How Our Bodies Get Energy

Do you know how your body gets the energy it needs and what it does with it?

Like many people, you will probably have an idea but no real details about how our bodies get and use the food we eat. So here’s a quick resume covering the two most misunderstood hormones our bodies use.

Knowing about these will give you an insight about how our bodies convert what we eat into energy and what happens to the excess ‘energy’ our bodies produce. More importantly, it will show you just how you can gain more control over what your bodies does with what you eat and how by having that knowledge, you can get the most from the Snack Box Diet through evening out your eating habits.

Where we get our Energy

Glucose is a simple sugar that provides energy to all of the cells in your body. Your cells then take in glucose from your blood and break it down for energy.

For instance, brain cells and red blood cells rely solely on glucose for fuel. The glucose in your blood comes from the food you eat.

When you eat, food gets metabolised via your intestines and is distributed through the bloodstream to the cells in your body. In all conditions your body tries to keep the supply of glucose constant, maintaining as consistent as possible glucose concentration in the blood. If it did not do this [private_silver](as in diabetes for example) your cells would have too much glucose right after a meal (particularly one that is high in carbohydrates) and starve in between meals and during sleep.

When you have an excess of glucose, your body stores this in your liver and muscles by making glycogen, long chains of glucose. Conversely, when glucose is in short supply, your body mobilizes glucose from stored glycogen and/or stimulates you to eat food.

To maintain this constant blood-glucose level, your body uses two hormones – insulin and glucagon. These are produced in your pancreas and have opposite actions.

The Pancreas

Your pancreas is formed from clusters (Islets) of alpha and beta endocrine cells. The beta cells secret insulin and the alpha cells secret glucagons. Both these secretions are protein hormones made up of amino acids.

What Insulin Does

Insulin is used by almost all of your body’s cells, but it’s most active in the liver, fat and muscle cells. Insulin has the following effect:-

• Inhibits the liver and kidney cells from making glucose from intermediate compounds of metabolic pathways (gluconeogenesis)
• Causes the liver and muscle cells to store glucose in glycogen
• Stimulates fat cells to form fats from fatty acids and glycerol
• Causes the liver and muscle cells to make proteins from amino acids

Insulin production is the signal for the body to store energy (as fat). It does so by reducing the concentrations of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids in the bloodstream.

What Glucagon Does

Now when you don’t eat or eat food that have a very low glycemic index  (Are low in carbs), your pancreas releases glucagons instead which causes your body to produce glucose… Glucagon acts on the same cells as insulin, but has the opposite effects in that it:

• Stimulates the liver and muscles to break down stored glycogen (glycogenolysis) and release the glucose
• Stimulates gluconeogenesis in the liver and kidneys

The action of glucagon is opposite to insulin in that glucagon mobilizes glucose stored inside your body and increases the level of glucose in your blood, thus stopping your blood glucose levels from falling dangerously low.

How Insulin and Glucagons Work as a Tag Team

Under normal circumstances, the levels of insulin and glucagon are effectively counter balanced.

When you eat, your body metabolises the food quite rapidly and registers the presence of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids absorbed from the food. This causes the pancreatic beta cells to release insulin into your blood and inhibit the pancreatic alpha cells from secreting glucagon.

As the levels of insulin in your blood begin to rise they act on the liver, fat and muscle cells in particular causing them to absorb the incoming molecules of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. The insulin acts to prevent the concentration of glucose, fatty and amino acids from increasing too greatly in the bloodstream.

In this way, your body maintains a steady blood-glucose concentration. This action occurs when you eat a properly balanced diet as opposed to the high carb diet of today. Unfortunately, where the diet is high in carbs (or there is just too much food) it has to go somewhere and inevitably, it is deposited as fat in just where you don’t want it to go.

Between meals, or when you are sleeping, your body senses that it is effectively starving. However your cells still need a supply of glucose to keep going. So while in this condition, the slight drops in blood-sugar level stimulate glucagon secretion from the alpha cells in the pancreas and in turn inhibit the release of insulin.

This causes glucagon levels in the blood to rise and start acting on the liver, muscle and kidney cells to mobilize glucose from glycogen to make glucose that’s then released into your blood. Such action prevents the blood-glucose levels from falling too much.

This change occurs many times throughout the day with the secretion of either insulin or glucagons helping to keep your blood-glucose level relatively constant, typically in the range of 90 mg per 100 ml of blood.

However, seeing as the secretion of the pancreas lag behind the blood glucose levels, the action of eating large quantities of high carb food will drastically disturb this. Simply put, when the blood glucose level is overly high more quantities of insulin will be produced than are needed as the glucose will have been dealt with. So more glucose will have been absorbed than was necessary. This will cause a dip in the blood glucose level causing us to feel a lack of energy and trigger a production of glucagon.

Sunday Lunch Syndrome

This is something I call the “after Sunday lunch syndrome” as it is most often seen after a big meal. You will most likely have noticed that 30 – 60 minutes after eating far too much (as in a typical Sunday lunch) and then not moving a great deal either, you tend to feel really sleepy and quite soon many will also start to get the munchies and go looking for that last roast potato or piece of pie. In fact the body is wanting anything that will get the blood sugar up again – and so the cycle continues…

What Can You Do?

Well, the most obvious first step is to cut down on foods with a high level of carbohydrates in them.

The nest thing would be to even out the amount you eat by eating smaller quantities more regularly throughout the day.

Just by taking these two small steps in cahnging what and how you eat will make a masive difference to how your body reacts to what you eat. And that will be shown by improved or more even energy levels and slowing down or even reversing the process of fat gain.  I.E. You will start to lose fat instead of putting it on.[/private_silver]

I’m very fortunate to live iin a community where we can get good quality raw milk – in our local supermarket (SPAR). It comes from a farm a little up the valley and if I have a mind to do so I can even go and watch the cows as they making it for me. (OK not just for me – but you never know…)

But just why should we want to drink raw milk, why is it better then treated milk?

Thomas Cowan MD explains

As I’m sure most of you know by now, there are very few subjects as emotionally charged as the choice of one’s diet. Sexual relations, marriage and finances come to mind as similarly charged subjects and, like diet, we are all sure we know all we need to know about each of these subjects. The subject of milk, as I have discovered during the past four years, when properly viewed will challenge every notion you currently have about what is good food and what isn’t.

The story of milk is complex and goes something like this.

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A Little History…

Back in the pre-processed food era (that is before about 1930 in this country) milk was considered an important food, especially for children. Not only was there an entire segment of our economy built up around milk but, as I remember, each house had its own milk chute for the delivery of fresh milk directly to the house. It was unquestioned that milk was good for us and that a safe, plentiful milk supply was actually vital to our national health and well-being. It was also a time (now I’m referring to the early part of the century) when many of the illnesses which we currently suffer from were rare.

As an example, family doctors would often go their whole careers without ever seeing a patient with significant coronary artery disease, breast or prostate cancer, whereas current doctors can hardly go one month without encountering a patient with such an illness. Furthermore, as scientists such as Weston Price, DDS discovered, there were pockets of extremely healthy, long-lived people scattered about the earth who used dairy products in various forms as the staple of their diets — further evidence that milk and its by-products were amongst the most healthful foods man has ever encountered.

Recent past

If we fast forward to the 1980’s, we now find an entirely different picture. For one thing, there have been numerous books written in the past decade about the dangers of dairy products — the most influential being a book by Frank Oski, MD, the current chairman of paediatrics of Johns Hopkins University and perhaps the most influential paediatricians in this country. It’s called Don’t Drink Your Milk. In it Oski pins just about every health problem in children to the consumption of milk, everything from acute and chronic ear infections, constipation, asthma, eczema, and so on. Secondly, just about all patients I have now in their initial visit proudly announce that they have a good diet and that, specifically, they don’t eat dairy (which they pronounce with such disdain).

One might well ask where the truth in this picture. Perhaps the experiments of Dr. Francis Pottenger in the 1940’s can help to solve this mystery. In these experiments Dr. Pottenger fed one group of cats a diet consisting of raw milk, raw meat and cod liver oil. Other groups were given pasteurized milk, evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk instead of raw milk. The results were conclusive and astounding. Those that ate raw milk and raw meat did well and lived long, happy, active lives free of any signs of degenerative disease. Those cats on pasteurized milk suffered from acute illnesses (vomiting, diarrhea) and succumbed to every degenerative disease now flourishing in our population, even though they were also getting raw meat and cod liver oil. By the 3rd generation a vast majority of the cats were infertile and exhibited “anti-social” behavior — in short, they were like modern Americans.

What’s ‘in’ Milk

Since the 40’s the “qualities” of milk have been extensively studied to try to find an explanation for these dramatic changes. Studies have shown that before heating, milk is a living food rich in colloidal minerals and enzymes necessary for the absorption and utilization of the sugars, fats and minerals in the milk. For example, milk has an enzyme called phosphatase that allows the body to absorb the calcium from the milk. Lactase is an enzyme that allows for the digestion of lactose.

Butterfat has a cortisone-like factor which is heat sensitive (destroyed by heat) that prevents stiffness in the joints. Raw milk contains beneficial bacteria as well as lactic acids that allow these beneficial bacteria to implant in the intestines. All of these qualities are destroyed during pasteurization. Once heated, milk becomes rotten, with precipitated minerals that can’t be absorbed (hence osteoporosis), with sugars that can’t be digested (hence allergies), and with fats that are toxic.

Raw milk has been used as a therapy in folk medicine — and even in the Mayo Clinic — for centuries. It has been used in the pre-insulin days to treat diabetes (I’ve tried it — it works), as well as eczema, intestinal worms, allergies, and arthritis, all for reasons which can be understood when we realize just what is in milk — such as the cortisone-like factor for allergies and eczema.

How to Ruin Milk

Another way we ruin milk is by feeding cows high protein feed made from soybeans and other inappropriate foodstuffs. Rarely is anyone truly allergic to grass-fed cow’s milk.

Fresh raw milk, from cows eating well-manured green grass is a living unprocessed whole food. Compare this to the supposedly “healthy” soy milk which has been washed in acids and alkalis, ultrapasteurized, then allowed to sit in a box for many months.

The Pottenger cat studies provide a simple but profound lesson for all Americans: Processed, dead foods don’t support life or a happy well-functioning society. We must return to eating pure, wholesome, unprocessed foods, including whole raw milk from pasture fed cows.

In my practice I ALWAYS start there — I encourage, insist, even beg people to eat real foods— no matter what the problem. Often with just this intervention the results are gratifying. SO, find a cow, find a farmer, make sure the cow (or goat, llama, or whatever) is healthy and start your return to good health!

Author: Thomas S Cowan MD

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2 handfuls of cashews is the therapeutic equivalent of a prescription dose of Prozac. Inside you, the essential amino acid L-tryptophan is broken down into anxiety-reducing, snooze-inducing niacin. Even more important, tryptophan is also made into serotonin, one of your body’s most important neurotransmitters. Serotonin gives a feeling of well-being and mellowness, or as the Australians would say, “no worries.” This is such a profound effect that Prozac, Paxil and similar antidepressants usually either mimic serotonin or artificially keep the body’s own serotonin levels high. You can do the same thing with your food. And no one can tell us that beans, peas, cheese, nuts and wheat germ are toxic if you eat a lot of them!

Plenty of carbohydrates (starches) in your meals help tryptophan get to where it does the most good: in your brain. In order to cross the blood-brain barrier to get in, carbos are required. So cheese and crackers provides a better effect than the cheese standing alone. An egg or two on toast is better than just the egg. Beans, peas, and nuts already contain carbohydrate, so you are all set there.

Consider that five servings of beans, a few portions of peanut butter, or just one big handful of cashews provides one to two thousand milligrams of tryptophan, which will work as well as prescription antidepressants… but don’t tell the drug companies. Some skeptics think that the pharmaceutical people already know. Here are two quotes in evidence:

“Pay careful attention to what is happening with dietary supplements in the legislative arena… If these efforts are successful, there could be created a class of products to compete with approved drugs. The establishment of a separate regulatory category for supplements could undercut exclusivity rights enjoyed by the holders of approved drug applications.” (Source: FDA Deputy Commissioner for Policy David Adams, at the Drug Information Association Annual Meeting, July 12, 1993).

Here are 15 other Amazing Health Benefits Of Cashew Nuts – http://www.healthdigezt.com/cashews-are-a-natural-anti-depressant/

One of the worst ingredients of Gatorade (and Powerade, etc…) is Brominated Vegetable Oil which is added to some flavors to keep the drink from getting cloudy and the artificial flavor suspended in the drink. This controversial substance is linked to serious health consequences like skin rashes, severe acne and thyroid disease and is banned in Europe and Japan! (Update: Gatorade recently decided to phase out this ingredient due to a recent successful petition, but Powerade still contains it)

The new natural version of Gatorade still has chemically processed refined sugars and questionable natural flavor to cover up the fact there is absolutely no fruit juice in this drink to make their fruity flavors. To think athletes and exercise enthusiasts have started drinking this makes me sad.

Gatorade does do one thing. It replaces electrolytes. But what is the big secret behind the ingredients that do this? To replace electrolytes you don’t need some tricky formula, man made chemicals, refined sugars or colors. All you need is simple real food sources that provide a few key minerals like sodium, chloride, potassium and magnesium.

Here are 4 ways to replenish your electrolytes naturally and give your body some serious nutrition at the same time. Remember to choose organic ingredients whenever possible.

Read more – http://foodbabe.com/2012/07/10/the-secret-behind-gatorade-how-to-replenish-electrolytes-naturally/

Snack Box Diet Food Preperation

This is one problem you won’t have with the snack box diet as when you think about it, you are preparing all your meals for the day at the same time. And even if your still having to prepare meals for the rest of the family, it won’t really take up any more time.

The real keys here are planning and using your time wisely.

Planning is virtually self-explanatory.

With most diets you would be encouraged to sit down at the beginning of the week and sensibly plan what it is you’re going to eat throughout the week or even the month. With the snack box diet this is done for you.

Not only that but the shopping list has also been taken care of as well.

So there is a huge time gain over other diet systems.

Wise Use of Time

This again is fairly self-explanatory.

If you’ve got to be in the kitchen preparing food, you may as well be doing the preparation – not just for the meal that you’re going to eat immediately, but also for the meal that you might be eating later on or even the next day.

While you’re waiting for one pot to come to the boil or something to finish cooking under the grill or in the oven, you can make preparations for what it is you’re going to need for a later meal.

Then all you need to do is store it safely in the cooler ready to be used as and when it’s needed.

Even simple things like doing a few days salad preparation in one hit, and then storing it in a plastic bag in the cooler, can gain you so much time it would seem a shame not to take those opportunities.

So there you have a few seeds for thought, it’s really up to you to take them and nurture them, and build on them, using probably the most valuable tool any cook can have.

That tool? … Plain common sense.

What do I do?

For instance, the other weekend, we had a stir-fry Chinese meal, and when I was preparing the vegetables for that I didn’t just prepare the vegetables that I needed for the immediate meal, I literally doubled the quantity and put the excess into the fridge ready for another meal.

Let’s face it, it’s not the actual work of chopping and peeling and things like that that take the most time – it’s the getting things out and prepared and the clearing away afterwards that takes the most time. So just by doing two lots of vegetables at one time, you gain 15-20 minutes preparation and clearing up time in one fell swoop!

Other things, for example, if you’re cooking a chicken – cook a slightly bigger chicken so that you’ve got extra meat left over that you can then use in another meal, such as a chicken salad. It’s all of these little things that build up in order for you to gain time.

Cheese, Cream, more cheese, in fact everything and anything dairy can be found on the Snack Box Diet plates.

Eating high calcium, higher fat dairy foods, may not be the heart attack weighting to happen foods many people think they are. In fact they can be one of those foods that actually helps you to lose fat, and for good reason too.

Danish Study on Eating More Calcium

Now, a recent study conducted in Denmark has observed that the more calcium you eat in your diet the less body fat you will have, and therefore the less you will weigh. This points to the fact that not only is dairy a high-energy food, it could be that dairy itself can help you absorb less fat.

Professor Arne Astrup, Head of Human Nutrition at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, Denmark, undertook a study to prove this fact.

In the study, a group of volunteers spent one week eating a diet that was high in calcium, typically more than 2000milligrams of calcium a day; and week 2 was on a low calcium diet, where they were eating around about 500milligrams of calcium a day.

These diets were designed so that they had the identical amount of calories and crucially, they also had the same fat content each week.

The known science led the researchers to expect that the higher calcium diet would indeed cause the body to absorb less fat than on the lower calcium diet.

Better than Expected

However, the results that actually came out were even better than expected, in fact on the higher calcium diet tests on the subjects excretions showed that they passed through twice as much fat as they did on the lower calcium diet.

Putting that another way, on the higher calcium diet they absorbed only half the amount of fat than they did on the lower calcium diet.

What this means for snack box dieters is that when you eat dairy products, not all of their calories count.

But of course, that still doesn’t give you an excuse to binge out on cheese!

Daily Choices Matter

Studies have shown that each day we make as many as 200 food choices.

Those choices are influenced by many things, even the people we are eating with. While the individually choices may be quite small When you add them together their actual contribution to our health and well being can make a huge difference.

You’ll probably notice that many of our members questions are about small things. They seem to hone in on the details. Yet quite often people say – “Surely, if I just take care of the big things then I don’t really need to worry about the small things?”

Which on the dace of it seems fine. But when you analyse anything, the big things are made up of lots of small things. Meaning that If you take care of the detail in your diet, then each of those things that you take care of will add up and make the big things far more effective.

Here’s a just some of those small things that you might like to consider:

Check the Ingredients

Firstly, when you go to the supermarket or your local shop to stock up, look down the ingredients list to make sure you avoid eating foods that have got artificial sweeteners, MSG and a whole range of additives and colorants. These are the things that many manufacturers have to put into their food in order to put back the flavour and vitamin content that their processing has processed out.

Secondly, try as much as possible to use organically sourced and grown produce.

By sticking to organic (from a reputable producer), you know that you are not going to be eating and digesting pesticides, phosphates, all kinds of hormones and all the other things that commercial food producers use in order to overcome the problems that their fast-food production line cause.

It’s making those healthy choices, the small ones, that all add up to a much healthier lifestyle.

And it’s not just what you eat!

It’s Not Just What You Eat

A small choice you can make every day is just to take the elevator to get up two floors, or take the stairs. Taking two flights of stairs briskly will do far more for your heart than taking the elevator, that’s for sure.

Doing that five or six times a day, is just like jogging to the top of a ten-storey building!

It’s those type of small changes that I’m talking about, those small changes can make a really big difference.

The reason for making those choices is clear.

In Europe, the U.S.. Australia and in fact most of what would be considered the western world, its poor lifestyle choices that (e.g. what we choose to eat, to exercise, etc) account for the leading causes of death. Things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and the rest.

In fact, the WHO (World Health Organization), in one it’s previous World Cancer Report, have said that the rates of cancer would increase by 50 percent over the next 15 years. Statistics like that are cause for concern.

However, all is not doom and gloom as WHO also suggests that at least a third of the cases could be prevented by folk making better lifestyle choices.

No Need to Make Huge Sacrifices

Some folk think that in order to make these changes they have to make a lot of sacrifices. But in reality, this is just not so.

If you think about it, it won’t cost you much at all to take the stairs (often times it’s quicker than taking the lift). In fact just 20 or so minutes of exercise a day can make the difference .

And to eat organic may cost you a little more each month, but these are all a small price to pay in exchange for a long, healthy, active and sickness free life.

Cheese, Cream, more cheese, in fact everything and anything dairy can be found on many lowcarb plates.

We would be lost without it.

But, as this article shows, eating dairy is more than just a way to cut down on carbs…

Eating high calcium, higher fat dairy foods, have been a long term stable tenant of the low-carb way of eating, and for good reason – it works – as part of a healthy low carb regime.

Continue reading…

Drinking a few cups of coffee a day may help people avoid clogged arteries – a known risk factor for heart disease – Korean researchers believe.

They studied more than 25,000 male and female employees who underwent routine health checks at their workplace.

Employees who drank a moderate amount of coffee – three to five cups a day – were less likely to have early signs of heart disease on their medical scans.

The findings reopen the debate about whether coffee is good for the heart.

Continue reading…