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Fat For Fuel Essay

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Fat for Fuel If there is one thing Americans know a lot about it is diets. Everything from Weight watchers to Atkins and everything in between has been promoted on television, in bestselling books and now advertised all over social media. Each one claiming to be the answer to weight loss, lifelong health and even making claims of reversing disease. It is confusing. Who is right? Who is wrong? What can be believed? What can the average person actually attain and stick to? The government even has a say in what people should be eating. The food pyramid and more recently MyPlate have been attempts to steer people towards health. Unfortunately, they have been steering people in the wrong direction. A low fat high carbohydrate diet…show more content…
Insulin’s job is to bring the blood sugar down. One of the ways it does this is by taking the glucose and storing it as fat in the cells for later use. (Mawer, 2016) This is a critical function of the human body during times of feast and famine. It needs a way to fuel itself when no food is present. This is not the case for most Americans today.
The cells in the human body burn glucose for fuel first so when that is present it will not reach for the stored fat because its need for fuel is fully satisfied by the constant intake of carbohydrates.
Unfortunately, the standard American diet is filled with these glucose producing foods. This constant glucose supply inhibits lipolysis or the breakdown and release of fat from cells. By controlling carbohydrate intake, the body will begin to turn to its own fat cells to produce energy. Once insulin has been suppressed for an extended period of time, the liver produces a hormone called glucagon, the counter part of insulin. Glucagon’s role is to deplete the liver’s glycogen stores and increase fatty acid concentration in the blood stream. This will also encourage the liver to produce ketones. The human brain has a very high energy demand and will begin to use this alternate fuel. Ketosis is the state achieved when the body switches from using glucose as its primary fuel to using ketones, which are produced when the body
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