Why most diets don’t work part 1 - Body nutrients regulation

There are thousands of known diet scheme out there that claim to achieve amazing results in a short time by replacing the gradients of the diet – “eat only fats”, “eat only carbon”, “stop eating sugar”, and so on.

Many people think, even doctors, that the real way to lose fat is to count calories. well, most people do not understand what calories are. Here I start to introduce a simple biological considerations, that argue against all the calorie counting schemes, and try to explain basic metabolism and the fundamental paths of nutrient regulation.
This post focus on energy regulation.

It have almost become a dogma today that eating a lot of “calories” will make you fat, but is it so? well, the true is that we can’t really know that. First, the food we eat is not simply get into our system and being used as is, and I later on explain why. Our body is an incredible machine that designed to keep something that biologists call homeostasis, which is simply the property of a living organism to regulate its internal environment and to maintain a stable, constant condition. homeostasis is extremely important to our bodies, and sometimes a very small change will cause a catastrophic event. For example, change of one degree in our body temperature can kill us.

The absolute need of our bodies to maintain stable internal environment caused them to develop an extremely sophisticated mechanisms to control the quantity of each needed nutrient in the body. one of the most important nutrients are sugars, which build our energy supply, attached to our proteins, to the cells structural organs and more. Another very (very!) important nutrients are fats, which build our cells membranes, function as signals and hormones, and used also as energy storage. The last example here for one of the most important nutrients our body constantly need are the amino acids, which build all of our proteins, and used also has structural elements as well as an important source for nitrogen and... energy!

Lets go back to calories. a calorie is a unit that came from physics and measure energy amount. I won’t enter to the details of what energy is, but you have to understand that our body need a huge amount of energy in order to function properly. almost universally, the energy of living creatures, including us, come form a small molecule called ATP. this molecule uses to transfer chemical energy to all sorts of energy consuming machines in our body like the movement proteins in our muscles, and the electric currents in our nervous system. When people talking about calorie in the food, they are talking about how much ATP can be produced from a certain food.

How does our body create ATP? The answer is that it’s uses the chemical energy lay in the connections between carbon atoms is carbon-containing compounds to produce ATP. What are these carbon compounds? well, all the major food components I talked before are actually carbon compounds including Fats, Sugars, Amino-acids, cholesterols and more. Moreover all of these compounds can be used as energy source!. The most interesting point is that since our body always need to keep constant conditions, and since all of these compounds are chemically similar, our body knows how to convert the main ingredients of our food from one form to another! Your body knows how to convert sugars to fats and fats to sugars, and how to produce amino acids and proteins from sugar and vice versa.
How do we become fat? well our body is also programmed to store energy as fat for later use. However, since the body knows how to convert one kind of food to another, it is useless to think that if we eat, for example, only proteins, our body won’t know how to convert them to fat, sugars etc.

So what is the solution? The truth is that nobody’s really knows, but we can point out what the solution should look like. The solution cannot be what kind of carbon compound we eat – proteins, fats, cholesterols, sugar, they all the same in the basis. Eating less is probably important, although you must know that eating less might cause the body to actually get into stress condition of hunger and actually accumulate more fat!, I’ll explain this point in a later post.

The answer should be that in order to control the body weight, we need first of all to intervene in the control systems of the body itself and not in the food supply per se. A good diet should not concentrate in what we are eating but in questions like when to eat, what and how much, in order to trick the body homeostasis systems to stop storing fats and convert the fats to something else. I’ll get into the system is more details in later post.
Good lack.