Insulin, Can’t Live Without It, Can’t Live With It, or Why My Body Is Trying To Be As Fat As Possible
Continuing our basic theme, on the basics. Your body is programed to save away the fat away for later, if it has sugar to use now. One of the more interesting things is that the more sugar and starch you eat, the hungrier you get, and the more sugar and starch you eat.
Lets digress and look at what happens when you eat food containing simple carbohydrates and sugars.
As your chew, an substance in your saliva amylase starts to break the simple carbohydrates into sugars. This has a side effect of making the food taste sweeter. When the food makes it into the small intestine (the part of your digestive system after the stomach), the pancreas provides more amylase and other starch digesting enzymes, breaking all of the digestible starches and sugars into glucose, fructose, galactose and other monosaccharides. These pass through the intestinal wall into the blood stream and are directly transported to the liver. The liver converts some into glycogen, some into triglycerides and the rest passes on into the body. Something signals the pancreas to release insulin, in response to the sugar in the blood. This insulin rapidly stops the burning of fat, and forces triglycerides into your fat cells. If a lot of sugar comes in quickly, the pancreas may produce a lot of insulin and reduce the sugar levels in the blood to much, resulting in hunger. This can become very quickly cyclic, eat some carbs, have a blood sugar spike, store most of it away as fat, and get very hungry again and eat more.
The more carbs you eat, especially simple carbs and sugars, the more likely you are to crave them, and to gain fat.
