Food is about health. Exercise is about fitness. You can have fit people, elite athletes, who get by on genetics and training. Are they healthy? If health is the absence of sickness, then yes they are. But health is a reservoir of potentials. It's not just what's on the surface. The question is, are you able to fight off sickness, and not just avoid it somehow. Can you confront it, and beat it before it gets a hold. And all those diseases awaiting some person down the line -- are they dormant or incipient or festering now? If so, that's not health.
Same with healthy people, with their great diets. It's not the same as fitness. Diet makes fitness easier, but fitness is about performance, and that has to be practiced. Training. By these standards, though, it is clear that the starting point is health, and fitness follows. Diet, followed by training.
Here's the upshot, about why carbs are bad. All calories can be made into fat. Free fatty acids. That's just a form of usable energy in your blood. These fats are stored in cells as FAT -- blubber fat -- by being bound together as triglycerides. The glue that turns the good free fatty acids into the bad blubber is glycerol. Your body gets glycerol by burning carbs -- glucose. So the more carbs you burn, the more glue there is to bind fats. Glycerol is the limiting factor.
Isn't that interesting? It's exactly the same idea as with omega 3. You can't make anti-inflammatory hormones unless you have omega 3. The more you have, the more you can make, and that's a good thing. The more glycerol you have, the more blubber you can make, and that's a bad thing. The wrong lesson to draw from this is that you shouldn't eat carbs. Plants are carbs. Eat plants. Don't eat glue factories. Grains. Some bread? Sure, once in a while. All the time, at every meal? What, is there a famine? Wheat is great if you're starting a neolithic civilization. But too few calories is not the problem, in 21st century America.
The observation has been made that Canadians don't seem nearly as fat as Americans. Well, the Canadian government didn't start to sponsor a poisonous -- low fat -- diet, beginning in the 80s. Exactly the time when obesity started its meteoric rise. Although meteors don't rise. Sure, low fat generally means fewer calories. But it also means low ESSENTIAL fats. You can turns carbs into fat, but never into essential fats. So it's a malnutrition diet. Brilliant. Thanks for that. Instead of getting the essentials, we got hydrogenated- and transfats.
Where's a coup when you need one? Start with yourself. Sensible diet, sensible exercise.
Be excellent.
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