| I like the submitted blog post although the blog post does not really try to explain why pigs get fat when fed milk, corn or sugar. Actually I am not a pig specialist but I heard a lot of times that the pig body chemistry works quite similarly to human body chemistry. So I will try to explain why people get fat when fed milk, corn, sugar. The central mechanism to understand is insulin. Quoting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin:
"Insulin is a peptide hormone, produced by beta cells of the pancreas, and is central to regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body. Insulin causes cells in the liver, skeletal muscles, and fat tissue to absorb glucose from the blood. In the liver and skeletal muscles, glucose is stored as glycogen, and in fat cells (adipocytes) it is stored as triglycerides. Insulin stops the use of fat as an energy source by inhibiting the release of glucagon. ... Porcine insulin is especially close to the human version." That means whenever you consume a meal that produces a high insulin response your body stops burning fat immediately and in addition stores all the fat in the meal you just consumed in the form of fat. That is what makes pigs and people fat (in addition to another phenomenom which makes you hungry again much quicker). You can index food by the insulin reaction it causes. This index is called insulin index. Different food has a different index value. See e. g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index Unfortunately there are no really detailled insulin index tables as there are for the glycemic index. The glycemic index measures how fast your blood sugar will rise after consuming a specific food. In most cases however high glycemic index will also mean high insulin index and you can substitute the missing insulin index data by using the glycemic index data with one exception: milk. Milk although having a low glycemic index (caused by milk sugar/lactose) has a high insulin index! See e. g. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/dairy-insulin/ Corn and Sugar have high glycemic (and thus insulin) index.
Milk protein causes an abnormal high insulin index. There are a lot of diets that can be explained by optimizing mostly this insulin effect: Atkins, Low Carb, Sears/Zone, Paleo. Although I am not an expert in any of them. All I can say is that by only taking care for what I ate I lost 60 pounds over the course of 1.5 years (I used a similar german diet called "Schlank im Schlaf"). The interesting thing to me is: When I am eating food with a low insulin effect I stay satisfied for much longer. When I eat food with high insulin effect I get hungry again in 1-2 hours. It feels almost like drinking salt water against thirst... |