Part 1: Protect the Liver, Feed the Gut: Based on the book “Metabolical”
Essentially, all you need to know are two precepts, six words total: 1) protect the liver, 2) feed the gut. That being said, science concluded that not all calories are created equal; and it’s the food quality, not the quantity, that matters. The first key is the one the medical establishment doesn’t want you to know—that their drugs can’t and don’t treat chronic disease; they only treat the symptoms. Ever gone to a doctor who told you that you have high blood pressure and then proceeded to put you on medication that you will have to take for the rest of your life? High blood pressure is a symptom, not a condition. We have to look at the whole body to figure out the root cause behind the symptom to alleviate it. There are eight subcellular pathologies that underlie all chronic conditions—and all of them are nutrient-sensing, meaning that they respond positively or negatively to specific components in food; yet none of these are considered diseases themselves. The second key is the one that the food industry doesn’t want you to know—all food is inherently good; it’s what’s been done to the food that’s bad. The problem is that in the course of food processing, poisons are either added (stuffing the liver) or antidotes have been removed (starving the gut), or both. Minimally processed food (e.g., white rice, fruit juice) interferes with one or the other; while ultra-processed food (e.g., Cheetos) interferes with both. Now our livers are stuffed (from the sugar our bodies turn into fat) and we’ve literally turned ourselves into foie gras. Our guts used to be full of beneficial intestinal bacteria that munched on fiber and kept everything in our bodies copacetic. Now, that food has been stripped of its fiber, and those bacteria get so hungry they eat the mucin barrier off our intestinal cells, setting us up for inflammation and leaky gut. In this book, the author will provide evidence for three separate, yet related immoral hazards perpetrated by Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government. As people get sicker, Big Pharma benefits from complicity, the food industry is protected from the costs of its actions, and the government profits from tariffs on processed food shipped to other unsuspecting countries. We’ve accepted this as normal. It’s not, and we have the power to change it, for ourselves and for society at large—for health and healthcare, for economics, and for the environment. It’s time to expose the maneuvers of the food industry and the pharma industry, and their influence on Congress to make us all fat, sick, and broke. You have to work upstream of the problem if you’re going to fix the cause. Working downstream only fixes the result. The cause of most havoc on your body is called metabolic syndrome. The simple fact is that anyone can get metabolic syndrome—even those who are normal weight. Everyone is at risk—both ways. Insulin resistance is the primary defect in metabolic syndrome. Insulin resistance manifests itself in a myriad of tissues and ways, which may vary from person to person. You may be overweight, or not. You might have high cholesterol, but maybe it’s normal. You might have high blood pressure, although it could be low. All of these are tissue-specific symptoms of metabolic dysfunction. Previously, doctors only diagnosed metabolic syndrome if you were obese. Now we know better. Even people who aren’t overweight develop metabolic syndrome. The issue is that doctors are still targeting obesity, which they think is the disease. Rather, it’s just another symptom. Everyone thinks that first you gain weight, and then you get sick. Yet, 80 percent of the time, it’s actually the other way around. First you get sick, then you gain weight. How do we know this? Because only 80 percent of obese people are metabolically ill. The other 20 percent of obese people are metabolically healthy. We even have a name for them—metabolically healthy obese (MHO). They will live a completely normal life, die at a completely normal age, have normal-length telomeres (the ends of the chromosomes that determine how sick you are and when you’ll die), and they won’t have exorbitant health insurance claims. The key is that these people have lots of subcutaneous fat, very little ectopic fat (fat in cells that shouldn’t have fat), normal metabolic function, and low insulin levels. Metabolic syndrome is the inappropriate storage of energy in the wrong form in cells that shouldn’t store it. There are only three types of cells in body that should store energy: subcutaneous (i.e., stored in the butt) and visceral (i.e., stored in the belly) adipose tissue is supposed to store excess energy as fat; muscle tissue and liver tissue are supposed to store excess energy as glycogen (starch). That’s it. Fat stored anywhere else in the body is called ectopic fat. If the muscle or liver or any other body tissue stores any amount of ectopic fat, then that tissue will develop metabolic dysfunction, and promote some clinical manifestation of metabolic syndrome. How about the other 80 percent who are overweight and sick? They were sick first—they had metabolic syndrome—and that caused insulin resistance, which led to high insulin levels. But because their fat cells still responded to insulin, that extra insulin allowed the fat cells to accumulate more energy, so they got bigger. Therefore, their weight is a biomarker for their metabolic dysfunction. When you look at the normal weight population, approximately 40 percent of those people also have metabolic syndrome—meaning they have metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, and high insulin levels. But for whatever reason, they’re just not obese. In some of them, their fat cells are insulin resistant, too, so energy doesn’t accumulate in the subcutaneous tissue. Instead they put it in other organs that shouldn’t have fat, such as muscle and the liver. This has spawned a new medical term with 1,500 citations in the literature called TOFI, or thin on the outside, fat on the inside. WHat can we do to help reverse metabolic syndrome? A change in your eating habits. Stanford nutritionist Christopher Gardner showed in his A to Z study that all dietary interventions regress to the mean—meaning by two months on any specific diet, the subject will return to eating the same way they were before the intervention. Dieting is hard, and rarely works in the long term. You can alter your health, but you have to know why; your doctor does, too. They need to be able to explain the “why” back to you. If you don’t understand and tell people why something will work, they won’t do it. You really can’t blame the public for their nutritional whiplash. We are exposed to a daily barrage of contradictory statements and straw man arguments about basic science (one day “fat is bad,” the next day “fat is good”) coming from physicians and dietitians, while nutritional biochemistry is ignored (i.e., how metabolism works versus calorie counting and body weight). The physicians don’t understand it themselves. If there’s no science or understanding, there’s no imperative to change. Another reason that patients can’t or won’t alter their diets is that they’re abusing sugar—the food additive that’s most addictive, induces metabolic disease, and reduces longevity.
