… We felt a recap was necessary. …
It’s the carbohydrate content of food that drives the chemical reactions that turn the proteins and fats that you eat into steroid (sex) hormones, muscle tissue, cytokines in your immune system, and neurotransmitters in your brain and body. Fats called triglycerides can fuel all of the same chemical reactions that carbohydrates do. Remember that even your heart has a summer and winter metabolism – in the summer your heart uses glucose and in the winter it’s meant to run on free fatty acids. In other words, you are designed to live on both carbohydrates and fats, depending on the landscape and season.
There is no evidence that you were ever meant to live solely on carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are converted and stored to see you through lean times. Protein and fat in the form of other living things would be available wherever you were living, no matter what the season – unlike carbohydrates, which would grow and be available only during the warm-weather growing season. So summer eating – carbohydrate consumption driven by the number of hours of light - is as physical imperative to secure sugar storage for famine, and it’s driven by the timing of the light.
In times of actual famine, not just when your side of the planet went dormant (winter), only those of us with stored carbohydrate got to live. Those of us who didn’t have stores died. Our DNA hates that. So an acute insulin response to eating carbohydrates became genetically entrenched over millennia for survival.
Through the miracle of technology, we have lost the famine period. The famine period emptied the stored sugar in your muscles and liver and, more important, from your accumulation of body fat. The next summer, feasting filled it again. That means that episodic high insulin was our salvation. For four or five months out of twelve, insulin levels were elevated to make use of the feast-before-famine period. Continuously elevated insulin meant only one thing for mammals.
Winter is on the way.
If that day of need never comes, you just keep storing as long as there are hours of light.
Now you are in deep trouble with Mother Nature.
Research and common sense would indicate that being overfed, in the grand scheme of things, is asking for it. In the “food web,” every species must stay in balance or all bets are off.
Since the stakes are so high, the rules are pretty strict.
Light-and-dark cycles control insulin through carbohydrate craving but also, more directly, through your stress mechanisms. Remember, when the lights are on, your cortisol stays up because it’s a blood-sugar mobilizer – and it helps you to be ready instantly to run or fight. Continuously high levels of cortisol – which are mobilizing your blood sugar – means insulin stays up too, to disperse that blood sugar to your muscles. So just watching TV late into the normal sleep period keeps your insulin up longer than nature wants it to be, causing insulin resistance – and you know what that means.
You get fat just by smelling a cookie.
For Paleolithic man, long days meant the end of summer and the approaching end of the food supply. The short sleep cycles of long days translated to an increased need for carbohydrates to store fat and to turn serotonin into melatonin for the part of the year when he would sleep more in order to reduce metabolic functions to save energy when it was scarce; so carbo-craving is a precursor to sleep, and modern man still responds to instinctive behaviors led by hibernation drives.
As a result, we crave carbohydrates only when we’re tired, not when we need food.
