Before long, my research efforts uncovered studies about the relationship between carbohydrate and fat feeding. Scientists had long wondered whether fat could form from non-fat sources, a point I’ve discussed previously. Farmers, of course, have known that, when animals are fed a grain diet, they rapidly convert carbohydrate into body fat. Thus, it was well understood, by the 1960’s that low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets lead to a rapid conversion of carbohydrate-to-fat. The name of this biochemical process is lipogenesis - lipo meaning fat, genesis meaning new formation - fat formation from carbohydrate.
One important point evolved from early studies regarding the relationship between fat and carbohydrates: â??That carbohydrate utilization depends upon an animal’s previous nutritional state has long been recognized and is supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence. Thus glucose (blood sugar) utilization is depressed in the fasted animal and in the animal fed a diet containing little or no carbohydrate.
"I want you to burn this point into your thinking: one’s habitual dietary intake is a controlling factor in regards to any change in future dietary pattern. This means, for example, that if one consumes a high-carbohydrate diet, he’s conditioned to using carbohydrates. A switch, then, to a high-fat diet creates a metabolic disruption which continues until sufficient time has elapsed for the body to make its adjustments to the dietary switch.
â?¨Other findings support this idea, ‘Generally, dietary carbohydrates increase liver lipogenesis (fat-making from carbohydrate) and the activities of enzymes related to lipogenesis, whereas dietary fats or starvation have the opposite effect.’
In 1955, researchers from Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, wanted to see if the liver’s capacity for lipogenesis (fat-making) was different from the capacity of adipose tissue. They concluded: 'Feeding a high-carbohydrate diet stimulated lipogenesis in adipose (fat tissue), which considerably exceeded that found in the liver.
The assumption that adipose tissue is the main site of lipogenesis is supported by the observation of an unimpaired lipogenesis in animals without livers.'And, 'The rate of lipogenesis from available carbohydrates seems to be regulated by the carbohydrate content of the diet.'Finally, ‘Fasting or feeding a high-fat diet abolished lipogenesis in adipose tissue.’
Abolished. Wow! Stopped it altogether. A high-fat diet stops fat making, and a high-carbohydrate diet turns-on fat making. Think about this the next time you read the experts’ recommendations about the healthfulness of the high-carbohydrate diet.
I now had the evidence that high-carbohydrate feeding makes one fat. How fat one becomes, however, depends on calorie balance. This evidence also showed that high-fat/low-carbohydrate feeding doesn’t make one fat as long as calorie intake doesn’t exceed calorie burning.
There was, however, one problem with this research. The adipose tissue and livers had been cut out of these animals, thus isolating the effects of carb feeding from the whole animal. People might argue that real carbohydrate-to-fat conversion doesn’t occur in whole living organisms but only in isolated cell fragments.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long to discover, finally, that diet composition does in fact affect body composition. A 1990 study addressed this issue, providing a head-to-head comparison of two diets: One group of rats ate a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet (63%-carbohydrate/13%-fat); the other group ate a high-fat/low-carbohydrate diet (63%-fat/13%-carbohydrate). Both groups followed the dietary regimen for forty four days.
â?¨It was beyond argument that these two diets led to dramatic differences in body composition. The high-fat/low-carbohydrate fed rats weighed only two hundred fifty two grams, compared with two hundred eighty two grams for the high-carbohydrate/low-fat fed animals. Most striking was the difference in body fat. The high-fat/low-carbohydrate rats had only twenty three grams of body fat (9% body fat). The high-carbohydrate/low-fat fed group had a whopping sixty five grams of body fat (23% fat).
This was the perfect complementary research to the studies done forty years earlier. It powerfully confirmed that carbohydrates in the high-carbohydrate diet lead to their own conversion to body fat. The clincher was this: rat bodies on the high-fat/low-carbohydrate diet contained more protein (muscles and organs).
Now, let’s think about these studies, above, for a moment. The finding that carbohydrate converts to fat implies that one should eat few carbohydrates. Even more striking is the fact that carbohydrate converts to fat during a calorie deficiency! This implies that diet composition can affect one’s body negatively even if it’s in calorie balance.â?
¨Carbohydrate that’s converted to fat is stored, and those calories are no longer available to the active tissues! This process is called energy-partitioning; from our knowledge of this process we know that eating a calorie doesn’t necessarily mean that that calorie remains available to the active tissues as fuel.
â?¨This is a mind-numbing revelation. This surely adds a new dimension to the calorie tables, doesn’t it?
My growing file of research papers convinced me that high-carbohydrate diets contributed to increases in body fat. These increases occurred at the same time as decreases in muscle tissue. These changes occurred even during times of calorie deficiency. The research papers demonstrated that the mechanism behind these changes was the conversion of carbohydrate to fat.
The fact was, however, that carbohydrate stimulated its own conversion to fat. Certainly, no one knows why this occurs. It’s just an evolutionary fact. I believe the reason behind it is that during man’s evolution little carbohydrate was available as a food source. The body’s metabolic machinery developed in response to the available dietary fare, which was, as we’ve learned, largely meat and fat from animals.
Because this was the primary diet of early humans, the body’s machinery didn’t tolerate carbohydrates very well. But whatever the reason, the body developed a biochemical process to store carbohydrates as fat. We’ll never know, beyond doubt, the real reason why the body did this. But, what we do know is that this is precisely what the body does: it converts carbohydrate into fat.
No amount of argumentation from scientists who don’t like fat will change this fact: carbohydrate stimulates its own conversion into fat.
There’s overwhelming scientific confirmation of these conversions of carbohydrate to body fat, and they date back more than one hundred forty years.
I was, however, at the time, bewildered. The bulk of the scientific community was convinced that fat was the worst thing to eat. In those years, I hadn’t yet stumbled onto Thomas Kuhn’s work describing scientific beliefs and how it’s almost impossible to dethrone these beliefs once it’s discovered they are wrong. The science that I was then studying represented only glitches to the existing glucose-loving belief; there weren’t, at that time, however, enough glitches, yet, to cause a belief system shift.
Thus, I was totally confused as to why, and how, scientists were maintaining the notion that carbohydrates were good and fat was bad. At that time, I could only assume that they didn’t have a solid background in biochemistry.
I now realize that some may, indeed, not have had such a background, but most couldn’t hide behind this excuse, surely not practicing biochemists, as opposed to technically less sophisticated physicians. The fact is that they were, and are, constrained within the confines of the box that’s the one based on the goodness of carbohydrates and its derived glucose.
The outcome of my research was that many scientists supported the low-fat diet and, indeed condemned the low-carbohydrate diet! Scientific studies, it was clear, didn’t support their conclusions. These scientists simply supported - and preached - false dietary protocols. And people listened.
What was their basis for supporting the low-fat diet?
