| Agave nectar | It’s a hypersweet natural substance. | Try it. While it’s very high in calories, you need only a fraction of the amount of sugar needed to gain the same level of sweetness. You can order through veganessentials.com or blueagavenectar.com. |
| Stevia | A noncaloric natural herb. Taste isn’t ideal, and stevia seems to lower sperm counts in some studies. | For the taste and the potential side effects, no thanks. No diet drink is worth the potential of sterility. |
Chapter 5
Taking a Fat Chance
How Fat Ruins Your Health
Diet Myths
Thin people are automatically healthier than fat people.
A fat is a fat is a fat. All fat is equally damaging.
Your ideal blood pressure is anything less than 140/90.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re just trying to shave a few inches from your waist or trying to morph your slushy belly into an ice-hard one, the fact remains: It’s hard to forget about body fat. You see it when you get dressed, get washed, and get jiggy You feel it when you sit down, when you walk upstairs, when you bend over to lick the last cake crumbs off the plate. And if you’re a person who’s struggled with weight for a lifetime, you likely stress about fat more than you stress about money, relationships, or anesthesia-free colonoscopies.
Fat is constantly right in our faces. And on our minds. And wrapped around our necks and arms. And hanging from our bellies, raining from our rears, and gyrating during twist contests. But you know what?
Oftentimes, we forget about fat. We eat a lot of food at one meal and go back to do it right again—because we don’t see the health risks in the same way we see a slightly larger chin in the mirror. Now that our digestive journey is over, and you’ve learned how fat is stored, it’s time to explore what that excess stored fat can do—to your heart, to your arteries, to your entire body.
Most of us assume that you have to be as skinny as a coaxial cable to be healthy, but the truth is that plenty of so-called thin people are less fit and less healthy than so-called heavy people. YOU-reka! That’s right: It’s actually better to be fat and have few risk factors for bad health than it is to be thin and have a high number of health-related risk factors. Now, that’s not to say we’re ordering a round of fried pickles for everyone. When all else is equal, carrying extra fat will more likely increase your risk of heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes. But our point is that we want you to stop thinking about pounds and pounds only; we’d rather you start thinking about the numbers that really matter—especially to your husbands, wives, children, parents, and friends. The real story of your body isn’t measured by scales or wolf whistles. It’s measured by your waist size—and what fat does inside your blood and arteries.
What Fat’s Got to Do with It
Here’s how many of us assess our health: If the pain’s not severe enough to call the paramedics, then we tough it out, go on our way, and write off most of our general feel-bad symptoms to fatigue, stress, age, or the jug of vanilla fudge we downed during CSI. The problem with that approach? You’re probably more in tune with the fall TV schedule than you are with your own body Of course, if you’re overweight, the extra fat is sure to manifest itself in some outward side effects like lack of energy or lack of self-esteem. But many of the risk factors associated with carrying too much fat don’t have any outward symptoms at all—meaning that the only way to tell whether being overweight is threatening your life is by taking a microscope underneath the flub and chub and focusing on what’s happening at your body’s most core levels.
Sure, you know that fat lives on your hips, but it also lives in your blood. If you were to take a vial of blood and let it sit (we don’t recommend doing this at home), you’d see a layer of clotty cream that would rise to the top of the vial, sort of like tiramisu. That’s fat. How did it get there? (Half credit if your answer was tiramisu.) It’s absorbed via your intestines. But the key player is the omentum. And why should we care about that organ that sounds like it’s missing the letter m? Because the omentum can store fat that is quickly accessible to the liver (meaning it can cause lousy cholesterol and triglyceride levels to rise) and also sucks insulin out of circulation (making your blood sugar rise)—meaning that this cream-converted fat sets up shop in the omentum and puts your organs within very close striking distance of a hammer.
See, fat is like real estate: it’s all about location, location, location. We all have three kinds of fat: fat in our bloodstream (called triglycerides), subcutaneous fat (which lies just underneath the skin’s surface), and that omentum fat. (The fourth fat, of course, is the fat in food). As you remember from the last chapter, the omentum is a fatty layer of tissue located inside the belly that hangs underneath the muscles in your stomach (it’s why some men with beer guts have hard-as-keg bellies—their fat is underneath the muscle).
Because this omentum fat is so close to your solid organs, it’s their best energy source. (Why go to the gas station on the other side of town when there’s a station at the next corner?) Think of the omentum fat as the obnoxious eighteen-wheeler on a crowded highway—elbowing out the stomach, pushing away other organs, and claiming all the space for itself (see Figure 5.1).
What’s most interesting—and encouraging—is that as soon as you make physiological changes to your omentum, your body starts seeing effects. That is, once your body senses it’s losing that fat, then your body’s blood-related numbers (cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar) start traveling in the healthy direction—within days, before you even notice any kind of physical sign of weight loss (especially when you consider that the size of your omentum is impossible to measure without a CT scan).
In addition, the fat released from the omentum travels to your liver rapidly and constantly as opposed to the more patient fat on your thighs. The processed material is then shipped to the arteries, where it is linked to health risks like high LDL (lousy) cholesterol. The other problem with omentum fat is that it secretes very little adiponectin, which is a stress- and inflammation-reducing chemical that’s related to the hunger-controlling hormone leptin. When you have less fat, you secrete more adiponectin, which produces a product that reduces inflammation. But more importantly, higher levels of adiponectin are related to lower levels of fat. So the more omentum fat you have, the less fat-regulating adiponectin you’ll produce. Those who have low levels of adiponectin have abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other risk factors associated with coronary artery disease.
Those are the reasons why the fat in your thighs doesn’t matter as much to your health as does omentum fat (even if it matters for your bikini pride), and they help explain why omentum fat (or an “apple” body shape) is more harmful than subcutaneous fat (like thigh fat, which gives you a “pear” shape). Subcutaneous fat isn’t supplying a feeding tube to the rest of your vital internal organs, and it’s not messing up the levels of substances in your blood that are being supplied to your vital organs.
Figure 5.1 Belly Bully The omentum greedily bullies surrounding structures out of the way. The squished diaphragm and lungs make breathing difficult and the squashed kidney and its blood supply secrete hormones to raise the blood pressure in an effort to fight back.
FACTOID