Curing people of overeating Your body craves carbohydrated because they are the body's primary fuel. Of the three primary calorie-providing nutrients in the food supply-carbohydrates,protein, fat-carbohydrates are the most fundamental and cleanest-burning fuel the body can obtain. Your body is designed to consume and metabolize carbohydrates. Satisfaction of hunger depends on your getting enought of them from your diet. As long as your diet is deficient in carbohydrates, you will be hungry. Your stomach may be temporarily full, but you will still be yearning for what your body needs.

Our digestive tract, beginning with the mouth, tongue, teeth and saliva and proceeding to the stomach via the esophagus, the small intestine(where nutrients are absorbed) and the large intestine(frow which waste is eliminated, is designed both to enjoy and efficiently use carbohydrates. Enjoy, because it begins with the tongue. At the tip of the tongue are the "sweet" taste buds, indicating that the sweet taste is the one we want to experience first and foremost. Sweet tastes are found in complex carbohydrates. The foods that are rich in complex carbohydrates are starches, such as grains, beans, potatoes, and vegetables. Simple carbohydrates, which are highly concentrated, are found in many fruits and various sweeteners such as honey, maple syrup and refined white sugar.

The design of our teeth is consistant with this pattern of carbohydrate selection. Our front teeth are shaped with cutting edges to break off pieces of starches, vegetables and fruits which are then ground by the flat molar teeth at the sides and back of the mouth.

While being chewed, food is also mixed with saliva. The saliva contains the digestive enzyme alpha amylase, whose sole function is break down complex carbohydrates into simple ones that can be easily absorbed through the digestive tract.

The reason the body selects for carbohydrates above all other nutrients is that our greatest need is for fuel. Not only do carbohydrates provide the greatest abundance of fuel, but they are the cleanest-burning available to the body. Carbohydrates are composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and their main by-products when metabolized, carbon dioxide and water, are both easily eliminated from the body. Protein, which can be used as fuel, requires much greater effort to convery to energy, and its by-product, nitrogen, converts to ammonia and urea, both of which can be harmful, especially in highter quantities.

Your entire digestive system is designed to process large amounts of carbohydrate efficiently. The first part of the small intestine contains digestive juices made by the pancreas that are also rich in carbohydrate-digesting amylases. the intestine is long and convoluted, allowing for the slow and complete process of digesting carbohydrates.

The anatomy and physiology of the human intestine are revealed as the perfect factory for hte digestion and assimilation of foods high in carbohydrates. It is the entire digestive process that gives us a feeling of being satisfied.

Hunger is more than a mere need for bulk. If bulk were all we needed, we could satisfy ourselves on tire rubber. But hunger is a marvelously complex yearning to satisfy a complete range of nutritional needs. Hunger will not subside until we are nutritionally satisfied, and that satisfaction will not occur until we have consumed sufficient carbohydrates.

The rich American diet is made up primarily of carbohydrate-deficient foods. Meat, poltry, and fish have no carbohydrates. Nor are there any carbohydrates in lard, butter, olive oil, corn oil, or any other vegetable oil. Cheese has only 2 percent of its calories as carbohydrates. Obviously these foods will not satisfy your carbohydrate needs, and consequently they will not satisfy your appetite.

Carbohydrates have effects on the body that extend beyond physical health to emotional and psychological well-being. In fact, they change brain chemistry to relieve depression and decrease the hunger drive.

Research at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology has demonstrated that carbohydrate consumption increases levels in the brain of a chemical neurotransmitter called serotonin.Serotonin, MIT researchers have found, triggers a sense of well-being, improves the ability to concentrate, and enhances sleep. It also diminishes hunger.

Foods rich in protein, such as meat and dairy products, have the opposite effect on brain chemistry. They cause a relative decrease in serotonin levels.

All of us have been trained to think that weight loss involves counting calories and limiting our intake of them. However the reason diet methods fail is that they do not address the importance of satisfying hunger, our need for carbohydrates, and the hidden source of guaranteed weight gain in everyone's diet: fat.

Fats are calorically dense foods. In other words, they are concentrated sources of calories. A gram of fat provides approxinately nine calories, while a gram of pure carbohydrate or a gram of pure protein provides only four calories. A carbohydrate diet will not provide you with as many calories as your fat-rich American diet will.

Just because fat provides lots of potential energy doesn't mean that fatty foods will give you lots of energy. Actually fat is easier to store than it is to burn as fuel. Your body will burn all the available carbohydrates before it burns significant amounts of fat. Even though fat is considered a high-energy food, it is really a high-storage food, because in real life your body tends to store much of the fat you consume in your diet.

Fat molecules are comprised of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms. The more hydrogen atoms there are in each molecule, the more saturated the fat is. Think of a fat molecule as a living room with a certain amount of space. Saturated fats are rooms that are filled to capacity with furniture; you couldn't squeeze another end table in there. Monosaturated fats hace some room still available for a chair or two, and polyunsaturated fats have even more room for say, a sofa, a love seat, and a few odds and ends.

Like the room that is stuffed with furniture, the more saturated a fat is, the denser it is. Saturated fats are so dense that they tend to be solid at room temperature. A stick of butter is a saturated fat. Most saturated fats are found in animals, and they are often called animal fats.

Vegetable fats are usually monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. Each of these has fewer hydrogen atoms stuck between their carbon atoms. ("Mono" indicates one unfilled bond; "poly" indicates many bonds where hydrogen could be added).

While saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature, mono- and polyunsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature, that is, they are oils. Olis are liquid fats. In nature there are no free fats; they are all mixed up with other components of foods. Oils are freed from their original food source by various processing methods, which may be as simple as grinding peanuts and skimming the oil from the surface.

A few vegetable fats are predominantly saturated. These include coconut, palm oil, and cocoa butter.

You've seen corn oil or soybean oil that read "partially hydrogenated." This means that hydrogen atoms have been stuffed into a mono- or polyunsaturated fat, which makes the corn oil or soybean oil solid. One it is at room temperature, it can be used as imitation butter, or margarine, or shortening.

A saturated fat is not only dense, but packed with calories, or potential energy. Mono- and polyunsaturated fats are slightly less dense, but because they are fats, they too are packed with calories.

The fattiest foods in the plant kingdom are acocados, nuts, seeds, olives, and soybeans. Most plant foods are low in fat, while most animal foods tend to be high in fat, especially those foods Americans commonly consume. The greatest sources of fat for most Americans are meats, poultry, fish, dairy products, processed packaged foods, and a variety of vegetable oils. Regardless of the kinds of fats you eat, all are easily stored.

Fat is more than a backup energy supply. It is used by body to metabolize certain vitamins(A, D, E and K), to insulate and support organs, and to maintain cell membranes.

Your need for essential fat is less than 2 percent of the calories in your diet-probably as low as .55 percent of calories. It is practically impossible to cause a deficiency in essential fat in adults.

Protein

Americans always wonder about protein. Somewhere back in the 1950's, people became convinced that the most important nutrient in the food supply was protein, and whenever you suggest a change in diet, somebody always asks the same question: "Will I get enough protein?"

Digestion of protein begins in the stomach, where acids and enzymes begin to break it down into smaller components called amino acids. Some of the protein is immediately used to build muscle, skin, hormones and other tissues. Most of us use very little protein each day.

Americans consume an average of 160 grams of protein daily, or about eight times what we need. Little, if any, is ever used as energy. Nor is protein converted into carbohydrate, unless there is none available in the diet. All the excess protein is processed and eliminated by the kidneys and liver. In the process, this leftover protein overworks these organs. As a consequence, they become enlarged and the kidneys slowly deteriorate over a lifetime.

Excess protein also causes changes in kidney metabolism. Minerals are also lost from the kidneys in large amounts when they are called on to eliminate the excess protein, particularly animal protein. Among the most important minerals lost is calcium from bones, which can lead to osteoporosis and kidney stones. Most of that damaging protein comes from animal sources, such as red meat, poultry, dairy products, eggs and fish. People desperate to lose weight will often starve to lose. The body But unfortunately, proteins from muscle and other important tissues also are consumed to survive.

If protein isn't stored as fat, the question arises: Is excess carbohydrate stored as fat? The answer is no. The body uses the most efficient means of processing the components of the foods we eat. Almost all of the excess carbohydrates we eat are simply burned and released as heat through the skin and lungs, rather than being converted into fat. The standard American diet provides about 250 grams of carbohydrate a day. Most of it is used immediately to provide for daily energy needs. If more carbohydrate is available than can be used, the inital excess is stored in the liver, kidney, and muscles in long chains of reserve fuel called glycogen.

Carbohydrate storage contributes to very little to your weight.

On a starch-based diet, in which 85 percent of calories consumed are derived from carbohydrate, a normally active man would have to consume 5000 calories a dy before his body would resort to converting the excess into significant amounts of fat.

The bottom line is that carbohydrates do not add weight to your body. Dietary fat leads to body fat. In other words, the fat you it is the fat you wear.

Avoiding fat, on the other hand, causes the fat you're now wearing to be burned away quickly.

 

Regardless of what we may eat, we're all looking for the same thing: satisfaction from out food.  We want to achieve maximum satisfaction from our diet, lose weight, and strengthen our health.

As we all know, food satisfaction begins with taste. The sooner you are satisfied, the sooner you stop eating. To do that you must begin by chewing your food thoroughly. You should attempt to chew your food thirty-five or more times and you will notice that it will become more satisfying.

Fiber

Fiber provides no calories and is not absorbed into the body. It passes through the digestive tract enhancing digestion and improves satisfaction immensely.

Dietary fiber is found only in plant foods. There is no fiber in beef, chicken, fish, eggs, or milk. Fiber passes through the digestive tract, it helps to eliminate cancer-causing substances as waste. But it also performs other important functions. For example, fiber binds with fat and cholesterol and eliminates them in the feces. This causes a decrease in calorie absorption-eliminating some of the fat that would otherwise become part of our tissues-and lowers blood cholesterol levels. Fiber also increases the activity of the bowel thus improving eliminationof waste and unused calories. Additionally fiber binds with water and thus increases the volume of the food  in your stomach and intestines, which brings satisfaction sooner and with fewer calories. Fiber also slows digestion enough to prolong the feelings of fullness.