makes it. For instance, there are no plants in the north pole, right? So then how do Eskimos get their share of Glucose, well from whale blubber, which is rich in protein and fat. They don't eat carbohydrates, but they still have a normal glucose level, why? This process of turning fat into glucose is called gluconeogenesis and occurs in our liver.

Glucose is in starch or rather it is what starch is made of. Bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, lentils, quinoa, beans, these are rich in starch which is all glucose. When you consume glucose, for example, a slice of white bread, only 20 percent of the glucose ends up in the liver. Eighty percent of it ends up in the other organs because all the cells of your body can use this glucose for energy. So, what’s the issue here, well nothing, except that the problem is in the combination of glucose and fructose, of which our today’s diet is full of; this is found in fruit juice, soft drinks and syrups. Let’s spend some time on this to understand. Sugar, the sweet stuff, is glucose and fructose. Remember, fructose is not glucose. Fructose is sweet and is the reason we like and crave for sugar. It's the addictive compound in sugar, glucose is not. Fructose is not metabolised by our organs in the body. Only the liver can deal with fructose. When you consume sugar, 20 percent of the glucose will go to the liver, but 100 percent of the fructose. And if you over strain your liver's capacity to metabolise fructose, which happens relatively easily, then that extra fructose will get turned into liver fat. This is a process called de novo lipogenesis. And that is how, my friend, your body turns sugar into fat.

Either the liver will release the fat into the bloodstream, which will raise triglycerides (a risk factor for heart disease and obesity), or the liver won't release it and it will stay there and precipitate into fat or what we also know this as fatty liver disease. 

Let us now connect all the dots which we discussed earlier. Your pancreas has to make extra insulin to make the liver do its job. Now you have got high insulin levels everywhere. You are gaining weight and your insulin is blocking the leptin in the level of the brain making you hungrier. So, you see how you have got into a vicious cycle of consumption and disease.

Don’t get disheartened, there is hope. Let me introduce a wonder kid called Fibre, which would make sugar consumption safe. There is a way to make fructose and glucose safe. And our knight in shining armour here is fibre. In other words, fruits, which have fibre.

There are two types of fibre: soluble and insoluble fibre. Soluble fibre is like the pectin (a soluble gelatinous setting agent used in making jam), and insoluble fibre is like cellulose (like the stringy stuff in celery). Our body needs both and fortunately fruits have both of them.

When you consume both (a piece of fruit), what happens is the insoluble fibre forms a net on the inside of your intestine. Then the soluble fibre plug the holes in the net. Thanks to this fibre, you don't have to fear fruits. What you end up with is a whitish gel that coats the inside of your intestine and acts as a barrier so that you don't absorb all of the sugar fast but absorb it slowly, and this protects the liver and so it won't make that liver fat. Now pay attention here, this is where fibre gets really cool: when we eat fibre, it feeds our gut bacteria. We don't absorb it for our own use or storage. In addition, since you didn't absorb it fast, what you ate will go further down the intestine. There's something in the second part of the intestine that's not in the first part, called bacteria, the microbiome, and these bacteria’s must eat to live. When you consume your food with fibre, your bacteria get more to feed on, which lets the good bacteria to grow, which means the bacteria chew up the energy instead of you absorbing it. So even though you ate it, you didn't get it, the bacteria did. That's a good thing. Essentially, fibre is the antidote to sugar and Fibre is the reason fruit is okay or rather good to eat.

But the problem is when you take the fibre out of that fruit, then you just have the sugar. That's what is not okay. For example, fruit juice. That's the difference between real food and processed food. Real food is low sugar and high fibre, while processed food is high sugar and low fibre. People have been told their entire lives that processed food is food. It turns out it's not. Processed food is how we go into this mess. Instead, I recommend you stick to whole foods, good starches, lean protein, good fats, and cut out processed sugar(processed sugar like those white granules you add to your tea/coffee and other desserts) and processed foods. And thanks to fibre in fruits, vegetables and unprocessed complex carbohydrates, a calorie is not a calorie if it comes with fibre. Let me also tell you that calories are not the issue. The primary reason is because if you're consuming the food with fibre, even though you ate the calories, you didn't absorb the calories, so the mass is irrelevant because they weren't yours, it was the gut bacteria's. Hence, that's the reason why I say that counting calories is an unsuccessful way to lose weight and get healthier. Probably that’s why we have 40 years of unsuccessful obesity therapy around the world. If you believe calories are part of the problem, then I think you are part of this problem.

So, friends, next time you fill your plate with desserts, check if it is with Glucose or with Sugar or with Fructose?  Besides, if you have good amount of Leptin and it has direct access to your brain cells, then go ahead and grab those sugars. But if all fails, then I suggest our age-old trick works… “Eat and Burn”, i.e. Eat till your stomach bursts, then Burn till your lungs cry”; Remember, for every pound of dessert, run a mile.

Does Consuming Soy Make You Gain Weight?

Does consuming Soy make you gain weight?

Off late I have been hearing and asked by many people, “does eating Soy make you gain weight”, besides the other common notion that Soy makes men, feminish. Initially my reaction used to be, look at that person with a straight face and try to understand if she/he is seriously asking me this question or is it a joke. But then when these questions became more frequent, I thought of writing a blog on Soy.

I shall start this blog too with the same adage that anything in excess is harmful. Similarly, any food, eaten in excess, will make you gain weight, which includes foods made from soy too. That doesn't mean that soy has inherent fattening properties. Many people are misinformed regarding this plant protein and its role in health. Soy has numerous health benefits, it is a rich source of calcium, iron, and fiber. Soy also contains all essential amino acids (meaning it’s a “complete protein”). One research states that a 3/4 cup of cooked soybeans contains as much protein as 1/2 a cup of cooked meat. Many soy-derived foods have nutrients that actually help with weight control. But it is very important to note that no single food will make you gain weight or lose it. It all depends on how many calories you are eating each day as compared to how many you burn; Eat more than you burn, and you'll gain weight, eat less, and you'll lose.

For example, a slightly active 37-year-old man who is 6 feet tall and weighs 84kgs needs about 2,900 calories to maintain his weight. So, if he eats daily more than that, say, 3,400 calories, or an extra 500 calories daily, he would gain about a half kilogram each week. If he eats less than that, like 2,500 calories daily, or 500 calories fewer than he needs, he would lose half kilogram a week. (Shhh, I just shared a secret to lose weight)

Individual calorie needs depend on one’s size, activity level, gender and age. There are quite a few calorie calculators available online, go ahead and check your optimum calories intake per day. Depending on what you are looking for, add 250 to 500 calories to your daily diet for safe weight gain or remove 500 to 1,000 calories for safe weight loss.

This leads me to calories in Soy-based foods. Soy foods are moderately high in calories, which means they can help you gain weight, but they could also become an important part of your restricted-calorie weight-loss diet. For example, 2-cups of soy nuggets/granules will give about 360 calories. If you add a cup of soy nuggets to your daily diet, you get enough extra calories to gain about 250gms per week. However, if you control the calories for the soy nuggets in a restricted-calorie diet, you won't gain weight.

Another example is eating a cup of firm tofu, and you'll take in about 176 calories along with beneficial nutrients like protein, calcium and iron. Soybeans also supply calories and nutrients; a cup of green hulled edamame beans (immature soybeans in pod which are boiled or steamed and consumed) contains 376 calories and more than your entire vitamin C needs for the day, while a cup of cooked mature soybeans supplies 298 calories and around half your daily iron needs. Drink a glass of soy milk, and you would get 131 calories, plus protein and essential minerals like manganese and selenium.

Soy-based foods are high in protein, which makes them beneficial for weight loss. Protein-rich foods have a high heating effect, which means you would burn more of fat and calories during digestion; more than you would in digesting fat or carbohydrates. Soy is just as beneficial for weight loss as other sources of protein.

Further eating soy increases your fiber intake; edamame, for example, has 43 percent of the daily value for a cup. Fiber makes your food more filling and controls blood glucose levels, which prevents blood sugar crashes that trigger hunger pangs. Mature soybeans supply 41 percent of the daily value for fiber per cup; tofu contains 8 percent of the daily value; and soy milk contains 6 percent of the daily value per cup.

With all these benefits, still why do some people stay away from soy?

The issue is with soy protein isolate, which is soy protein that’s been extracted from soybeans, and reaches you through bread, cereal, soup, and energy bars. If you are constantly seeing the words ‘soy protein isolate’ on the ingredient lists of the foods you eat, it might be a wake-up call that you’re eating too many processed foods, which can pack on the Kgs or Pounds

The problem is less with soy protein isolate and more with processed foods, which it’s always a good idea to stay away from as they are often loaded with sugar and salt.

Less processed soy foods include tofu, edamame or soy beans, and soy milk.

Besides the misguided belief soy can cause weight-gain, people also avoid Soy for two other reasons. Some claim it’s an “estrogenic,” meaning it can increase the amount of estrogen hormone in your body, which will make you more feminish. Others worry about it being genetically modified.

Research has also shown two to three servings of soy per day can prevent breast cancer (this doesn’t pertain to soy supplements), and two servings of it per day is safe for breast cancer survivors.

Daily consumption can also help reduce one’s risk of cardiovascular disease and alleviate symptoms of menopause.

The other reason is the taste, there is a section of people who state that they do not like the taste of Soy. What they are referring to are soy nuggets, which are available in the market as isolated soy or processed soy. Besides like many other foods, one needs to develop taste for Soy Nuggets.

Soy milk is also an excellent alternative to milk, specially for those who are lactose intolerant

So, feel free to add soy milk to your daily coffee without fear that it’ll wreak havoc on your waistline.