Weight Loss Documentary – The Obesity Tapes (part 7)

Weight Loss Documentary – The Obesity Tapes (part 7)

I did a fellowship in biochemistry before medical school, so I look at our obesity epidemic a little differently. From a biochemist’s point of view, the American obesity is not caused by eating too many calories, but by storing too much fat. The American obesity epidemic is not excess calories, but excess fat storage. When you eat too much carbohydrate at a meal, your body stores too much fat, because eating carbohydrate releases insulin. Insulin carries the carbohydrate you eat into your cells to store as fat. Stored fat is triglyceride, and your body gets the glycerol to store fat from the alpha glycerol phosphate in carbohydrate. In English, when you eat too much carbohydrate at a meal, your body stores too much fat. It’s diet economics. The 1972 U.S. government task force report on nutrition told Americans to stop eating fat, cholesterol was killing us, and we were to replace the fat calories we were eating, with carbohydrate calories. And I have to say it turned out that cholesterol is essentially harmless. What’s killing us is triglyceride, and triglyceride is directly related to how much carbohydrate you eat. But like good Americans, we complied with the government task force report, and our diet went from 55% fat to 55% carbohydrate. This caused 60% of us to store excess fat, and that’s the American obesity epidemic.