Tag Archives: well-being

The tale of the poison-filled cupboard

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My dear aunt Sunita e-mailed me recently.  “Ravi, I have been following the Ravionhealth diet and lifestyle religiously, but I haven’t lost much weight!”.  I was intrigued, because I now have over a hundred people following my diet, and the only person who has not shown results is a friend with a thyroid problem.  It was time for a forensic investigation at Aunt Sunita’s home!

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, I knocked on her door.  “Helloooo!” said the familiar singsong voice and the million-watt smile, but I could see what she meant when she said that my diet was not working.  Aunt Sunita was as rotund as ever, looking like the most eligible bachelorette in Uganda*.

After the pleasantries, I made a beeline for her kitchen, and started my investigation with the refrigerator.  Full of fresh vegetables, whole milk, cheese, dark chocolate (85% cocoa), paneer, eggs, mayo, butter, and not a juice in sight…so far an A+ from me!  The freezer was full of fish and frozen chicken and no problem there.  Next I looked in the cupboards, and there was no sign of cereal, rice, pasta, flour, sugar, honey, and now I was starting to really worry…how can Aunt Sunita be putting on weight with a kitchen stocked like that?

“So Auntie, tell me what have you been doing since you started my diet?” I asked, and I wondered if she was simply eating out all the time.

“Not much, son!  Have been staying home.  Can’t really eat out much in India because the vegetarian food in restaurants is full of sugar carbs.”

Now I was flummoxed.  Was she that random person who won’t lose fat no matter what she eats?

As I was trying to work through this problem, the doorbell rang.  “Oh, it is my mahjong group!”, said Aunt Sunita as she waddled to the door and let in four other aunties who were all plus-sized.

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with…

The Jim Rohn quote danced in my mind’s eye as I looked at the kitchen table, now occupied by this gaggle of famine-prepped aunties.

“Son, this is how I spend my afternoons these days.  We meet mainly at my place for mahjong and a little gossip.” Aunt Sunita smiled at me.

I feared that the end of my investigation was near.  I went to the living room and browsed the daily papers, lost deep in thought, until the familiar “tea-time” call from my aunt’s cook an hour later.  I walked back into the kitchen/dining area, and there was the answer to my question on the table, a whole spread of potato samosas, flour murukus, potato and paapdi chaat, rice crackers, corn chips and dips, you name it!

“Auntie, what is all this?”  I was aghast.

“This is just for when I have guests, son!”

“But you have guests every day for mahjong, auntie!”

“Yes son, but it is only for tea time!” my dear Aunt Sunita smiled as she tucked into a fried potato triangle.

“But where do you keep all this stuff?  I didn’t see any of it in the kitchen!”

“Oh it’s not for me, so I keep it in the guest cupboard!” she pointed to the dining room cupboard, where I could see the words in clear typeface “Guest Cupboard”.

As I left Aunt Sunita’s house, I marveled at the power of sugar addiction.  It is no different than alcohol or any other drug, in that once you develop a dependency, the addiction will create a delusion that you don’t have a behaviour problem, and that whatever symptoms you are experiencing are beyond your control, i.e., genetic.

Here was my aunt, a perfectly sane and reasonable person, who simply put all her junk food into a cupboard marked “guest”, and ate healthy food three times a day.  But she simply put it out of her mind that since going on my diet she had joined a daily mahjong group that met at her house, and she put away at least a thousand calories of sugar from the “Guest Cupboard” daily while entertaining her guests.  She was by no means the fattest of her mahjong group, so she never feels out of place when she is in their company…quite the opposite!

Breaking sugar addiction is an extraordinary achievement for some people, the same as quitting smoking, while other people do it with ease.  We have to sympathize with our sugar-addicted loved ones, be patient with them, and ultimately respect their choices.  But it is not impossible.

Aunt Sunita, I will find a way to rid your home of the poison cupboard…eventually!

 

Diabetes Part 3 – What happens to the food we eat, and why drinking orange juice can lead to diabetes

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Before I address the link between orange juice and diabetes, I want you to explore with me a more basic question.
How do humans eat?  Let us explore this in a logical way, because if you know what happens to the food we eat, you can take simple measures that will help you lose excess fat.
Step 1.  We cook food.
Humans learned how to cook food around 50,000 years ago.  The three reasons cooking became popular are that 1) it kills pathogens.  2).  It makes inedible food edible.  and 3) It makes food combinations possible that are tastier, and make use of leftover scraps.  However, it is important to know that increasing the amount of raw food we eat, such as salads and low-sugar fruit, is better for losing weight because raw food is harder to break down and digest.
Step 2.  We put the food in our mouth.
At this point, the food we eat is mostly not in a form that is digestible.  If the food is a solid, we subject it to mechanical dessication, otherwise known as chewing. While chewing, this food is also mixed with saliva, which contains some enzymes that aid in digestion.  The process of chewing consumes energy,  which is why, it is better to eat solid food than liquid food if you want to lose weight.  Simply avoiding drinking your calories goes a long way in fat loss.
Step 3.  We swallow the food.
This is the last manual or voluntary task we perform with food before the body’s automatic process takes over.  Swallowed food goes through your esophageal sphincter into your stomach, where it is given a bath in stomach acid.  The amount of stomach acid we produce depends on many things, but generally speaking, people who are overweight tend to produce more stomach acid than skinny people.  What this means is that because high stomach acid generally increases food absorption, we should avoid eating acidic foods.
Step 4.  The enzyme bath.
The food gets bathed in enzymes that digest proteins, and other secretions of the liver and pancreas.
Step 5.  Bacterial decomposition.
The food slurry enters the intestines, which are 25 feet long tubes, where it undergoes bacterial decomposition from the trillions of bacteria that live there.  If you have ever seen how quickly bread flour rises when it is mixed with yeast and sugar,  you will have a sense of what happens to the slurry when trillions of bacteria start breaking it down.  You essentially get a bacterial soup that is being rapidly broken down into nutrients that are in an easily-absorbed form by the lining of your gut.  Any food that is at this point still undigested will serve as a weight that pushes the soup further down the intestinal tract.
Step 6.  Absorption.
As it is passing through the intestine, the dissolved sugar, fat, protein and other nutrients from the now digested food are absorbed into the bloodstream.  This is the step at which food is essentially converted into energy.
Step 7.  Elimination.
At the very end of the journey, the undigested fibers in the food plus a bacterial content of around 25%, reach the anus, where they are expelled out through a bowel movement.
This whole process is like a factory, where food is converted into energy.  What we should realize is that this is one factory where you should not increase the efficiency, because excess sugars that are absorbed by the body are converted by the liver into body fat.  In fact, it is always better to eat foods that are harder to digest, such as vegetables, protein, and seed-filled fruits like guavas, instead of easily digestible sugars like rice, wheat and pasta.
Which finally brings us to problem of orange juice!  Orange juice is a liquid, sugar-filled, fiber-less, and acidic concoction that violates every rule of how and why the human digestive system evolved.  By totally short-circuiting the digestion process, orange juice basically makes itself and any food it meets in the stomach, more easily digestible and more easily absorbed.  OJ is essentially a catalyst for obesity, which of course is the main cause of Type 2 diabetes.
There is a whole concept called metabolic resistance which we will explore in another post.  People with high metabolic resistance are skinny, and those with low metabolic resistance are fat.  Orange juice lowers your metabolic resistance and makes you fat.
By all means eat an orange whenever you wish…but do not drink orange juice, freshly squeezed or otherwise, if you want to avoid diabetes.  Except as a rare treat, of course!