Nothing stays in Vegas. That’s our starting point here: that every calorie you consume has to get used or disposed of by your body in some way. No calories simply disappear into thin air (although they may disappear somewhere else, as noted below). No calories are “free.” Every single molecule you eat must be dealt with. Your body doesn’t function like a car’s gas tank, when there’s an absolute limit of capacity that results in gasoline on the ground (and the gas station owner yelling at you) if you keep trying to outwit the automatic shutoff by “topping off” the tank and manually restarting the pump. Your esophagus doesn’t have an automatic shutoff valve. I’m not even sure where that organ would be best situated: above the larynx? Halfway between the mouth and the stomach? There’d be a food backup, I guess. Kind of gross, and maybe dangerous. You certainly can get into the “I can’t eat another bite” mode, but in reality the stomach’s capacity is very flexible and expandable. (Just ask the people who’ve had stomach-reduction surgery that leaves them with a greatly diminished stomach pouch. If they’re determined enough, they can outwit the surgery, either by eating constant small meals that don’t overstrain the new little pouch or by going ahead and eating too much. The pouch can stretch, eventually. Read about this and other dangers of the surgery at “Long-Term Complications after Gastric-Sleeve Surgery.”)
It is true that your body excretes some nutrients in the waste products of urine and feces. Diabetics, for example, have sweet-tasting urine (and how that was discovered is something I do not want to know) because their cells can’t absorb the proper amounts of glucose and therefore blood sugar levels get too high. The kidneys have to filter out that excess sugar, often leading to damage of the kidneys themselves as they deal with the poison. Your kidneys also excrete excess water-soluble vitamins such as vitamin C, excesses often caused by consumption of dietary supplements. (It has been said that Americans have the most expensive urine in the world.) Also, your small intestine is not 100% efficient at extracting nutrients from the food passing through it, so some is eliminated that way. Interestingly, and here’s one of many arguments for eating whole unprocessed food as much as possible: high fiber content in your food usually results in a lower percentage of calories actually being absorbed. This lower absorption rate may be from the nutrients’ clinging to the indigestible fiber and/or the fact that higher-fiber material passes through the digestive system faster. So I guess if you’re in a famine you’d better eat Wonder Bread!
What percentage of the calories you consume is eliminated by these avenues? I’ve tried to find an answer, with the best I could find being a ballpark figure for healthy people of around 5%. That ain’t much, folks. The vast, vast majority of what you eat has to be used; that is, broken down for energy or rebuilding on the one hand, or stored in either your muscles (as glycogen, a short-term fuel) or in your fat cells (as . . . fat) on the other. That’s pretty much it. So here’s a thought for you to ponder:
You carry around a visible diary of your food consumption, especially of your excess food consumption.
For men, the excess is usually deposited around the middle as abdominal fat. As I’ve said before, and as you, dear reader, probably knew already, there are unique health risks associated with abdominal fat, although it’s not completely clear why this is true. Men as a whole are more at risk for heart attacks than women because women typically deposit excess weight around their hips and thighs, which all of us women hate but which doesn’t do the damage that abdominal or visceral fat does. Scarily enough, though, studies seem to show that if women do carry abdominal weight their risks of heart disease/attack are higher than men’s with the same profile. (“Got Belly Fat? The Bigger Heart Disease Risk for Women”) I have to say that in my admittedly unscientific, unrandomized observations I see more and more women with potbellies.
Are there genetic factors playing into these deposits of excess consumption? Definitely so. I want to address that question in later followup posts. But that’s not my point here. Let me bring back a quotation from the New York Times that I used in a previous post of my own:
Whatever the combination of factors at work, something about the environment is making many people as fat as their genetic makeup permits.
And the main “something about the environment” is excess calories, especially sugar and refined carbohydrate calories.
Now, here’s the thing: your body deals with sugar calories in a very different way than it deals with complex carbohydrates, fats or proteins. So while all calories count in some way and have to be dealt with by the body in some way, sugar calories, that is, calories coming from our massive intake of sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup, as well as other refined starches such as white flour, are uniquely fattening because of the specific pathways we have for sugar metabolism. Again, maybe everyone who’s reading this already knows these scientific facts. I have to tell you, though, that it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve understood these concepts. It seems so counterintuitive to be told that sugar makes us fat. Doesn’t fat make us fat? In truth, any substance in which we overindulge can make us fat, but sugar is the biggest villain. Even Gary Taubes, the anti-sugar guy, tells us in his Why We Get Fat: and What to Do About It that Mauritanian girls are practically force-fed a diet that consists largely of milk in order to make them attractive for marriage. Here’s a quotation from a magazine article on the same subject:
Her parents used to give her zrik – a drink made of milk, water and sugar – so she would digest food faster, she recalled. (“Force-Feeding Burdens Obese Mauritanian Girls with Heart Disease, Diabetes”)
Very, very interesting that “sugar” is included in the mix, isn’t it? The girls are also fed high amounts of meat and of porridge, probably whole-grain but in amounts that fill up buckets. Girl can weigh over 300 pounds by the time they’re eight! EIGHT! And they can end up north of 440 pounds, or 200 kilograms, by the time they’re young women. This weight puts a huge strain on their hearts and leads to Type 2 diabetes. But the parents think they’re doing something good for these girls by making them marriageable. It’s the same type of reasoning that led to hundreds of years of foot-binding in China. So, so sad. (And I’m glad I looked up this article when I couldn’t find it in Taubes’ book, because he implied that the girls were fattened on milk alone.) Also, just a little teaser for the next food-related book review I have planned: Tommy Tomlinson, author of a book that tells his story of weight struggles, weighed in at 460 pounds before he started losing, and he’s over six feet tall. Imagine a much shorter woman carrying around almost that much!
Getting back to my main point here: we’re told often that our bodies were never, ever designed to handle our current typical sugar loads. (Watch, though, for an upcoming post about the ridiculous paleo diet, the next on my list of fad diets I want to debunk. Be sure to read my recent posts on the keto diet if you haven’t done so already–here, here, here, here, and here. Man, did I go to town on that one!) Anyway, as above, your body has to do something with that Big Gulp you just gulped down. If you’re diabetic (and if you are, why on earth are you drinking a Big Gulp? Not that anyone should be drinking one of those poison potions), some of that sugar will hang around in your blood vessels wreaking havoc and will eventually get filtered out by your kidneys, as above. The amount of unmetabolized sugar in your blood will vary according to how severe your diabetes is and according to the type of diabetes you have. (Also a subject for upcoming posts.) But that massive and sudden of a sugar intake is terrible for everybody.
Just to give some perspective here: A 32-ounce Big Gulp of regular sweetened soda has:
SEVENTY-TWO GRAMS OF SUGAR.
That is:
ALMOST THREE TIMES THE DAILY RECOMMENDED ALLOWANCE OF ADDED SUGAR IN A NORMAL DIET,
which is 25 grams.
And I’m way over my word limit. Come back later for the next post on this subject!