Figure 4.1 Internal Conflict Food and toxins continually line the frontier of our intestines. Good foods slip through to provide us nutrition, but combatants stimulate an aggressive response from local immune cells. The resulting inflammation causes swelling, gas, and belly cramps.
FACTOID
While hundreds of herbs and supplements have been purported to help you lose weight, many of them have not been studied well enough to support those claims and are not regulated by the FDA. Safety can be an issue-as was the case with ephedra, which helped people lose weight through adrenalinelike action but put them at risk of heart attacks. Here are some common herbal remedies and why they may not be all they’re supposed to be, which is why you shouldn’t put your weight-loss faith in any of them:
Calcium: It’s been touted as an ingredient that speeds weight loss. Studies have shown that those with low calcium are more likely to gain weight and be overweight. But the people who lost weight with increased calcium were also on short-term, calorie-restricted diets, so the weight loss was more predictable than an Oscar winner’s speech.
Bitter orange: It’s been shown to decrease weight but has the same side effects as ephedra, such as increasing heart rate and blood pressure.
Chitosan: It’s extracted from the shells of shellfish, and the theory is that it works a little like some weight-loss drugs, by blocking fat absorption in your body. But studies show that chitosan doesn’t lead to weight loss.
Essentially, alien bacteria are living in your intestines, trying to get into your bloodstream to multiply (which is their goal) and cause havoc, but they’re being fought at the intestinal wall by those who guard it. (Your gastrointestinal tract, but especially your intestines, is one of three places where your body interacts with the external world; your skin and lungs being the other two.) In your small intestine, your mast cells and macrophages, which are part of your immune system, serve as the bowel brigade, fighting alien invaders.
When foods enter the small intestine and are transported across the intestinal wall, they’re met by this bowel brigade border patrol, which screens the nutrients. The bowel brigade lets the food through because it has an authorized ID card—it’s food, and your body wants it. But if it’s the wrong kind of food, or if it’s got some toxins with it, your bowel brigade responds by calling in more mast cells and setting off time-released bombs throughout your intestines. This is where the inflammation firefight starts. The result? Pain, gas, nausea, or general GI discomfort.
Milking It
If you suffer from a milk allergy, it can make your gut feel like a washing machine in the rinse cycle. Here are some ways you can help manage it:
Milk’s one of the easiest ingredients to substitute in baking and cooking by using an equal amount of either water, fruit juice, or soy or rice milk.
Watch out for hidden sources of dairy. For example, some brands of canned tuna fish and other nondairy products contain casein, a milk protein. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently working on requiring products to eliminate the term nondairy if they contain milk derivatives.
In restaurants, tell your server about your allergy. Many restaurants put butter (which comes from milk) on steaks and other food after they’ve been grilled or prepared to add extra flavor, but you can’t see it after it melts.
Some ingredients seem to contain milk products or derivatives but actually don’t. These are safe to eat if you have a lactose allergy: cocoa butter, cream of tartar, and calcium lactate.
By the way, there’s a higher ethnic predominance of lactose intolerance in those of non-European origin. It’s just another example of how genes-not willpower-help dictate what you can and cannot eat.
Why is this crucial? Not just because of the initial inflammatory reactions, but for the role it plays in your eating emotions (your small bowel is your second brain, and 95 percent of your body’s serotonin, which is a feel-good hormone, is in your gut). How you feel influences how you eat, and how you eat influences how you feel. When you eat food that makes you feel bad, you self-medicate with food that may make you feel good in the short term but will actually contribute to both inflammation and weight gain. Ultimately, when you’re caught in a cycle of feeling bad and eating worse, you’ll create a chemical stress response in your body—one that’s handled by your parking lot of fat.
FACTOID
About 2.5 percent of us suffer from milk allergies, making it the most prevalent of food allergies. While allergies to dairy products are generally outgrown, peanut allergies are not (and they’re the most potentially lethal). By the way, it seems like allergies are more prevalent the earlier in life we’re exposed to the foods.
Figure 4.2 Belly Up Not all fat is skin-deep. Deep down under your muscles, the omentum drapes off the stomach like stockings on a hanger. As we store fat the omentum wraps around to give us the dreaded beer belly.
FACTOID
Most of our body parts are adaptable enough to use multiple energy sources to survive. Only two organs need sugar directly: the brain and the testes. Evolutionary hints often come in these forms of clues.
The Storage of Stress in Your Belly
The best way to tell how stressed you are: Take a look how much belly fat you have. The larger your waist, the higher your stress.
Along the intestinal freeway, the parking garage for fat that is your omentum looks like a stocking draped over a hanger (the stomach is the hanger), but changes depending on how many calories you’re storing (see Figure 4.2). In a person with little omentum fat, your stomach looks as if it has nylons hanging off it—thin, permeable, with some webbing. But in a person with a lot of omentum fat, the hanger looks as if snow pants are hanging on it—the fat globules are so fat that there’s no netting or webbing whatsoever. (While cells can convert to fat in the liver, getting fatter is more a case of your existing cells growing. When you add body fat, you don’t get more fat cells, just more fat in each cell.)
Genetics certainly helps dictate whether you’re going to have a full garage (by having lots of belly fat) or an empty one. But your lifestyle—in terms of stress—often plays a bigger role in deciding whether you’ll have large amounts of belly fat or not. Here’s how it works:
Historically, mankind has two types of stresses. The first kind is the immediate soil-your-loincloth stress (in other words, the dinner-seeking saber-toothed tiger is closing in fast). In that fight-or-flight scenario, your body produces the neurotransmitter norepinephrine to speed your heart rate, breathing, and 100-yard-dash time to the cave. When that happens, the last thing you’re thinking about is grilling up some tubers on the campfire, so your hunger levels are squashed. That’s because your body inhibits the peptide NPY during periods of acute stress (it’s why exercise cuts appetite, because your body senses that you’re in acute stress). So high levels of stress work in favor of your waist: They take away your appetite and speed up your metabolism.
The second kind of stress that early man faced is the chronic struggle brought on by drought and famine. In contrast to the thirty or forty seconds they sweated over tiger fangs, our ancestors worried about survival all the time, and their bodies had to deal with chronic stress. When they faced famine, they sought out as many calories as they could, and their metabolism downshifted to help them conserve energy. While we don’t deal with famine, we experience modern-day versions of chronic stress that make us seek out calories and then downshift our metabolism. YOU-reka! Our bodies respond by storing the excess energy to call upon during periods where there may not be enough food. Those extra calories are stored in the omentum—our abdominal fat depot—to