Diet-Primer
Diet primer
Quick facts about the optimal human diet.
Links:
Human dietary history
- The human diet has consisted of the flesh and fat of animals for at least 350 thousand years
- Gut acidity levels similar to felines, who are obligate carnivores
- Helps in digesting meat, fat and rotten flesh
Randle cycle (and the myth of the "balanced" diet)
- Part of the holistic metabolic function
- A series of enzymes (switches)
- Mixing fats and carbohydrates in your diet triggers the Randle cycle
- Turns off the ability to metabolize both fats and carbohydrates
- Thus causes accute inflammation
- Accute inflammation causes increase in body fat
- Ancient humans would eat fruits when they were in season
- Mixed with the animals foods they eat year round, they would gain fat in the autumn/summer
- This would help them in the cold winter months
LDL and HDL
- Low and high density lipoproteins
- Function as "packages" for cholesterol in blood
- Cholesterol is fat soluable, blood is water based
- LDL and HDL allow fat to be transported in the blood to the cells
Why are vitamin C requirements lower on low carb diets?
- Carbohydrates are "converted" to glucose
- Glucose is transported in the blood by GLUT4
- Vitamin C is also transported by GLUT4
- Glucose and vitamin C carrying GLUT4 compete with one another
- Thus, vitamin C is not guaranteed to be absorbed by the cells
- Thus, increasing vitamin C in your diet increases the chances of vitamin C absorption
- At some point in early hominid history, the ability to synthesize vitamin C disappeared
- Hypothesis: probably due to increase in dietary meat and uric acid
Uric acid
- A powerful water based antioxidant
- More effective than vitamin C
- Mixed with vitamin C causes gout
- Contained in meat