 Atomic Dog
We ain't no dopes
By TC
Jake is the guy who runs the front desk at the gym where I work out. He's a pretty good bodybuilder, and he lives the part. I don't think I've ever seen him without a tank top on, and his body is as smooth and hairless as Mr. Bigglesworth, the cat in the new "Austin Powers" movie. Personally, I think he could make a helluva' good living jumping out of cakes at gay birthday parties. Sure, some spandex posing trunks, a little oil, and a Ricky Martin "Livin' La Vida Loca" tape is all he'd need to start his new career. Apparently, though, Jake is content to work the front desk of the gym, along with working part-time at a local sports nutrition store. Given his duel-pronged career choice, he's always willing to try new supplements, so I gave him a tub of Grow! I forgot about it until I saw him a couple of days later. I asked him how he liked it, and he said that, although he thought Grow! tasted fantastic, he wasn't going to use it anymore because it had "too much sugar" in it. This remark didn't sit well with me. My face inadvertently slipped into a "Dirty Harry" frown, the kind he gets before he decides to scrape some piece of shit off the Earth's shoe. I immediately began to wish that Jake would indeed take that job jumping out of birthday cakes, and while fighting off the greedy gay hands trying to pinch his boyish bottom, fall ass-backwards out a 17th floor window. I just turned around and continued my workout. What I should have done, however, was explain to him that he, along with other bodybuilders, should stop worrying about "sugar" and things like that and instead worry about a food's glycemic index. For those of you who aren't familiar with the glycemic index, it relates to the blood sugar-raising ability of a food, and this ability is expressed as a percent of the response to the equivalent amount of a standard food, which is white bread. White bread is assigned a value of 100, as is sucrose. Foods that don't elicit much of a blood-sugar response have lower values, while foods that elicit high blood-sugar responses are assigned high numbers, close to or even higher than white bread. Why is this important? Well, if you eat a high-GI food, by itself, the body releases a large amount of insulin in an effort to maintain blood-sugar levels. The trouble is, the body ends up overcompensating. The insulin does its best to stabilize things by driving sugar, or glucose, into muscle cells. Unfortunately, the muscle cells can only hold so much. Through a complex series of reactions, all that excess glucose in the blood gets converted into fatty acids and triglycerides which, subsequently, gets stored as fat. What's more, if you keep on eating high-GI foods, you get a kind of an insulin receptor downgrade. All that continuous overproduction of insulin plum tuckers out those poor receptors, thus forcing the body to produce a lot more insulin to counter all the elevated blood sugar. Furthermore, in people who are chronically insulin-resistant, glucagon levels remain high. Glucagon is a counterregulatory hormone that breaks down body tissues to ensure adequate fuels for the body in the absence of substrate. That means, among other things, that it breaks down muscle tissue, and that's no fun at all. In short, insulin-resistant people are typically fatter than ideal, with less muscle tissue. You may have wondered why people today keep getting fatter and fatter, despite the prevalence of fat-free foods. Here's a telling piece of history: Prior to the early 17th century, bread was made by grinding grain with big old lumpy rocks. Accordingly, the end product was an unrefined bread that looked like it contained hunks of plywood. When high-speed grinding was invented, the particle size of flour decreased, leading to breads that look very much like today's Wonder bread. It was just about this time that cases of diabetes started to show up in large numbers around the world. Here's what happened: when the particles of flour — which are carbohydrate and elicit an insulin response — are introduced to the digestive system, they get absorbed so easily and so quickly that they enter the body much faster than sugar, causing a big insulin response. And this big insulin response leads to all of the aforementioned problems. A lot of things other than particle size contribute to the glycemic index of a food. Even though there are more and more fat-free foods on the market, it might well be, ironically, this absence of fat that's helping to screw us all up. If you take the fat out of a food, the particles in the food get absorbed much more quickly. Now, if you combine modern high-grinding methods with the practice of removing most or all of the fat from foods, you get foods that have incredibly high GIs. That's why things like fat-free crackers, white bread, rice cakes, and even fat-free potato chips are bad, bad news. There are a few things to remember. First, you shouldn't eat carbs that are highly processed. If they crumble into dust when you pinch them between your fingers, you're looking at a GI nightmare. Secondly, try to eat some healthy fats with your carbs. If you must have a cracker or rice cake, add a little natural peanut butter to it. Better still, try to eat foods in combination. If you eat carbs, make sure you eat protein and fat, too. Throughout the years, I've tested my response to various foods by using something called a glucometer. It's a little doohickey that diabetics use to test their blood sugar: if the glucometer tells them it's too low, they quickly get something to eat. Conversely, if it's too high, they need to give themselves a shot of insulin. The ideal food, for the diabetic and non-diabetic alike, would be a food that didn't have much effect on blood sugar. Now, my baseline blood-sugar reading is normally about 71. After eating a bowl of oatmeal (an unprocessed grain), my blood sugar rises to about 80 after 15 minutes; 85 after a half hour; and back to about 73 after a full hour. Cool. That's just where I want it. Consider what happens, though, when I eat a bowl of Special K cereal, which is, unbelievably, targeted at dieters. Again, my baseline was, for this test, 75. After 15 minutes, it skyrocketed to 114, and after a half hour, it was up to 140! And then, after an hour, my blood sugar dropped a few points below baseline. If blood sugar drops below baseline, it can trigger a signal to lead to early food consumption — and that, by itself, repeated over and over again, can lead to an expanding waistline. Now, if I'd perhaps had my Special K with a side of eggs, I probably would have gotten the desirable response. The secret would be mixing different macronutrients together at the same meal (protein, fat, and carbs). We were fully aware of the science behind the glycemic index and its effect on the body when we developed Grow! That's why Jake's comment about "too much sugar" (in Grow!'s case, fructose) was moronic. By combining low GI-sugars, guar gums, and a slightly higher amount of healthful fats than what you might find in conventional MRPs, we created a drink with an ideal GI response. In fact, Grow! causes blood sugar to rise no more than four points in a half hour, allowing it to return to baseline levels at around an hour. Here's how it affects me: We ain't no dopes. A lot of people agonize about how hard it is to decide which diet they should follow to lose body fat, but it doesn't have to be all that complicated. Just remember the simple rules: avoid highly processed, fat-free foods, and if you must eat them, combine them with other foods to slow down their absorption. And if you see Jake, cold-cock him with a tub of Grow! for me, will you? |
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