Everlean Culture

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The Human Diet, Then and Now

Before the discovery of agricultural grains about 10,000 years ago, the human species subsisted for over 2 million years on a diet of mostly meats, vegetables, and fruits, with occasional tubers and nuts — foods on which our genome mainframe was developed. Relative to the time span of human evolution, the agricultural period was too short for adaptation of our species. Simply put, we haven’t evolved to metabolize grains very well.

Where once the human diet consists of mostly meat and vegetation, now more than 50% of its composition is grains, with recent food practices changing much of this portion into grain-based processed foods — from breads to pasta to Twinkies. The Standard Western Diet now contains a significant amount of an edible material not part of our evolutionary and biological disposition.

Insulin

We know that carbohydrate stimulates the pancreas to produce the hormone insulin. We know, too, that chronically high carbohydrate intake means chronically elevated insulin. And we also know that chronically elevated insulin is just bad news for health and body weight.

And what do you know… the Standard Western Diet contains high amounts of carbohydrates, and it’s based on governmental dietary guidelines (60% of your daily caloric intake!). As a result, the typical person consumes chronically high amounts of carbohydrates, which probably means this typical person also suffers chronically elevated insulin.

Insulin transports blood glucose (converted carbohydrates) into the cells of muscle, liver, and fat. But since our muscle and liver cells can store only so much glucose (as glycogen),  the surplus must be transported elsewhere. So the pancreas manufactures more insulin in order to shuttle this surplus to the much more pliable and expansive fat cells, whose storage capacity is nearly limitless.

Surely by now you’ve heard of the term insulin-resistance. It is the condition in which the receptors on muscle and liver cells (having been bombarded with chronically elevated insulin) no longer can perform glucose-uptake — i.e. these cells have lost their ability to take in the consumed calories. It is a paradox — insulin is a signaling hormone to the cells, telling the cells to open its receptor “doors” to the influx of glucose; yet with more insulin present, the cells begin to stop listening to the signal.

Diverting Calories into Fat Cells

With muscle and organ cells rejecting much of the consume calories, insulin must transport them to fat cells where they’re stored. To make matters worse, insulin also blocks them there. So, a double whammy: insulin not only expands fat cells, but it also prevents them from releasing fat to be used by muscle and organ cells later for fuel. While fat cells are fed, organ and muscle cells literally starve.

The Failure of a Reduced Calorie Diet

On a reduced calorie diet, we may initially lose some weight, but our starved muscle and organ cells eventually communicates through hormonal signaling with our hypothalamus to stimulate uncontrollable hunger. Studies show that each of us have limited will power, and eventually we give in.

But some of us may be resilient enough to remain longer on a reduced-calorie diet. Even so, in time the body compensates for this calorie reduction by lowering energy output. In other words, energy level will severely drop, impacting body and mind in less than human ways. There are many symptoms: reduced body temperature, weakness, fatigue, obsessive thoughts of food, irritability, mental fogginess, loss of motivation, depression. A reduced-calorie diet is, after all, a semi-starvation diet. These are the eventual symptoms of starvation!

The Partitioning Diet (PD)

The old dietary and weight loss hypothesis has not been shown to work long-term. We need something new. If we learn nothing else from Gary Taubes’s book Good Calories Bad Calories, we should take away the message that we need to focus on not calorie restriction but on energy partitioning. We need to teach the body to partition energy out of fat cells and back into muscle and organ cells, where they can adequately fuel normal cellular life and activities, and ultimately reduce the store of excess energy.

The goal of the Partitioning Diet is to shuttle calories to their proper places, and to release stored fat from fat cells to be used as for fuel. This is accomplished by the control of insulin through simple, easy dietary strategies. The Partitioning Diet is not a reduced calorie diet, but a grain-free, real-food diet that may inherently correct the metabolic conditions of modern civilization and facilitate weight loss.