Quote Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan, MD and Luke Shanahan
Aside from acting as simple mechanical insulation and cushioning, body fat generates chemicals required for sexual development and reproduction, immune defense, blood clotting, circadian rhythm, and even mood and concentration. [...]
Distorted Fats Damage Enzymes and Lead to Cellular Death
[...] The more distorted fat you eat, the more inflammation you're fighting against. Trans fat reduces your ability to metabolize the saturated and essential fatty acids that you need to be healthy, so eating trans fat can initiate a vicious cycle. The Nurses' Health Study showed that a mere two percent increase in trans fat consumption correlated with a 40 percent increase in insulin resistance and diabetes. Once you develop diabetes, your metabolism is deeply committed to converting as many calories as it can into fat. Given the power of unnatural fat to disturb metabolism, it's no wonder the advice to avoid healthy, natural fat sets us up to fail.
To successfully avoid eating oxidized fats, you must avoid all foods containing vegetable oils. [...]
High fructose corn syrup can make it practically impossible for you to normalize your weight. We've all heard that when bears need to fatten up for winter, they eat berries. It turns out that fructose sugar (in fruit, fruit juice, soda, and more) sends especially powerful fat-building signals by switching on liver enzymes for converting sugars to fat. Since most of the food you eat gets sent to the liver first, eating fructose effectively traps dietary carbohydrates in your liver and converts them to fat, preventing them from ever making it to muscle tissue where they could be burned during exercise.
So fructose-containing foods can make you pack on the pounds, but there's really no sugar that's good for you[...]
Because carbohydrates in your food are converted into sugars, a diet high in pastas, breads, and so on, is inherently pro-inflammatory as well. Worse, these starchy foods are so bereft of vitamins and other antioxidants that building a diet around them can make it hard for your body to control oxidation reactions once they start. This puts you deeper into a pro-inflammatory state.[...]
Fat Grows from Stem Cells
You've probably heard of stem cells, immature cells derived from embryos with the potential to grow replacement parts for any organ. These are the cells you've seen researchers use to grow ears on the back of mice. Many believe stem cells hold the cure for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and a host of other currently incurable diseases, and someday they may. But if you want to reshape your body, harnessing stem cell versatility can help you achieve that goal today.
One of the most frustrating things about fat is its ability to seemingly appear from nowhere. It's really coming from stem cells. When you eat sugar, starch, and trans fat without exercising your body will churn out new fat cells like a termite queen producing eggs. When stem cells turn into fat cells and grow plumper, you grow plumper too.
One reason diets fail is that cutting back on calories without changing any other habits sends precisely the wrong message. The body presumes that the relative scarcity of food, in combination with little activity, must mean food has become so scarce you've given up looking for more. If it has the slightest chance to store surplus energy as fat, the panicked body reasons it had better do so. Under these circumstances, stem cells stand at the ready to convert themselves into more energy-storing fat cells. Frightening our stem cells into turning into fat cells is exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead, we should capitalize on the stem cell's protean nature and convince it to turn into a kind of cell we want.
Like what, you say? Like muscle, blood vessel, nerve and bone. What's even more remarkable than stem cell versatility is the fact that grown-up fat cells seem capable of changing their identity almost as readily as stem cells can. That means you don't need to starve to get rid of all that flab; it can be transformed into the healthy tissues of a brand new beautiful you.
Fat Can Transform Back into Stem Cells, and Other Types of Cells
You might find this hard to believe, but fat cells require constant attention to maintain their girth. Many people who have tried to improve their looks by having fat injected into their lips and cheeks have seen their enhancement melt away when the transplanted fat cells refused to flourish in their new locations. When researchers investigated this phenomenon, they found that not only had the once-plump cells slimmed down to fusiform slivers, some had changed into an entirely different type of cell, called a fibrocyte, the type of cell most prevalent in the tissues into which the fat cells had been injected. Apparently, fibrocytes surrounding the transplanted fat cells refused to make the introduced cells feel at home (by producing the necessary fat-sustaining hormones). Without these hormones, the receptors and enzymes that enable fat cells to do their thing—ingest sugar and fat and grow pudgy—began to shut down. Shrinking under the peer pressure of a hormonally cold shoulder, the unwelcome guests simply conformed to the rules of the neighborhood and reinvented themselves as fibrocytes.
You may be able to coerce fat cells into becoming just about anything you want. Fat tissue belongs to a class of body material called connective tissue, which collectively includes collagen, bone, muscle, blood, and associated cells. Some cell biologists now believe that one type of connective tissue cell permanently retains its ability to transform into another cell type whenever chemical signals instruct it to do so. So muscle cells can become fat cells: fat can become bone; and then a bone cell can change back to a fat cell again. This process is termed transdifferentiation. [...]
All this suggests that a fat cell on your thigh today might once have been a muscle, bone, or skin cell, living someplace else in your body. But why, you may wonder, would any cell decide to pack its bags and head to an entirely new location? It would if it received a chemical memo saying that its service in its current tissue is no longer required, and that it should head to its new assignment in the fat department.
[...] Exercise is important because it generates signals to transdifferentiate your fat.
Exercise works at least three ways: 1) It increases insulin sensitivity, so you need less insulin to get sugar out of the bloodstream. This allows your insulin levels to drop, which tells your fat cells to slow down the conversion of sugar into more fat. 2) It reduces the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol packs fat around organs (as opposed to under the skin) where it produces lots of pro-inflammatory chemicals, which in turn tell the body to produce still more fat. And 3) Exercise makes blood sugar levels drop, and with it the potential for AGEs and the sugar-induced inflammation that blocks healthy body-building signals.
[...] This discovery that so many cellular transformations are occurring has unsettled the medical community, which must now abandon the old notion of a cell as something created to be a lifelong member of one particular cellular species. This model grossly underestimates the cell's protean nature. Just as genes change in reaction to what we eat, think, and do, cells change their internal construction too, dedifferentiating from a mature phase back into the immature, pluripotent stage of cell life. And then, from the pluripotent stage, they can be instructed to redifferentiate back into the original, or even be recruited into another type of tissue altogether.
